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I’ve seen about a handful of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings on two separate occasions. ART/In Word Only was a Basquiat retrospective in the Lower East Side of New York. His journals were displayed under thick glass and stained by his own blood, blood from a heroin needle, from his own vein. The second time I saw Basquiat’s work was at the New Museum in the Chelsea area of New York. There was a painting alluding to Aaron and Moses in the Old Testament, prophets on a puzzling and seemingly haphazard surface. My friend who was with me said they were like puzzles, like cryptology. He said that it was like a game. He tried to “crack” the message of the paintings.
I didn’t really think about them. At first I didn’t know how to approach them. Who was this man? I just wanted to look at them and listen for him, see if he would reveal himself to me. Basquiat’s bold line was like a double-edged sword to me, like impenetrable armor, an exterior that took me a while to find a way in. His overlapping colors and background reminded me of some early contemporary painters, particularly Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. The words themselves were like drawings, each with their own personality.
When I stood in front of his paintings, floating with words, I saw the speed and energy in his line and color. This speed and energy produced a sort of rhythm in my walk and in my gaze. I was drawn back to each one at least three times. I saw crowns. Feathers. Teeth. My mind began to make associations with dead kings, dead pigeons and angry salivating dogs - images from my own subconscious and childhood.
But as I looked longer, bending my body from left to right, sort of locked in a rocking trance, I began to see the interior and exterior worlds of Basquiat’s surface. He painted bones and flesh. He painted the ugliness of truth and the pain of truth and the beauty of truth. His paintings seem to have gone through a cheese grater, displaying for my eyes the turmoil of war and the cut-throat policies of greedy men. Being inside Basquiat’s paintings is like being inside the cheese grater. Once inside, the viewer might become lost or claustrophobic in the metal-jungle of Basquiat’s enigma.
I think his works are meant to be incisive and lure the viewer inward, into a history that each of us must come face-to-face with, whether we like it or not. I think Basquiat wanted to have a voice through image that resurfaced a forgotten history, one that has been written in a dehydrated diction, causing mass indifference and materialistic trends.
Basquiat was a street-walking prophet. The ancient tradition of inscribing hieroglyphics on walls was borrowed from his poetry with the spray can. Brooklyn and Manhatten were his Giza plateau. As I left Basquiat’s works, I asked myself if I had gained anything. If his work did anything it flooded me like the Nile. It flooded me with rich color and history and gesture.
I thought to myself that Basquiat was one of those artists who remained an artist to his death. He was one of those artists who had decided to be an artist, and not some phase-of-life artist (something a few critics dubbed him to be). His life had been taken by drugs, taken by the destructive addiction rooted in Adam, but this star has not yet flickered out from the world of art. Basquiat’s line still lingers in galleries and books. He knew what he was saying when he said, “Every line means something.”
Basquiat’s paintings are food for my mind and soul. Sometimes this food is like the dry taste of Saltine crackers and sometimes it is like a juicy steak dinner. When I think of Basquiat, I think of him working on 20 paintings at one time, dancing from one to the next. It is this motion, this liveliness that opens up the door into his paintings, and opens our minds to see him shuffling across the floor in pyjamas and Armani suits.
If we can see his work and see his energy injected into it, then maybe we can look again and let down our own barriers, our own bold lines, and let Basquiat’s art be born into us as an important art. When asked if his paintings were angry, he responded, “About 80% of my paintings are angry.” What was the other 20%? Does one see hope? Does one see love? Does one see humor?
Whenever the human condition or the current times are depicted through the expression of art - whether it is painting, sculpture, installation - it is common for artists to lay bare the negative side of things, the pain and puncture of human frailty. For artists, it doesn’t always end here. I don’t think it ended here for Basquiat, either. I feel rhythm and jazz in his musician paintings on doors and fences. I hear the stories of the old griots in West Africa, of family, community and culture.
Basquiat said, “I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.” If we can train ourselves to break through the lines of our own tastes and preferences when it comes to the visual arts, then maybe we can experience the spontaneous power art can have in our lives, a power that changes us, a power that wakes us into action.
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Daniel Brophy
Homelessness. Poverty. Hunger. Men under bridges with rain dripping on their scruffy faces.
Every day I am exposed to these tragedies. I can't help but to address them, somehow. But in them, in the corners, in the cracks of the paint, or on the walls in graffiti, their is some message of hope for the viewer. I guess what I want to say is this - in our darkest most depressing of times, there is hope, we just have to find it, to look at our life, to listen to it, and find it.
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