Untitled (We Have Decided The Bullet Must Have Been Going Very Fast)
ART REVIEW
Basquiat's energy brings you into his 'visual conversations'
Artist operated with a streetwise sense of absurdist humor
By Neil Kendricks
August 28, 2005
Twenty-seven is too young to die, by anyone's standards. The untimely death of Jean-Michel Basquiat – coupled with the enduring quality of his beautifully frenzied art – is the stuff of art-world legend.
Basquiat's unorthodox lifestyle and drug-related death in 1988 continue to overshadow the scope of his artistry, one that solidified his status as one of the pivotal figures in American art during the 1980s. Fortunately, the massive, traveling retrospective "Basquiat," on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, through Oct. 10, shifts the focus back to his prolific body of work where it belongs.
The artist's second retrospective (the first was in 1992 at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art) traffics in a forest of cryptic iconography of his own making. His imagery writhes with body fragments gleaned from the pages of "Gray's Anatomy" and collaged drawings. Together, these seemingly disparate elements add up to the multifaceted, visual textures of the artist's vision of contemporary urban life.
Some of the most powerful pieces in the exhibition, organized by the Brooklyn Museum, are also the most sparse when it comes to details. This is especially true in Basquiat's skull-like renderings of human heads as eruptions of color.
Mounted next to one another, both 1984's "Flexible" and "Gold Griot" feature skeletal human figures painted over picture supports made of wooden slats. In each case, the grimacing faces immediately seize your attention while evoking the figuration often found in African art.
A viewer can get lost in the thicket of images found in Basquiat's chaotic drawings and paintings. In fact, the precise meanings behind the childlike scrawl of his free-floating words are often hard to decipher with any real certainty. But they remain potent, with an undeniable intelligence.
Many of Basquiat's paintings throb with visual conversations drifting through the work like artifacts preserved in a hermetically sealed time capsule. The viewer eavesdrops on these wonderful interior monologues that are visualized in bold swaths of color, jagged lines and bizarre compositions.
Sometimes, Basquiat's art obliterates words, burying them under paint or crossing them out as if he were writing entries in a crazed visual diary where street vernacular becomes urban poetry. It's no wonder the artist first garnered attention with his graffiti tags as Samo, years before he made the transition from struggling artist to art-world darling.
Often, Basquiat's works function as charged vessels for broken phrases to circulate on the picture plane, like 1986's "To Repel Ghosts." In the 1981 piece "Untitled (A Suite of Fourteen Drawings)," phrases like "A lot of Bowery bums used to be executives" resonate with the sarcastic, deadpan wit of a sharp social observer. Sometimes, his wry humor emerges out of the juxtaposition of image and text. In other pieces, the acidic punch lines are found in the titles.
The bursts of social commentary are rarely heavy-handed or forced. Rather, Basquiat's streetwise sense of absurdist humor is always cognizant of social ills like racism and class struggle, even as he embraced the trappings that fame and fortune offered him. This awareness of society's tug-of-war between inequity and the republic's potential make his signature crown that appears repeatedly in his work all the more ironic.
With its collaged photograph and bitter words, the macabre 1979-1980 drawing "Untitled (We have decided ...)" shows two men in business attire standing before a microphone. They could be politicians. The artist attacks this image of authority in a manner reminiscent of Ralph Steadman's savage, unflattering illustrations.
This weird, cartoonlike image's text declares, "We have decided the bullet must have been going very fast." The statement is deliberately divorced from a specific context, standing in for any number of conspiracy theories or secret cabals perpetuated by the unspecified powers that be from the artist's point of view.
Basquiat made his reputation as a graffiti artist-turned-painter by never approaching his paintings with a sense of reverence. Rather, he attacked his materials, manhandling them with a playful streak of spontaneity. So it makes perfect sense that the Brooklyn-born artist used everything from oil paint-sticks to collaged drawings on scraps of paper to create the desired effects. You can even see the ghostlike marks of his sneakers covering the surface of the 1983 portrait "Eyes and Eggs."
Sometimes, the childlike renderings of cars or quasi-stick figures exert their presence. In fact, many of Basquiat's paintings have the raw, unpolished appearance of children's drawings suddenly blown up into large-scale compositions.
Despite its chaotic surfaces, his art buzzes with the articulate, shout-outs of a human beatbox supplying its own hip-hop soundtrack. Music provides another recurrent theme in the artist's milieu. After all, before Basquiat's meteoric rise to fame, he performed in the post-punk band Gray with the likes of actor-filmmaker Vincent Gallo.
While his techniques jettison or avoid any traces of preciousness, the artist's works often pay tribute to such musicians as Charlie "Bird" Parker (1982's "CPRKR" is one example) and Dizzy Gillespie (1983's "Horn Players"). Ricocheting from humorous asides to aches of pathos, athletes also figure prominently in Basquiat's pantheon of African-American cultural heroes such as the martyrlike figure in 1982's "St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes."
The larger question of race and identity crops up in his work as a central motif. For example, Basquiat's concerns about the contradictions of race and power can be summed up in the titles and garish representational imagery of 1981's "Irony of the Negro Policeman" and 1982's "Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari."
Regardless of the subject matter, however, everything was potential material for Basquiat's art-making process. In his hands, even old, weather-beaten doors and windowpanes became unconventional picture supports. Such is the case with pieces like the 1987 triptych "Gravestone," among others.
Of course, artists working with salvaged debris are nothing new. What is notable about Basquiat's phoenixlike appropriation of discarded objects is the way these transformed bits of urban detritus inform the viewer of the particular time when they were created; they help to establish the work's cultural context of life in the '80s New York art scene, not unlike how Robert Rauschenberg's early-'60s assemblages helped to define a particular moment in American art before pop became all the rage.
But the collection of artworks in "Basquiat" is more than a memento mori to a startling talent that flamed out all too quickly. It shows the epic scope of a major artist's actual artistic abilities despite the shock waves of hype that threatened to eclipse the significance of his achievement.
Throughout the exhibition, one is reminded of other artistic outsiders, ranging from Beat writer William S. Burroughs to legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, who were haunted by their own demons.
Oscar Wilde once wrote "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." There is no question that Basquiat's gaze was fixed on the firmament with the defiance of a brilliant artist who refused to play by any rules except his own.
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