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Marc Mayer, Ed. Everyone wants to touch a legend; make a legend; it is embedded in our celebrity culture. The New York success story of Jean-Michel Basquiat is no exception. The anonymous, self-taught graffiti poet who signed himself "SAMO" (for "same old shit") became, overnight, a twenty-year-old cause célèbre collaborating with the likes of Andy Warhol. Then died in 1988, eternally young, eternally at the top of his game. His visions remain: threatening skull-like heads, scribbles of violent energy, ciphers of line and word. They embody the nervous energy of the street, the rough tumble of both gang symbols and classical references incorporated into self-taught art. Basquiat assembles over 150 of the artist's paintings and drawings with four essays, each of which takes a different approach to the work. Following the lines of argument here is as intriguing as looking at the actual art. Editor Marc Mayer disarms by bringing up the very argument one might level at Basquiat, that of the validity of untaught, undisciplined artists. Mayer holds that we're not meant to decode these works, that they are "confusing and disarming us with their discursive sleight of hand", consciously-chosen "pseudo-gibberish" like "scat-singing". At the same time Mayer likens Basquiat to Matisse, Gauguin, even Picasso, bringing in illustrative examples to compare. The effect is a bit like overpraising one's own prodigy -- look at the little darling, he's a modern Mozart -- but it does raise the impulse to look and see whether Basquiat's influences can really be traced back to these canonical references. Too formal, however, and the examination grows top-heavy: when Fred Hoffman refers to Basquiat as "a sophisticated humanist", it doesn't seem an apt phrase. Hoffman's detailed academic analysis of five "key" works seems to read too much into them, and the art, in the end, simply doesn't stand up to this level of scrutiny. Best and most complete for getting into the head of the artist is the half-informal groove by Franklin Sirmans covering Basquiat's affinity with music, past and present, bebop, hip-hop, punk. Sirmans compares Basquiat's messages to those of hip-hop in expressing anger and challenging power structures. The observations, both his own and the quotes drawn in from everywhere, from rappers to Schejldahl, are candid and convincing: "If you know what I mean by hip-hop, then you probably don't own one of Basquiat's paintings, but you may feel them in a way their owners may not." Finally, Kellie Jones takes a sociological standpoint, discussing Basquiat as an African-American phenomenon, a middle-class artist who rose via his graffiti. She likens him to Jimi Hendrix in bringing an infusion of new blood to the New York art scene, and finds his art as representative of both African and Spanish culture in America. Her essay is strongest where it illuminates the cultural associations that are clearly strong features of Basquiat's art: the use of griot/grillo/gri-gri figures in his images, the presence of voudoun personalities such as Baron Samedi, her description of the art piece Exu (1988) as a depiction of a god of the cross-roads. Through these and other references, Jones assesses Basquiat as "working through the charged relationship between the black male identity and death."
Left out of Basquiat are references to the circumstances surrounding his own death, any mention regarding the prevalence of gang symbols in his work, and the awareness that hip-hop itself often burns with an undercurrent of violence. These omissions seem to have been made in an attempt to further legitimize Basquiat's art, to remove it that much more from vernacular street life into the more rarefied air of the gallery. That movement from street to gallery is in itself one of the sociological interests of Basquiat's work, in which the burning undertone of anger and violence are defused by the gallery setting, removing the visual threat. A gang symbol on a wall in a New York art gallery is tamed, harmless, a world away from the logistics of the same tag on the wall of a dark alley. Like Andy Warhol, who adopted the younger artist as collaborator, Basquiat played with popular image in an artistic environment. Where Warhol's repetitions of pop icons and soup cans provoked examination of the ambient environment of consumer culture presented as art, Basquiat did the same for the streets, reproducing the randomness and gritty nervousness of urban surroundings. Displayed as art, Basquiat's work controls and limits the ferocity of urban visual noise, provides a release, an outlet for the tensions cultivated by a frenetic, anxious, multi-cultural society. Cacophony and color are foremost in these images. It is a visual distraction, rather than a stimulation, that echoes the random bustle and roar of the street. Basquiat's career lasted a brief eight years, from 1980 to 1988. Like some of America's most enduring popular icons -- Elvis Presley, James Dean, and Warhol's own wellspring of iconic image, Marilyn Monroe -- Basquiat's early death left him forever young. He was also one of New York's own, a self-taught, unknown artistic success, a welcome injection of newness to the New York art scene of the eighties. Whether one agrees that Basquiat's art may be said to rank with that of Matisse and Gauguin, as Meyer maintains, the essayists of Basquiat propose ideas so diverse in approach that they entice one to page through the book to see if the images support the claims being made. And with this art of New York nerve, raw, scrawled, brutal -- does it? Yes and no. Like advertisements on a modern street, Basquiat's work sells attitude, not a product. It is too soon to say decisively whether Basquiat's art is, as the authors assert, "timeless". Neither, on the other hand, can it be dismissed. This densely-illustrated catalogue of the young artist's work is a fascinating study, as much of the nature of varieties of academic presentation as of the artist's work itself. --Katherine R. Lieber Katherine R. Lieber has edited ArtScope.net's Visual Arts reviews since 1998. Ms. Lieber is Editor and Associate Producer for ArtScope.net.
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