‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.

The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.

Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.

But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.

This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)

Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.

Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.

But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.

This feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”

The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.

With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)

This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.

Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.

The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters.