David Hammons: above the game.
Higher Goals turns the familiar basketball hoop into a question about aspiration and access.
A basketball hoop is an invitation. Raise it beyond reach and the invitation changes. In David Hammons’ Higher Goals, an ordinary structure of play becomes something more difficult to read.
Public Art Fund records the temporary installation in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza Park from April 1986 to March 1987. Hammons built it on site: five telephone poles decorated with bottle caps, each topped by a basketball backboard, hoop and net.
The distance to a goal
For us, the work holds a tension between possibility and exclusion. The equipment remains recognisable, but the relationship to the body has changed. A sporting symbol becomes a way to think about who is invited to succeed, and the distance between an ambition and its fulfilment.
That reading is an interpretation, not a quotation from the artist. Public Art Fund’s original account offers the project history and Hammons’ own explanation.
