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Jean-Michel Basquiat: Dreadlocks in the Ivory Tower I remember first seeing in 1981 the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. I was immediately struck by their freshness. I was immediately aware of the effort that went into making these objects, I could feel a physical strength in the gestures, in the frenzy of strokes and in the soaring pace of his fashioning of images. The evidence of his determination to be sensational and to do things that hadn't been done before with paint intended for a gallery wall, was immediately in your face swallowing up peripheral vision. He smeared colors together in broad swipes that no artist before would have felt comfortable in doing in their attempt to fit into a tradition observing neatness, clarity, precision and decorum.Even in these first paintings on canvas, Basquiat as a colorist doesn't fear the mess in his exploration of blends and fields. The detailed moments of each patch of canvas matter less than the overall effect of the entirety. Jean-Michel creates a canvas the way a jazz musician builds a solo, knowing that the moment's articulation is part of a path to expression, each moment in that search a reflection of wonder and passionate response. He obliterates the niceties that art audiences had become accustomed to and expected even with the eruption of Pollock and the "crudeness" of Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism strived for a measure of balance, a contained frenzy, a framable expression, an abrupt mood of feeling and upheaval tolerable for consumption. Basquiat was always conscious of creating art—with the inference that it is produced for an audience—but he seemed determined to see what could happen by going against the contained, tolerable, acceptable and perfect. In not striving for that formal place of stasis, he animates his surface with the shout of the grafitti artists decorating every subway train throughout the city. What's going on is not merely an un-neatness, not simply a rebellion against order and that attempt to impose sense or declare the artist's control over the raging of the universe. His work accepts that raging. The work announces raging in every stroke and in every relationship of images. His attack is precisely a confrontation with those forces. He allows that energy to invade his body. His struggle is not to deny those forces but to engage with them, to directly expose the energy they affect him with. He accepts the urgency in the rawness. He knows that only with that sort of eloquence can he dare to go beyond the familiar. He accepts the untethered isolation of his own body. Though most of his pieces offer a narrative, it's not necessary to decipher their thread or to acknowledge the associations. There's such power in the raw expression, scribbled glyphs and scratched signs to affect the same response as a magic or spiritual sign meant to a 15th century devotee. There is the same organic potency, that same inference to signal the way to a different theater, a transcendence of the moment's ordinariness. The symbols give access to fertile realms, trigger entry to nether regions of mystery, indicate property we've never trampled, are the maps to a personal geography, visual clues to feelings unexpressed this way before in paint. Feelings are transformed into images. Without knowing exactly what specific lines indicate, we can feel what the artist is feeling. The images work as transfer agents to get us back to the raw emotion that prompted their creation. They display the feelings of anger and horror of a person, despite his youth, aware of the truths many of us spend our lives avoiding. Cookie Mueller wrote: "There was a strange force that was moving his hand, forcing him to commit to canvas something that was at once larger than he was. After all, he was but only human, a fragile, vulnerable being, a tiny speck on the globe, one of the world's citizens who was translating the universe on a canvas. He was making transmissions, unrestricted manifestations were appearing in front of him." (Mueller, Cookie, "Art and About," Details, November 1988, pp. 101–02) Basquiat is not the idiot-savant that detractors, in their dismissive swipes, would have him be. His intelligence and absorption of those events in art history useful to him inform his stroke. He recognized in Cy Twombly's nervous gesture or Dubuffet's raw scrawl a connection to the dirt that artists had previously denied and avoided. These artists put us in touch with the magical impulses we somehow recognize by feeling, if not by conscious comprehension. Their rubbed out surfaces and unintelligible scribbling accesses a dream-like recognition of ethereal possibilities that adulthood tries to wipe out in its insistence on making believe we're in control of ourselves. This work returns us to the child's spontaneous impulse, innocent of any contrivance that would pollute the pure expression, the constraints of adulthood that impose refinement. Jean-Michel connects to the fabulous. He uses all the strength of his youth to keep that confining influence out and so allow his associations to build into a frenzy of activity. I don't need to know the literal significance of his references. I feel their power as personal fetishes. The work is not about the portrayed. The subject is the artist's personality; how Basquiat, in his combining, in his associative jazz, blends and renders the surface and stirs the fragments of remembered incidents into a stew of gesture and identification. With the breeziest of encounters with his work, the conformist middle class values that many of us grew up with becomes unfurled. This work challenges the finessed. Its proud, unflinching claiming of the roughly rendered, its alert flagrancy of colors, its grabbing at the barely comprehended and the unarticulated, delivers an entirely new direction as liberating as rock n roll was to the Fifties' hit parade. To say he was primitive because he allowed footprints on his surface misses the point of how modern he was being, how infused with a Dadaist's transgressive rebellion at bourgeois respectability. This work delivers us out of the Reagan-Bush era's grounding in capital. Its African-American subjects announce the proud championing of formerly invisibilized heroes. He proclaims Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis to be entitled to beatification. These master jazz musicians are as worthy, he asserts, of enshrinement as any Madonna and child or landowner. And of course he's right. No one took the risk before in so bold a way. Jean-Michel knew that listening to these musicians was an alchemical process. He knew that the encounter with their music was transformative. He recognized the respect these marginalized musicians were due and he paid tribute by including them directly into his work. Bird and Diz's frenetic soaring improvisations pushed Basquiat's hand. That jazz's structure of theme and bravura soloing suited Basquiat's graphic need by indicating a way to include variousness, to draw in the products of a mind open and in touch with the full range of phenomena around one. By his last years (1984–85), he was losing the drama of his frenzied energy to a comfortable decorativeness. Common images—cartoon animals — replace the personal expressive confrontations of the earlier work with a placating servitude to the mass consumerism aesthetic of more Disney images, more of the familiar. Surround us with what we know, drown us in mass quantities of the mass-produced to distract us from our feelings, to replace individual effort with identification with the pack. The paintings at this point lose a sense of autobiographic urgency that formerly connected the viewer to the artist's emotional experience. As he moves to the silkscreen process at this time (1983–84), the images become less personal as they become more easily manipulated showing up on different canvases in differing contexts. He's producing product now, consumables for an art market waiting in line to buy his product. There's a safer quality. His exposure to and collaboration with Andy Warhol makes him a pro, a producer of images, a craftsperson. At the same time as his work is in peak demand, it is losing the shock and brusqueness that initiated its popularity. He becomes an exploiter of himself reusing the ideas and techniques that made him famous, but without the fire that propelled the earlier work to transcend bland availability. "Other" Becomes Us Basquiat's version of painting on the grand scale included imagery of his patois that hadn't been central to the Europeanized-American modernist canon. To some, who recognized that easel painting had reached certain dead-ends, Basquiat's infusion of "other" cultures was a welcome contribution that enlivened the discussion. He didn't merely fulfill a need for an expanded vocabulary. He intruded and forged a new dialog that would place the elements of his hybrid culture alongside the white standard. Jean-Michel was a star of a youth culture of graffiti and break-dancing that integrated young energy from the Bronx and Brooklyn into the nightclubs and, eventually, the galleries of Manhattan. Boundaries were being subverted as young people established connections between boroughs that accepted different flesh colors and differing social backgrounds. Blacks, Latino and mixed race influences were prominent in the clubs because they'd always been prominent in the clubs—from earliest jazz to blues to salsa to Motown. The difference was that in the early 1980s, it wasn't just their musics but the "minority" artists themselves that were present in the clubs mixing with the white crowds, showing them how to dress and how to dance: putting their culture on display, making of it an exhibition, wild style.Punk music of the late 1970s had set the table for these developments, challenging the established order by expressing its Baudelarian distaste, disgust and absolute rejection of it. Johnny Rotten questioned the Queen's right to power while England burned and the more introspective American Richard Hell asked the musical question, "I was sayin let me outta here before I was / even born. It's such a gamble when you get a face" ("Blank Generation," 1977). The facades and veneers were opened up to assault. The hierarchical structures that had been declaring a set of values—applicable to a rich white man's convenience—as the rigid standard for decades was finding itself the target of attack by a growing disenfranchised youth that had already felt itself excluded for too long. The children of SoHo and 57th Street made their treaties in the bars and clubs after the adults had gone to sleep. Things were happening fast. Alternative spaces accommodated one-night art shows. The opening party was the entire life of the show. Shows were hung in the established clubs, at instant clubs like Club 57 (in the basement of a church) and in apartments. Rents were cheap enough in the East Village for young entrepreneurs and champions to take a chance. The entire neighborhood was transformed as 60-70 storefront art galleries established themselves like a fervent virus to accommodate and exploit a new market of art that saw itself existing in parallel with the established markets of SoHo and 57th Street. A new crop of producers who saw themselves as independent wished to forge a new identity more connected to the fun and excitement of being in touch with young artists than the blatant commerce of the established art markets. Like any source of energy, this became acknowledged as a scene and grew in stature enough to fuel its own market. The limos began arriving. Artists' magazines, like 108 and Cover, were created to review and celebrate what was going on in the East Village. After two years, the proliferation had polluted the original integrity. Too much art had attached itself to the original impetus and the pollution destroyed the coherence. A few galleries moved to SoHo and the rest breathed their last, leaving the East Village a monstrously inflated real estate market with empty storefronts. A number of careers were launched, including Jean-Michel Basquiat's. Soaring Past the Politeness of Boundary This simple mapping is offered only to set the stage for the field onto which Basquiat strode. By the early 1980s, the art market could support a new superstar that hadn't risen out of the traditional pedigree. The climate had shown itself tired of redeemers who'd all arrived with the same credentials. Jean-Michel's work was too powerful to be merely patronized. The work's grand sweep was familiar enough to be seen as belonging to the tradition of painting. But what to make of the new gestures and the iconography that had been in the west for 400 years but had been demeaned and categorized as "other" or "primitive" or "naive" by an established structure that perpetuated its own standards of "good" by maintaining the hierarchical arrangement that placed Picasso, Hemingway, Matisse, Beethoven, Mozart on the top of the pyramid of the acceptable because those artists reflected back the correct class values?Critics Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer see Jean-Michel as a tool and ultimately a victim of the art market. Basquiat is "a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics." Commenting on Basquiat's painting at the 1981 "New York/New Wave" show at P.S. 1, Hughes acknowledges a "seed of unformed talent" but feels that the artist should have proceeded on to art school to acquire "some real drawing abilities...and skills without which good art cannot be made." (Hughes, Robert, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Requiem for a Featherweight," The New Republic, November 21, 1988) The question becomes: What is Hughes' definition of "good art"? Hilton Kramer reaches further into paranoia seeing the major retrospective show that opened at the Whitney in October of 1992 as "little more than a depressing inventory of misunderstood devices misappropriated from modern art by a mind too immature to be capable of fathoming either their meaning or their use...[the show is] one of the hoaxes of the 1980's art boom. He was essentially a product—and ultimately the victim — of the hype and hyperbole of a 'downtown' scene . . . [where art] was the vehicle to the success that was [the art's] only value." (Kramer, Hilton, "Whitney Beatifies Basquiat as Ross Plays the Race Card," The New York Observer, November 2, 1992, p. 1, 23) Reading between the lines of these critics I sense a tremendous fear on their part at the attack on the fortress of art they've set themselves up as protectors of. Between the lines I read a wish to conserve a tradition of academically forged, palatable images, immersed in an accomplished draftsmanship and exhibiting a level of refinement that reflects the privilege of a leisure class. They see Jean-Michel as a threat to that licensed enclave wherein they wish to keep up their exclusive memberships. Acceptance of Jean-Michel by any other than a few dismissable rowdies or more daring critics, would put into question the values they uphold as the pedigree of the finest people. Their whole attack reeks of defending a hierarchy that needs to establish and maintain a canon that beams back to them images of their own fantasy, images that sustain the pose of inherited values. What meaning is Hilton Kramer calling for? Meaning to who? Does he invalidate the work because it has no immediate referents he feels comfortable with: no sofas, no leafy plants, no idyllic landscapes, no patient posers showing off their sophistication? Are these effusions of a personal energy intolerable to these critics who seem to need to regard art as something possessible, controllable, somehow polite enough to fulfill their needs of a decorative, non-threatening filigree? Any argument that proposes a "minority" angle distracts from the work itself by relegating the discussion to a disempowering position. A critic declaring "otherness" is assuming a position in which he believes himself to be the standard and his audience accepting of that authority. Jean-Michel's scribbling, scrawling, razzle-dazzle engagement with paper or canvas's surface asks us to supplant our former assumptions about what art is supposed to provide for us and to open ourselves up to a larger arena. He offers a field of inevitables, untouched in previous consciousness. His attack is a courageous assault on the shrines, canons and values that have passed for so long as "good taste." Whose good taste? he challenges. Why must I perpetuate the values? he asks. And it would be demeaning to simplify his accomplishment by putting a limit of race on the argument. That he was a "minority" artist going up against a "white" establishment is a fact, but the larger issue is the work itself not the personality that created it. His work can be seen as an assault on the white art market aesthetic, but its power—evidenced by its success and its affect on a large and growing audience—is in its challenge to art history. This is not the story of a minority person being noticed and wearily accepted by a patronizing establishment that can afford a nod to a disadvantaged upstart. This is the story of a genius whose work is being recognized as legitimate by a jury used to work more familiar and less threatening to their values. Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer can expend their energies to preserve the foundations but in their obsessive focus they miss out on what's going on around them. Theirs is an act of preservation of an old order while all around them new life blooms. The standards and taste they enshrine is, of course, worth our appreciation but it has been found to lack meaning by many and new solutions are being offered. Imitation and passivity are the only options available to the colonized. Where Kramer and Hughes see a problem in influences being linked, Basquiat accepts and makes use of the simple truth that these hybrids are rich possibilities. His work is an assault on Modernism's insistence on a white, Euro-Americanized male model. I hear the cry of privilege crumbling in these critics attempt to condemn the validity of this voice that's contrary to their own personal standards. Fab 5 Freddy: "My hope is that . . . with this exhibition at the Whitney and the future books and things that will be done on Jean's work, people will look at what he did. But what they have to do first is look at themselves. They have to try to erase, if possible, all the racism from their hearts and minds. And then when they look at the paintings they can see the art and not have images of some wild black savage from the streets of Brooklyn . . . Jean would be really pissed if he left his own show at the Whitney and couldn't get a cab . . ." (Braithwaite, Fred [AKA Fab 5 Freddy], Interview with Ingrid Sischy, "Jean-Michel Basquiat," Interview, October 1992, pp. 114–123, 140) Bibliography Brathwaite, Fred [a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy], Interview with Ingrid Sischy, "Jean-Michel Basquiat," Interview, October 1992, pp. 114-123, 140Hughes, Robert, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Requiem for a Featherweight," The New Republic, November 21, 1988, pp. 34-36 Kramer, Hilton, "Whitney Beatifies Basquiat as Ross Plays the Race Card," The New York Observer, November 2, 1992 Marshall, Richard, editor, Jean-Michel Basquait, Whitney Museum of American Art/Abrams, New York, 1992 Mueller, Cookie, "Art and About," Details, November 1988, pp. 101-02 (at The Whitney Musuem of American Art, October 23, 1992–February 14, 1993) —previously unpublished |