Basquiat is a Grown-Ass Man!: Putting the “Radiant Child” to bed.
Fahamu Pecou © March 2016
Like Jean-Michel Basquiat, I have a healthy fascination with words. Whether written or spoken, rapped or scrawled across the surface of a canvas – language for me is always first and foremost a medium. And in the case of Basquiat, a visual medium. The ability to manipulate words, transform or subvert their meaning, re-purpose them, reimagine them, have them do your bidding; that is the work of a master, an alchemist, a shaman. Word-smithing is not a pedestrian sport. As such words and language, can be as volatile and treacherous as they are magical and beautiful.
Ironic then it is, that someone so masterful and adroit when it comes to the use of words is often described in terms that in many ways undermine him and the potency of his work. I find the language often used to describe Basquiat and his work problematic- because again, words are deliberate. They change things. How and where certain words are used, as well as who they are being used by and being used towards is equally important. When using terms like “child” or “primitive” to describe Jean-Michel Basquiat, an adult male and brilliant strategist, we begin a dangerous game of reductivism that problematizes any subsequent readings. So what exactly are we saying and what do we really mean when we call Basquiat a “child”, regardless of how radiant? What do we risk missing or misconstruing when we reduce Basquiat’s mark-making to some form of primitive expression? What do we fear confronting when we choose to approach his work from a position that truly honors the gravitas and complexity that his work exhibits?
Is Basquiat’s work playful? Absolutely. The work most certainly has an urgency about it as well. But neither of these attributes make the work childlike or primitive. Beneath the surface and very often in plain sight, are bold and complex ideas which betray the apparent simplicity of his writings. I use the term writing as opposed to drawing or painting because essentially, writing is his medium. From the earliest documented moments of his career, it is evident that Jean-Michel Basquiat and writing went hand-in-hand. For example, his SAMO© poetry didn’t simply join in the chorus of NY’s late seventies/early eighties graffiti scene, it changed the tune.
Those early SAMO© writings are significant not just stylistically or as a record of Basquiat’s creative endeavors, but instead, because they also signal the depth and brilliance of his artistic mettle. Where as most other graffiti writers of his time were content to simply throw up their tags, Basquiat (as SAMO ©) wielded the practice more abstractly. This was not merely street art. The walls Basquiat painted, solo, as well as with his collaborator Al Diaz, were interrogations of modern society and specifically, the art establishment. This was an intervention in a system of exclusions; be it race, class, economics, accessibility, etc. They were thoughtful and profound, prompting many to think SAMO© was (to quote Fab Five Freddy) “just some sort of white conceptual artist”.
In his 1981 Artforum article “The Radient Child”, Rene Ricard took great care to distinguish Basquiat from his graffitist contemporaries. By highlighting distinctions in the street-turned-fine art culture beginning to emerge from the early 80’s street art scene, Ricard hones in on the uniqueness of SAMO©, effectively introducing Jean-Michel Basquiat to the art world. Ricard points out that most of the artists whose works were often compiled together in the massive group shows featured the artists’ trademark tags, what he called “auto-logos”. They were at once accessible and easily commodifiable. “You are buying the label proper,” he writes, “the essential iconic self-representation.” Ricard distinguishes Basquiat by pointing out that there was an “observable [art] history” in Basquiat’s work at this time. It was clear, even to early critics, gallerists and collectors that Basquiat was not simply tagging, but instead very strategically and deliberately making work that was as conversant with the downtown street scene as it was with the work of Cy Twombly or Andy Warhol, or Picasso, or Matisse, or Da Vinci or any other artist whose works he’d diligently studied.
A closer reading of Basquiat reveals him to be a conscious and conscientious selector in the great tradition of hip-hop djs and producers. Basquiat’s visual compositions sample art history books, medical texts, maps, conversations, newspaper and magazine articles, novels and jazz albums the way say, J Dilla or Kanye West might sample old funk and R&B records. Sampling is tedious. It is a practice that requires deft and depth. Musically speaking, one must be intimately familiar with particular canons of music or the body of work by a specific musician to effectively sample said material. Additionally important to note, is that sampling is not about copying, it is about creating. The sample becomes another instrument or in the case of Basquiat, a [visual] device to create new compositions and alter our perception. And though very much integral to hip-hop, it is a skill that links to survivalist practices inherent throughout the history of the Black diaspora, where notions of sampling (appropriation, remix, etc) are all a part of a broader toolbox of resistance methodologies.
This is not the work of a child.
In his catalogue essay for “Basquiat: The Lost Notebooks” curator and Basquiat-scholar Dieter Bucchart asserts that “Basquiat’s drawings almost challenge the viewer to rap them aloud. His paintings, with their combination of pentimento, acrylic paint, oil sticks, and collage, create a form of painted hip-hop, with fragments of text playing a critical role as samples. And throughout the work, the artist’s intense critique of contemporary culture parallels hip-hop’s subject matter” (p 38). It should be stated however, that Basquiat’s critique doesn’t simply parallel hip-hop, it is hip-hop!
Perhaps it is this incongruency that is the most troubling. If we think of Basquiat as a hip-hop artist, would we still consider him a child? The performance of masculinity remains a hot topic with respect to hip-hop. However, despite the relative youth of most rap artists, we continue to privilege rap—the commercial outcrop of hip hop culture—as the bastion of Black male masculinity. Since it’s earliest moments, hip-hop has provided a means of political, cultural, and largely public dissidence within mainstream society. If we were to read Basquiat’s masculinity and maturity through the lens of hip-hop, his critiques of contemporary culture become more dangerous, more salient, more remarkable, more flagrant. Perhaps then it is easier (read: safer) to accept the art world’s categorization of Basquiat as the “radiant child” because the idea of a child is less harmful, less threatening. But words matter. Words are matter. And what we speak becomes real.
There are obvious disparities that emerge when we reduce Basquiat’s masculinity to the position of a child or primal being. We strip him of his agency and intention and his critiques become less-pointed. When we reduce the complexity, thoughtfulness and brilliance of Basquiat to notions of childlike musing or primitive utterances, I think we miss invaluable opportunities to engage with his work in all of its fullness – including the very difficult and aggressive politics that play out both on, beneath and beyond the surface of his work. The infantilization of Basquiat undermines his impact in terms of his manhood and practice. Recognizing Basquiat’s manhood, his commentary of racism and classism, his intimacy with hip-hop, his intimacy with art and art history, and art world politics, as well as his extremely complex and cerebral relationship with words provides a newer, broader, deeper sense of the artist, his work and its legacy.
(Atlanta’s High Museum of Art exhibit “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” closes May 29, 2016. Be sure to visit and experience the incredible work of Jean-Michel Basquiat www.high.org)
