MY WEBSITE - www.thepanicartist.com - OVER 18's ONLY
At some stage even the greatest, most highly educated and cultured
critics - get it wrong. Ruskin got Whistler wrong. Greenberg got
Warhol wrong - and Robert Hughes got it wrong when he panned Basquiat
after his death from a drug overdose as a lightweight - in The New
Republic in 1988.
This article later featured in Hughes superb collection of art reviews
(perhaps the most objective of the twentieth century) - Nothing If Not
Critical (1990). I vividly remember reading it in January 1991 - and
becoming so incensed at his critical dissection of my idol - that I
threw his book at the wall in disgust.
Looking back at this essay and others by Robert Hughes on Basquiat - I
can now see the quality in Hughes' brand of acerbic prose - but I
think the Australian got it so wrong in the case of Jean-Michel. In
his essay 'Requiem for a Featherweight' - Hughes suggested that
Basquait should have gone to art college and learned some creative
discipline and conventional drawing skills. I don't think there is a
dumber notion in all Hughes' writing. The whole point of Basquiat's
work - was that he was largely self-taught and unbroken by the nit-
picking of tutors or fellow students.
Basquait had a totally natural and let us say God given gift for
drawing and painting - coupled with; an amazingly charismatic
personality, good looks, a hip understanding of style and the
Zeitgeist - plus according to his friends - a large cock!
I have been looking intently at this Americans work for over eighteen
years - and I am still amazed by this young man's work. Every time I
go to see an exhibition of student work I think of him - and what he
had achieved by their age. Time and time again I find imitators of him
- but not one comes even close to the real thing - including myself -
one of his most obvious thief's.
They said he was a flash in the pan, they said he was a shooting star
- but twenty years after his death he appears more and more like a
mythical solar explosion. Most of the art of the 1980's now looks
dated, trivial and academic in comparison.
Jean-Michel Basquait was born in Brooklyn hospital New York City on
22ed of December 1960. His domineering father Gerard - was from ****to-
Prince in Haiti - while his fragile mother Matilde was the daughter of
a Puerto Rican family. Thus Basquiat grew up speaking English, French
and Spanish and all these different languages would later feature in
his vast canvases. His work was a creole mix- of the old and the new
world - the emotional the intellectual.
They lived in a Brooklyn brown-stone and lived a comfortable middle
class life. Basquait's father was an accountant who worked in New
Jersey - and his mother a stay at home mom - had an interest in art
and fa****on. Basquait's mother later suffered from paranoid-
schizophrenia - something I know all about - sadly she has been
somewhat written out of his history - a story I think that needs to be
eventually told in full. But let me at least hint at its complexity.
It was his mother who encouraged Jean-Michel in his drawing - brought
him to museums like the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan and M.O.M.A.
- where he first saw Picasso's Guernica. However according to Jean-
Michel she was also a very strict mother, prone to depression,
violence - and she had a deep worry line running down her forehead. At
the age of seven Basquait was hit by a car on the street and had to
have his spleen removed - it was this and his later abuse of drugs
that made him break out in sores all over his skin. While in hospital
his mother brought him in a copy of 'Gray's Anatomy' - an odd present
- which emphasized his awareness of his inner organs and their
venerability. That year his parents divorced. Matilde was deemed unfit
to look after her children and Basquiat and his younger sisters Lisane
and Jeanine went to live with their father. When Basquiat was about
ten his mother was committed to a metal hospital and would be in and
out of them for years to come. If Jean-Michel's experience of dealing
with a paranoid-schizophrenic mother was even a half of mine - the
experience had to be shattering.
As a teenager Basquiat naturally rebelled against his authoritarian
and sometimes physically abusive father (Basquiat claimed his father
stabbed him in the leg one - time he caught Jean-Michel smoking pot) -
he ran away from home a number of times and dropped out of a series of
schools. His last - City As School - was a highly liberal
establishment which encouraged self-directed learning. The children -
most of whom were bright, creative but difficult pupils - were
encouraged to use New York city's museums, libraries, theaters, and
cinemas as their classroom.
Basquiat's teachers remember him as utterly obsessed with art, drawing
and comics - but also as a truant, a hustler and a dabbler in drugs.
He had the needy personality of an abused child - eager for approval
yet also - willfully rebellious.
While in City As School he wrote for the school newspaper - creating a
character called SAMO (Same Old ****) who sells his own fake religion
to lost souls. Around the same time in City As School - Basquiat met
Al Diaz a young graffiti artist who tagged the trains and subways. The
two formed an alliance and in 1977 began writing SAMO graffiti around
SoHo and the East Village - anywhere there were arty im****tant people.
Dodging the cops - they quickly scrawled in spray-paint - witty and
cryptic phrases like:
"SAMO saves idiots,"
"Plush safe he think; SAMO"
"SAMO as an end to mindwash religion and bogus philosophy."
At the age of seventeen Basquiat finally ran away from home for good.
He lived on the streets sold his body for rent, slept on the floor of
friend's apartments - and everywhere he lived - he covered with his
crude but powerful drawings. On the streets of Manhattan he sold hand
made postcard's which featured his growing lexicon of signs and
symbols - the crown, the copyright symbol, the skull, the mask, and
the names of famous black s****tsmen like Hank Arron. He became a
regular at the Mudd Club where he danced like a loping robot. He then
formed a band named Gray and tried to meet Andy Warhol. These first
attempts were ignored by Andy who was frightened of this young black
man.
Meanwhile Basquiat and Diaz's graffiti was attracting the attention of
the art community. But after disagreements in 1979 - Basquait broke up
his partner****p with Diaz - and tags with "SAMO is dead" appeared
around Manhattan.
=46rom the start Basquait wanted to enter the art world inner circle. He
crashed openings, gorged on the free food and cheep wine - and made
connections.
Basquait understood from an early age - that image is everything in
the modern world. His hair and clothes became calling cards for his
genius. His black dreads sticking up in the air became a moniker as
recognizable (at least to art students) as Dali's mustache or Warhol's
silver wigs - and Basquiat's paint splattered Armani suits a thing of
legend.
He shaped his identity as cunningly as Oscar Wilde, James Mc Neill
Whistler, Egon Schiele or David Bowe (who in 1996 - played Warhol in
Schnabel's biopic 'Basquiat'). Since the art world was and still is so
entwined with the media culture - artists have had to have a character
to play, a story to tell and an identity as recognizable as a Coke-
Cola bottle or Mc Donald's logo. Basquiat did not have a deep
introspective character - but he played his stylish cards to the hilt.
He acted out stereotypes of himself as a wild-child when it suited him
- but he also felt the backlash when his role became ridiculed. He was
derided as a mascot for a hypocritical and politically correct art
world - run and largely populated by whites whose only daily
interaction with African-Americans were the shoe****ne men, hotel
maids, and their apartment block ****ters. The battle was too big for
him alone. Most artists - no matter what their skin colour or social
background - are nothing but small pawns in the art world casino.
He began to appear as a regular on Glen O'Brian's cable access
television show 'TV Party' - in 1979 and in 1980 he was the star in
the low budget film 'Downtown 81' (later released as 'New York Beat')
- in which he played a struggling artist. The film is deceptive in
that it places Basquait amid the derelict ruins of Alphabet City - not
the middle-class Brooklyn home he grew up in.
In 1981 he was featured in 'New York/New Wave' at PS1. His work
attracted the attention of the likes of Rene Ricard, Henry Geldzahler,
Bruno Bischofberger, and Annina Nosei. She offered him a place in her
up coming show Public Address - but he had no money for canvases or a
studio in which to work. So she offered him the basement of her
gallery. He jumped at the offer and thus began his seven-year
explosion of creativity fueled by marijuana, cocaine, heroin and
crack. Collectors pulled up in their limousines and carted off still
wet and sometimes unfinished canvases for up to $10,000 a pop. This
would turn out to be an excellent investment - these canvases now sell
at auction for millions. Gossip soon circulated about this strange set-
up and talk of a wild man off the streets painting in a basement. It
all smacked of exploitation and slavery. Basquiat soon tired of this
arrangement and moved on within a year. Over the next few years he had
a series of dealers who tolerated his erratic behavior because he was
famous and a money-maker.
I have never shown a woman a book on Basquiat who hasn't cried out:
"Oh he's hot!" The women loved him and literally hung around his
studio door looking for a **** and an art work. He was guarded in his
speech and quick to ridicule. Apart from Suzanne Mallouk - he never
went out with ethnic women - and all his girlfriends were usually
blond wasp types looking for a bit of rough (one of the reasons Al
Diaz finished with Basquait was because Basquait had spat in the face
of one of their girlfriends while ****ing her). Yet women or *** for
that matter never featured much in his work. Some of his closest
friends said he preferred men and that his one true love was his
unrequited father/son relation****p with Warhol. His canvases and
agitated drawings depicted broken, defaced, and menaced black men. He
retold the stories of black musiancs like Milles Davis and Charlie
Parker and boxers like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson - tales of
prejudice, racism, exploitation, betrayal and martyred heroics.
By 1982 Basquait was spending over $2,000 on coke and grass a week. He
would spend weeks holed up in his Jones street loft (which he rented
from Warhol) listening to Charlie Parker, shooting up heroin and
painting and drawing for days on end in his designer paint smeared
clothes. His assistant Torton recalled in interview with Phoebe Hoban
that Basquait would free-base crack, puke in a bin, paint, free-base,
puke and paint for days on end without sleep. It is realities like
this that his hagiographers try to gloss over.
The power of Basquait's work resided in its confrontational and
anarchistic dance with the art world. He was a black cultural raider
who pillaged western art. The history of Modernism was a history of
cultural pirates. Artists like Picasso, Matisse and Kirchner robbed
the culture of Africa - as aggressively as their Colonial military
leaders in France and Germany pillaged the natural recourse's of 'The
Dark Continent'.
In fact the very reason their sacred masks where in European museums
at all - was because they had been looted by the same men who had
raped, enslaved, murdered, tortured and exploited the African
population.
It is a story so failure in the West that we hardly recognize its
significance. The West has been built upon the multi-cultural theft,
plagiarism, pastiche or copying of examples from; the Middle East,
India, Japan, China and Africa. But no matter how much we rob from
others - we in the West regard other races who copy our example with
suspicion and frequently derision. We acknowledge their power of
expression but we deride their lack of sophistication.
In contrast what we see in Basquiat - is a reversal of this process -
a young black man plundering Western masters like Picasso, Dubufftet,
Pollock, De Kooning, Twombly and Da Vinci - to create an art even more
energetic, explosive and raw.
There had been other black artists in the western tradition - but none
with Basquait's self-confidence, energy or originality. Most of their
work was too academic, second-hand and contrived to ever be truly
great art. You see the secret to Basquait's brilliance - was his ****
you attitude towards the Western tradition and his anti-art stance. It
is almost as if he was saying "This Modernist and Western art you
think so profound and difficult, is easy for me!" His work was like a
spit in the face of Modernist art and yet strangely it was one of the
few credible examples of Post-Modern or Neo-Expressionist
resuscitation of the the avant-guard corpse. Compared to Basquiat -
Schnabel and Clemente were mere posers.
In 1982 at the age of just twenty-one - he was featured in Do***enta
VII in Kassel - he was the youngest artist ever to be honored in such
a way - the same year the committee in Kassel refused to show the
equally famous Julian Schnabel some eleven years his senior.
By 1982-3 he had assistants like Stephen Torton and Shenge Ka Pharaoah
working in his studio; stretching canvases, collaging his xeroxed
drawings onto cotton-duck, filling in base colours with Golden and
Liqutex acrylic paints - but not we are supposed to believe - anything
im****tant like adding or crossing out words and masks. I wonder? He
would send them out to collect any old surface for him to paint on;
doors, fences, windowpanes - and Torton also created a series of
roughly lashed together canvases - which worked brilliantly with
Basquait's aesthetics of improvised assault.
The art world dream like the American dream is a pure fiction - no
more based on reality than the lottery or the electoral system. For
every one winner there are literally millions of losers. But Basquiat
was a winner at least in artistic and monetary terms - and what a
winner! I can think of no artist in the last 150 years who had so much
fame, money and success at such a young age. Thousands of black,
Hispanic and poor white boys made Graffiti in the late 1970's and
early 1980's - but apart from Basquiat and Haring - all have been
drowned by the tides of fad and fa****on.
I would like to avoid his fame - I don't want to descend into the snot
of celebrity news - but at least a brief list of his crass successes
deserve to be mentioned. He dated Madonna for a few months in 1982 -
it could never last she loathed drugs and the self-destructive ethos.
He finally enchanted Warhol and became a regular at The Factory. He
modeled for Comme Des Garcons. He featured in a one minute filler on
MTV and at his peak he was making over one and a half million a year
from his art. Not bad for a black boy who had lived in a cardboard box
in Wa****ngton Square Park! But none of this bull**** has anything to
do with the quality of his art and why it still impresses.
The really im****tant fact is that in nine years he created over 1,000
huge canvases and over 2,000 drawings. In 1982 alone he painted over
300 canvases! Of course in such a large oeuvre there were a lot of
thoughtless, crass and cynical works (especially one pumped up on
drugs). But there is also a surprising body of genuine masterpieces
worthy of Picasso, Matisse, Pollock or Dubuffett.
I would love to know at what stage of the drug buzz - Basquiat painted
certain canvases. Some of his work is rammed with text, slashes of
paint, skulls, masks and anatomy drawings - while others are shocking
in their minimalism - a sweep of colour and a telling phrase. However
- I would also caution against an exaggerated dramatization of his
painting on drugs. From personal experience I can testify that one can
soon develop a tolerance for drugs or drink. For example it always
amuses me to see people floored by joints - which I smoke like
cigarettes.
Cocaine is an ego drug - it creates unshakable self-belief but it also
robs the user of all self-critically and almost instantly creates
paranoia - and one sees this in Basquiat's work. It gives his canvases
their intensity but it also explains in part the underdeveloped nature
of his oeuvre.
The vast majority of world-class masterpieces in painting were created
by artists in their fourth decade. The great works of maturity and old
age come after prolonged self-analysis and intellectual growth - but
Basquiat never achieved this maturation because his personality was
frozen in a white line blizzard and he was determined not to grow up.
Some might say that Basquiat never had the chance to mature - true -
but Egon Schiele died at the same age and his last work really did
show a growing sensitivity and openness.
In 1984 Andy and Jean-Michel began to work on a series of
collaborative canvases. The idea of two or more artists working
together was briefly popular in the Post-Modern art world of the early
1980's. In Germany Neo-Expressionist painters like Walter Dahn and
Jiri George Dokoupil had worked together and in New York painters like
David Salle and Julian Schnabel had also briefly collaborated. Usually
such duel efforts paled in comparison to the work these artists
produced on their own. Even a Basquait fanatic like myself can find
the efforts of Warhol and Basquait or Basquait, Warhol and Clemente -
empty, cynical and soulless. But it was Basquait who came off looking
worse. The core value of his art was its authenticity - but in these
canvases his line appears dead, his energy drained and his practice to
self-conscious. The show was a disaster critically and financially.
Their friend****p soon ended. But it was Warhol's death in 1987 - which
really finished Basquait off. Warhol had been the only person he
respected enough listen to. Jean-Michel had tried to take Warhol's
advice - to curb his drug use, to exercise, to see his mother and slow
down.
By 1986 Basquiat was burnt out. He traveled constantly but to no real
purpose. He became paranoid, reclusive and increasingly irrelevant in
an Art world that had moved on from the slap-dash egotistical spasms
of Neo-Expressionism to the cool cynicism of Neo-Geo and the found
commercial object.
But before the end there was one last sensational exhibition in Verj
Baghoomian's gallery in SoHo. Baghoomian was a shady art world
character but one of the few dealers left who would sup****t the
increasingly self-destructive Basquiat. By then Jean-Michel and gone
through dozens of dealers including Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, Mary
Boone, Larry Gagosian and Bruno Bischofberger. These last paintings
have a sparseness, frailty and sullied quality that clearly indicated
a raging at the dying of the light.
On Friday 12Th August 1988 - Jean-Michel died in his Great Jones
Street loft of a multiple drugs overdose. Over 300 people attended a
remembrance service in St. Peters church in Manhattan.
If he had lived would we still care as much about his art? I don't
think so. There is no doubt that his premature death at twenty-seven
gave his oeuvre a supercharged boost after flagging for some time and
encapsulated his epic life story - putting him in the same pantheon of
teenager heroes like Egon Schiele, Jimi Hendricks and later Kurt
Cobain.
At the time of his death the highest price paid ed for one of his
canvases was =A330,000 a year after his death they were selling for over
$280,000! Moreover his estate was valued at nearly four million. Death
really was the best career move he ever made.
In 1996 Julian Schnabel released a film on Jean-Michel called simply
'Basquait.' As a biopic it was fatally flawed - willfully inaccurate,
sentimental, romantic and unrealistic - but as a poetic interpretation
it had its charms.
To the young art students of today he is an icon of rebellion and
success - but the truth of his life is much dirtier. It is telling
that when Phoebe Hoban wrote her excellent biography (which I have
relied on heavily) 'Basquiat: A Quick Killing In Art' (1998) - she
chose to spend nearly half of the book highlighting the New York art
world of the 1980's, the new money, the new collectors, the new
dealers and the savagery of big business. If Basquait is a hero - it
is because of the work - not because of his life. He had immense
talent but there is no way he would have been promoted so early and so
aggressively in any other period of the modern art market.
At the end of the day - graffiti was about aggression, it was about
provocation - it was about existential declarations in the void of the
city - and all of these sentiments fulled Basquait's art. His best
canvases (1981-1994) were covered in layer after layer of collaged
drawings, hand written text in fat oil sticks, painted and defaced
masks and skulls in slathered acrylic paint - plus a visual sampling
of everything including; the secret signs of hobos, comic book
illustrations, anatomy drawings, old master paintings, Da Vinci
drawings, and the labeling on commercial products. In reproduction his
canvases can appear congested - but in the flesh their huge scale
creates room for his constructions to breath. What you see in them -
is the awakening consciousness of a young black man. They are as much
about writing as about painting. They are as much about erasure as
declaration. They are as much about learning as mastery. Technically
they are often very simplistic and easily copied - but he coined this
realm. At his best he is an inventive colourists, a daring designer
and a compelling draughtsman.
Today people babble on about 'ideas' in art - and this is usually
thought to be seen at its best in conceptual objects - which I
personally find dry, tedious and pretentious. However in Basquait's
paintings there are hundreds of ideas - there are ideas about; how you
put words and images together, how you paint and edit, how you draw
and conceptualize and how gestures and lunges of paint can signify the
human soul in ecstasy, agony and resignation. His work was more than
ideas - it was thoughts embodied in a life!
MY WEBSITE - www.thepanicartist.com - OVER 18's ONLY
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