“I am the C.E.O. of the D.O.C.—the Duchamp Outpatient Clinic”
—David Hammons
Over the past fifty years, David Hammons has produced sculptures, installations, prints, drawings, paintings, performances, and videos that, with a sense of the sacred and the humorous, investigate the intersection of art and daily life. Hammons' The Holy Bible: Old Testament is a limited-edition artist's book that reappropriates a 1997 softcover edition of Arturo Schwartz’s The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, rebinding the book to resemble a Bible, complete with gilded text embossed on a leatherbound cover. As the originator of the "readymade"—a work of art made by placing an unaltered found object into an artistic context—Marcel Duchamp, perhaps more than any other artist, influenced the course of artmaking over the past century. Here Hammons celebrates Duchamp's close-to-sacred status as the forefather of conceptual art but also offers a gentle criticism: the book is bound as the Old Testament, leaving open the potentiality for a new volume of more recent artistic revelations.
