On a rug a number of balls formed out of clean white snow are placed very orderly in relation to their size. One of them David Hammons holds in his hand. The others are in front of him displayed for sale on the ground. This performance was staged in 1983 in New York on a corner of Cooper Square amongst other street sellers. Elena Filipovic gathers material documenting this iconic piece, part of an oeuvre that has only recently become well known. She places Hammon’s work, purposefully elusive and hard to grasp, in the context of his critique of questions of race in the United States and in the mechanisms of the Art World.

Testo Junkie – Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era – published 2007 in Spanish and French, translated into English in 2013, is an uncompromised document of the nearly year-long self experiment with synthetic testosterones and its lasting effects. The writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado shares the intimate radical shifts he undergoes while becoming ‘man / male’ and juxtaposes this document of his political performance with an analyses of how concepts of gender in society are shaped by the pharmaceutical and pornography industries. Preciado continues where Michel Foucault left with The History of Sexuality.

Martin Herbert introduces us in his essay collection Tell Them I Said No to 10 artists that have all for different reasons and in different forms decided to withdraw from the art world and its mechanisms. Amongst them are David Hammons, Agnes Martin, Lutz Bacher and Trisha Donelly. Herbert looks in detail at how their practices are shaped by strategies to counter established patterns and positions of power and dominance and instead foster the artists’ independence, each withdrawal comes with different implications.