For years, the Hammering Man didn’t get a break unless he broke down. He broke down a lot, actually, given the repetitive movement of his arm and hammer—up, down, up, down, day after day, year after year. His motor often wore out, and Bill Skodje, Mia’s senior preparator and exhibition designer, would have to repair it.
The Hammering Man was acquired by the museum in 1984 and went to work at his unknown, Sisyphean task on the second floor. He inhabited an airy court, part of the museum’s decade-old modernist expansion, with plants and balconies and not much else. He pretty much had the place to himself.
Hammering men at the Walker Art Center in 1985.
For all his lonely labor, however, the Hammering Man was not alone. There were others, identical except in height and materials. The first came to life in 1979 as an homage to workers everywhere. “He or she is the village craftsman, the South African coal miner, the computer operator, the farmer or the aerospace worker,” said its creator, the sculptor Jonathan Borofsky, in a statement explaining one of the most prominent hammering men, a 48-footer erected in front of the Seattle Art Museum in 1991. In some of Borofsky’s early museum exhibitions, including a 1985 show at the Walker Art Center, there were numerous hammering men, crowding the gallery like preoccupied aliens.
In the 1990s, the museum embarked on a piecemeal series of expansions that lasted most of the decade. During construction, the Hammering Man was moved to the new Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota and then, in 1995, to the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis, where he hammered away in the Crystal Court. He returned to Mia in 1998. But by then his habitat had been filled in, the floor occupied by the Buddhist sculptures still there today, the ceiling dropped to accommodate a new third floor gallery overhead.
The Hammering Man was taken apart and laid in storage, as though to rest. Given his stature, there aren’t many—if any—spaces within the museum where he could return to work. He has hit a ceiling, even as the floor has fallen out beneath him.