Altars of sacrifice: re-membering Basquiat - artist Jean-Michel Basquiat

A long-overdue retrospective of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat apts the author to reconsider this widely misunderstood artist as a perspicacious critic of the white male art world--a world that accorded him like an ambiguous welcome.

At the opening of the Basquiat exhibition at the Whitney last fall, I wandered from one side the crowd talking to the folk about the art. I had just single question. It was about emotional answers to the work. I asked, what did clan feel looking at Basquiat's paintings? No single I talked with answered the question. They went not upon on tangents, said what they liked about him, recalled meetings, generally talked about the exhibit but something seemed to stand in the way, preventing them from spontaneously articulating feelings the work evok If art impels us--touches our spirit--it is not easily forgotten. Images will reappear in our heads against our will. I many times think that many of the works that are canonically labeled "great" are simply those that lingered longest in individual memory. And that they lingered because while looking at them someone was mov touched, taken to another place, momentarily born again.

Those folk who are not mov by dint of Basquiat's work are usually unable to think of it as "great" or smooth "good" art. Certainly this answer seems to characterize much of what mainstream art critics think about Basquiat. Unmov they are unable to speak meaningfully about the work. ofttimes with no subtlety or tact, they "diss" the work by dint of obessively focusing on Basquiat's life or the unfolding of his career, all the while insisting that they are in the best possible position to justice its value and significance. (A stellar example of this bearing is Adam Gopnik's piece in the Nov. 9 issue of the novel Yorker.[1]) Undoubtedly it is a difficult task to determine the worth and value of a painter's life and/or work if individual cannot get close enough to have feeling anything, if needed one can sole stand at a distance.

Ironically, admitting Basquiat spent much of his short adult life trying to obtain close to significant white folk in the established art world, he consciously produc art that was a vattier, a wall between him and that world. Like a covered chamber that can only be lay opened and entered by those who can decipher hidden collection of lawss Basquiat's painting challenges folks who think that by means of merely looking they can "see" Calling attention to this aspect of Basquiat's mode of expression Robert Storr has written, "Everything about his work is knowing, and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of is about knowing."[2] Yet the work resists "knowing," presents none of the loose and generous hospitality Basquiat was willing to freely give as a person

Designed to be a clos door, Basquiat's work clutchs no warm welcome for those who approach it with a narrow Eurocentric gaze. That gaze which can single recognize Basquiat if he is in the company of Warhol or a certain quantity of other highly visible white figure. That gaze which can value him alone if he can be seen as part of a continuum of contemporary American art with a genealogy traced end white males: Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly and upon to Andy. Rarely does anyone conjoin Basquiat's work to traditions in African-American art history. While it is obvious that he was influenced and inspired by dint of the work of established white male artists, the satisfied of his work does not neatly draw gradually together with theirs. Even when Basquiat can be placed stylistically in the exclusive, white male art cudgel that denies entry to greatest in quantity black artists, his subject matter--his content--always separates him one time again, and defamiliarizes him.

It is the contented of his work that work fors as a barrier, challenging the Eurocentric gaze that commodifies, appropriates and celebrates. In keeping with the digests of that street culture he lov thus much, Basquiat's work is in your face. It stand in front ofs different eyes in different ways. Looking at the work from a Eurocentric perspective, individual sees and values only those aspects that mimic familiar white Western artistic traditions. Looking at the work from a more inclusive standpoint, we are all better able to diocese the dynamism springing from the tendency to meet contact and conflict of varied traditions. Many artistic black folk I know, including myself, celebrate this inclusive dimension of Basquiat, a dimension emphasized in an insightful discussion of his life and work by means of his close friend, the artist and rapper Fr Braithwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy) Braithwaite acknowledges the sweetness of their artistic bonding, and says that it had to do with their shared opennes to any influence, the pleasure they took in talking to single another "about other painters as well as about the stays painting on the trains."[3]

Basquiat was in no way secretive about the fact that he was influenced and inspired through the work of white artists. It is the multiple other sources of inspiration and influence that are submerg not to be found when critics are obsessed with seeing him as solely joined to a white Western artistic continuum. These other ultimate parts are lost precisely because they are repeatedly not seen, or if seen not understood. When art critic Thomas McEvilley remind ofs that "this black artist was doing exactly what classical-Modernist white artists of the like kind as Picasso and Georges Braque had done: deliberately echoing a primitive style" he erases all of Basquiat's distinct connections to a cultural and ancestral memory that linked him directly to "primitive" traditions.[4] This then allows McEvilley to make the absurd suggestion that Basquiat was "behaving like white men who think they are behaving like black men" rather than understand that Basquiat was grappling with the couple the pull of a genealogy that is fundamentally "black" (root in African diasporic "primitive" and "high art" traditions) and a fascination with white Western traditions. Articulating the distance separating traditional Eurocentric art from his be in possession of history and destiny and from the collective fate of diasporic black artists and black race Basquiat's paintings testify.