David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble.

David Hammons: Rousing the Rubble is an iconoclastic work that celebrates the career of "junk" artist and provocateur David Hammons.

The compelling aspect of Hammons' work is his ability to make politically and visually charged art in the form of body prints, sculptures and structures out of odd items. These include snowballs, telephone poles, basketball hoops, chicken bones and Night Train liquor bottles.

The idea of someone using "garbage" as art supplies may seem ludicrous or distasteful. But when Hammons stacks telephone poles and attaches impossibly high basketball hoops to create a piece called Higher Goals, it is clear a sly, mocking wit is at work.

All aspects of black life are fair game. "There's nothing negative about our images..." Hammons says. "We've been depending on someone else's sight."

--Frank McCoy David Hammons., Rousing the Rubble text by Steve Cannon, Kellie Jones and Tom Finkelpearl; The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 96pp, 1991, $25