If, in Kristeva’s terms, abjection arises from a threat to the integrity of the individual – like excremental matter which traverses the body’s limits – then the word might also have a broader, political resonance, describing those marginalized groups excluded from the body politic. David Hammons has been dealing with the politics of exclusion and the psychology of abjection since the late 1960s, employing discarded materials and peripheral locations in order to fulfil what he describes as: “my moral obligation as a Black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially.” Rock Head (2004) neatly encapsulates Hammons’ strategies of retrieval, displacement and subversion. Having once said that the Harlem neighbourhood in which he lives is as rich in ruins as ancient Rome, Hammons salvaged a head-shaped piece of rubble from this urban environment. He then visited his local barbershop – a site itself richly coded in terms of gender and ethnicity – and swept up clippings of afro hair discarded on the floor, recovering this abject matter jettisoned from the body as waste. Meticulously, Hammons glued the hair to one side of the oval rock, heightening its likeness to a human head. Then, in a typically ludic twist, he returned to the barbershop with Rock Head, to get the rock a haircut. A final displacement occurred when, encased in a raised vitrine like a primitivist sculpture by Brancusi, the work was installed in the gallery environment (Rock Head is now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art). By bringing his Harlem neighbourhood into the austere spaces of the art institution, to an art-world audience he has described as “over-educated, conservative and out to criticize not to understand,” Hammons plays upon the fascination with the cultural ‘other’ that ensconced Brancusi’s sculpture in similar spaces a century ago. Imbuing discarded or abject materials with what he describes as a kind of “tragic magic,” Hammons proves the adage expressed by one commentator in response to Oldenburg’s Hole, that “one man’s dirt is another man’s sculpture.”

This confrontation of indoor and outdoor, private and public space, Black and White culture is explored further in the series of Basketball pieces Hammons began in the 1990s. In one, a tree supporting a basketball hoop lies fallen next to an African vessel, like the relics of some abandoned civilization. The walls of gallery are marked with the traces of a basketball game, but the ball is nowhere to be seen, until one peers inside the vessel, which contains a ball its neck could not possibly have accommodated. Hammons lists his materials as: “tree trunk, basketball hoop, African vessel, basketball and Harlem earth,” suggesting that the marks on the wall, rather than just ‘dirt,’ might be understood as the material residue of a particular site, the geological foundations of this culture marked as ‘other’ by means of its clinical display. This “Harlem earth” is another kind of “matter out of place:” in the ‘wrong’ neighbourhood, in front of the ‘wrong’ audience, it becomes a substance of quasi-anthropological curiosity.

The imprinted mark or indexical trace, like the mark of a basketball on the gallery wall, operates via a logic of displacement. As Rosalind Krauss described in her well-known essays “Notes on the Index Part 1 and 2” (1976), the indexical mark registers that which was once physically present but now is absent, memorializing a past moment of contact. The photograph, Krauss pointed out, is also an indexical trace, a document of that which once was (of course, Krauss’s essays preceded the onset of digitalization). Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series of the late 1970s utilized the medium of analogue photography and the strategy of the indexical trace in order to figure the artist’s body as doubly absent. Working in Mexico and Iowa, Mendieta marked her outline on the land by pressing her body into long grass, outlining it with sand, or – more dramatically – filling the contours of her silhouette with gunpowder to create an ashen pit the size of a human being. These ephemeral traces marked the land only temporarily: washed away by rain or slowly blown to dust, the only remainders of Mendieta’s actions were the photographs she took to document them. In 1981, Mendieta described her work as “a return to the maternal source,” adding “through my earth/body sculptures I become one with the earth…. I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body.” Her words subscribe to a notion of the earth as nurturing, timeless and explicitly feminine. Yet in her images this attempt to “return to the source,” to a mythical moment of total symbiosis and plenitude – seems bound to fail. Mendieta’s work deals in residues, traces and moments passed: the precarious and transitory. These silent souvenirs of travel could also be said to echo Mendieta’s status as an exiled subject, forced to leave Cuba at thirteen and cast as an outsider during her teenage years in Iowa. Provisional, scattered and nomadic, these momentary enclosures for the body indicate a futile search for a stable, protective home; a search which coalesced, in Mendieta’s writings, in an attachment to the maternal archetype.

If Hammons uses displaced earth to raise questions of location and exclusion, and Mendieta deployed it the repeated quest for a fulfilment that would never come; the work of contemporary British artist Onya McCausland explores displacement more abstractly, in a manner which is nonetheless grounded in the geology of a particular site. Her Red Earth – Displaced Drawing series (2008) was made during her time as an artist in residence at Gloucester Cathedral, when she became fascinated by traces of polychrome decoration left on the building’s interior after it was stripped of all ornament under Oliver Cromwell. The Medieval painting cycle that once decorated the building contained the precious terra rossa pigment: an ochre made of red earth, which was also used in the Sistine Chapel. McCausland visited the Forest of Dean where the ochre had been mined in order to excavate the pigment for her drawings. The drawings exist in pairs: one sheet of paper to which the ochre is applied in small, vertical, rectangular units; and another made by meticulously removing pigment from each unit with an eraser and transferring to its counterpart on the adjacent sheet. These resultant drawings are the result of a series of displacements; from the dark and claustrophobic interior of the mine to the bright space of the studio or gallery, from page to eraser and eraser to page. Yet despite its status as “matter out of place,” McCausland’s meticulous handling of her pigment attests to its preciousness, the faceted fields of colour demonstrating why terra rossa was so prized.