Colby Chamberlain on the art of Dave McKenzie
Bobblehead from Dave McKenzie’s
While Supplies Last, 2003, performance, poly-resin figures, 7 × 2 1⁄2 × 2 1⁄2 .
“I KNOW YOU ARE DAVE, but who is Dave?” Sixteen years ago, in these pages, the artist Glenn Ligon recounted how a stranger once posed this question to Dave McKenzie’s face. Or rather, she posed it to a papier-mâché approximation of his face, which McKenzie wore while he handed out bobblehead figurines of himself during an opening at SculptureCenter in New York. Ligon floated a few possible rejoinders: Dave was a dancing machine; Dave felt your pain; Dave wanted to be like Mike; Dave believed he could fly; Dave was a dime-store Jesus, for whom made-in-China tchotchkes were the bread and wine of a secular communion. These musings riffed on McKenzie’s various attempts to embody public figures, such as when he marched through Harlem sporting a rubber mask of Bill Clinto
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The Whitney Museum of American Art, with the Hudson River Park Trust, has permanently installed a sprawling public art project by the seminal American artist, David Hammons. Entitled
Day’s End, the massive installation is situated at the Hudson River Park along the southern edge of Gansevoort Peninsula, directly across from the Museum. Hammons is best known for his interdisciplinary practice which includes sculptural, print-based, video, and painted work that explore African-American art history.
Hammons first proposed the structure in a sketch during a trip to the museum’s newly opened building the Meatpacking District. While there, he looked out from one of the gallery windows across the river, envisioning the now-completed monumental sculpture. The $17 million USD work involved plenty of government planning, community organizing and complicated engineering amid challenges presented by the COVID-19 lockdown. Fabrication was also done in five countries