BASQUIAT BOOM FOR REAL - Prestel Publishing

Boom for real! Was I dreaming? No. Maybe I was justwaking up. Waking up to my own luck. Luck is whereyou find it.1to free market capitalism, against the backdrop of recurringreferences to topics including music, anatomy, cartoons,economics and black cultural history.A naked wall reads ‘BOOM FOR REAL ’, spray-painted inlarge capital letters. Jean-Michel Basquiat stands in front ofthis wall with his left hand casually in his pocket, swinginga paper bag in his other hand, while looking at the camerawith a faint smile (Fig. 1). In this still from Downtown 81,filmed in late 1980 – 81 (when the film was known as NewYork Beat), he is barely 20 years old and plays broadlyhimself: an artist in search of his artistic self. Yet he was nota street or graffiti artist, which he was often labelled as aresult of his early graffiti works with his friend Al Diaz underthe pseudonym of SAMO . From 1977 to late 1978, the twowrote poetic and often critical phrases around downtownManhattan, which earned them significant popularity.2 In1982, at the age of 21, Basquiat was invited to take part inDocumenta 7 in Kassel, the youngest artist in the show’shistory at the time, where his works were exhibited alongsideJoseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twomblyand Andy Warhol, among others. Only six years later,Basquiat died on 12 August 1988.Exhibitions such as Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks atthe Brooklyn Museum (2015) 11 and Words Are All WeHave at Nahmad Contemporary in New York (2016)12demonstrated the ease with which the artist deployedletters, words, numbers, lists and phrases as integralcomponents of his work. As Klaus Kertess describes, heused ‘words like brushstrokes’.13 Kertess remarks: ‘In thebeginning of his creation, there was the word. He lovedwords for their sense, for their sound, and for their look;he gave eyes, ears, mouth – and soul – to words’.14 Yet stillBasquiat gets categorised as a neo-expressionist, alongsideartists including David Salle and Julian Schnabel,neo-expressionism being described in terms such as ‘BadPainting’, ‘New Image Painting’ or ‘Wild Style’ as a countermovement to conceptual art.15 Jordana Moore Saggese inher 2014 book Reading Basquiat anchors the artist betweenneo-expressionism and conceptualism,16 while I have focusedon looking at Basquiat through a conceptual lens.17NOW’S THE TIMEDuring his short life, Basquiat became one of the key figuresof the downtown New York art scene and has since beenascribed a decisive role in the art of the second half of the20th century. Almost 30 years after his death, his workscontinue to attract major attention, both on the art marketand, more importantly, from art historians.3 His works arefrequently compared to those of the great masters of classicalmodernism and the post-war era. Basquiat is considered inthe same pantheon of artists as Edvard Munch, Warhol andTwombly. He has inspired generations of younger artists,including Rashid Johnson, José Parlá and Oscar Murillo.It might be all too tempting to mythologise Basquiat as theJimi Hendrix of the art world.4 But what does it matter inthe end how early, how fast and in what quantity an artist’swork was produced? Let us re-pose Ingrid Sischy’s question‘What made Jean-Michel Basquiat so great as an artist?’5from today’s perspective, independently of drugs, fame andmarket values. Retrospective exhibitions since the turn of thecentury, such as at the Brooklyn Museum (2005)6 and theFondation Beyeler (2010),7 have underscored his artisticimportance in the Eurocentric8 and ‘entgrenzte’ 9 art historical canon through a curatorial presentation of his mostsignificant work. Now’s the Time at the Art Gallery ofOntario (2015)10 traced his contemporary relevance througha thematic analysis of his work. The latter exhibitionbroached Basquiat’s multifaceted engagement with sociopolitical questions, ranging from the history of oppressionBut what role did SAMO and the downtown New York artscene, which was heavily influenced by Andy Warhol, playin Basquiat’s development? And what was the impact ofhis attention-provoking participation in the Times SquareShow (1980) and New York / New Wave at P. S.1 (1981)?18What significance can be attributed to his rarely discussedinterdisciplinary artistic practice and how did he channelthe influence of his various source materials? 19 Thesequestions are addressed for the first time in Basquiat:Boom for Real at the Barbican, London, and the SchirnKunsthalle Frankfurt. The first extensive Basquiat exhibition in either the UK or Germany, it focuses on the artist’sinterdisciplinary practice and his encyclopaedic sourcematerial, from literature to bebop jazz to the history offilm and television.BASQUIAT’S INTERDISCIPLINARITY:BETWEEN LINE, WORD, PERFORMANCE,COLLABORATION AND MUSICIn the art scene of downtown Manhattan in the late 1970sand early 1980s, working across different artistic media– such as painting, performance, music or film – was awidespread phenomenon, as was working collaboratively,especially among a younger generation of artists. Animportant role model in this regard was surely Andy Warhol,who since the 1960s had been furthering his repertoire.His practice extended from painting, graphics, drawing,photography, sculpture and film to fashion, TV, performance, theatre, music and literature. Warhol overcametraditional barriers between disciplines and cultural scenes.13

Many other artists followed his example and began to workin multiple fields. Basquiat was active as a draughtsman,painter, performer, actor, poet, musician and DJ, whileKeith Haring performed in public spaces, producedpaintings, drawings and prints and worked with video andphotography and also as a DJ. Haring created collaborativeworks with graffiti artist Little Angel Two (LA2) 20 as wellas with artists, writers and performers such as Madonna,Grace Jones, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Bill T.Jones, Jenny Holzer, Yoko Ono and Warhol. Similarly,Julian Schnabel is today as known for his filmmaking asfor his painting, not forgetting his interior design. As aresult of this openness, moving between artistic disciplinesvirtually became a matter of course, anticipating themultidisciplinary work of many artists in the 1990s.Basquiat’s intensive collaboration with other artists contributes to our understanding of the multiplicity of hisartistic practice. In favouring this approach, he seamlesslyfollowed the examples of collaborative endeavours withinthe international art scene during the 1970s and early1980s. Both the COBRA artists Karel Appel and PierreAlechinsky (Fig. 3) worked collaboratively, as did ArnulfRainer and Dieter Roth, who together created morethan 100 drawings, paintings, photographs, experimentalworks, videos and books between 1972 and 1979.21 Sincethe 1960s, Roth had also formed a lively collaborationwith Richard Hamilton, which found expression in variousmedia. 22 With the arrival of neo-expressionism and theNeuen Wilden (the German neo-expressionist movement) at the end of the 1970s, collective work, orGemeinschaftsbild, took centre stage. Max Faust in 1983summarised Gemeinschaftsbild as ‘an aspect of theNew Painting’ in Germany. 23 Walter Dahn and Jiří GeorgDokoupil worked together, as did Albert and MarkusOehlen, Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger, as wellFig. 2: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Untitled, 1982.Ink on rubber, 62.9 88.9 cm (24 ¾ 35 in.). Keith Haring Foundation.14BOOM, BOOM, BOOM FOR REALas Salomé, Luciano Castelli and Rainer Fetting. Faustexplained that ‘The basis of working collaboratively is theclose relationships between the artists, their “pulling in thesame direction”, their curiosity for the collaboration, theircloseness, provocation and responsibility’.24 Because allcollaborations share the ‘principle of collective production’,25 there is an orchestrated tuning-in and harmonising,familiar to those working in music, performance andfilm – notably, Salomé, Castelli, Fetting, Dahn and Oehlenalso worked as musicians.At the beginning of his career, Basquiat created conceptualand politically charged collaborative graffiti with Al Diaz.On 29 April 1979, Basquiat ‘performed’ his first painting byspray-painting graffiti on a canvas mounted to the wallduring the recording of The Guy’s Big Party in Stan Peskett’s‘Canal Zone’ (Fig. 4).26 As a musician, Basquiat performedas part of the band Gray with Michael Holman, VincentGallo and Nicholas Taylor (among others), and engagedwith the early hip-hop movement with Fab 5 Freddy, Toxicand Rammellzee. He designed the cover for and producedthe rap single ‘Beat Bop’, in collaboration with Rammellzeeand K-Rob. For Rodeo, a short film by Salomon Emquies,he created neon drawings to be overlaid on the filmedperformance of the single at the Rhythm Lounge in LA.His leading role in Downtown 81 further underscores thebreadth of his artistic engagements.Another collaboration can be seen in a drawing with KeithHaring from 1982 (Fig. 2). Both worked with the same ink,thereby achieving a largely homogeneous appearance: Haringdepicted outlined silhouettes of walking figures whileBasquiat contributed a black angel balancing on the word‘TAR’ (summoning associations of slavery, racism andlynching), which he partly erased with gestural touches ofink wash. Basquiat was also very open in his day-to-daycollaboration with his studio assistants. As he explained inan interview with Marc H. Miller, from 1982 until 1983Stephen Torton, for instance, put together most of hisunorthodox supports, such as the ‘cross-bar’ canvases heldtogether by nails and ties, assemblages of doors27 and canvasstretched over industrial pallets, which became the basefor some of Basquiat’s most iconic paintings.28 Torton also‘tiled’ collections of Basquiat’s drawings onto canvas,forming collages that provided the foundation of laterworks, such as Glenn (1984, pp. 222–223) and King of theZulus (1984 – 85, p. 165). Basquiat sampled from the worldaround him; like the artist and composer John Cage, hebrought chance elements from the ‘everyday’ into his works.He often spoke of Cage’s concerts and performances of the1940s and 50s, in which the composer let the musicianscreate their own interpretations based on arbitrary markson the scores. In this vein, Basquiat invited the interventionof his studio assistants.29

Fig. 3: Micky Alechinsky. Karel Appel (left) and Pierre Alechinsky (right), working on theircollaborative series in Alechinsky’s studio, Bougival, France, 1976.15

BOOM, BOOM, BOOM FOR REAL

DIETER BUCHHARTFig. 4: Anton Perich. Basquiat at the Canal Zone Party, 1979.

Basquiat’s artistic collaboration with Warhol in the mid1980s evolved quite differently from those described so far.Rather than emerging out of a close artistic friendship, theirproject was initiated in 1983 by the Swiss art dealer andcollector Bruno Bischofberger, who convinced three ofthe very different artists that he represented – Basquiat,Warhol and Francesco Clemente – to embark on a series ofcollaborative works. Among other historical precedents,Bischofberger was inspired by the surrealist game of‘cadavre exquis’.30 Given Kunstforum International’s issueon collaboration in 1983, the timeliness was tangible.31Clemente had already been engaging with others, forexample on the ‘illuminated manuscripts’ he made withAllen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, Rene Ricardand John Wieners.32 On his long visits to India – before hispermanent move to New York in 1981 – Clemente had alsoworked with miniature painters in Jaipur and Orissa,papermakers in Pondicherry and sign painters in TamilNadu.33 As noted in a diary entry by Warhol dated 20December 1983, the three artists began their collaborationover the course of several months.34Nina Zimmer points out that the ‘societal climate forcollaborative works’ changed considerably after 1968 as‘group and communal strategies found their way intopedagogy, psychology, psychoanalysis and the popularsociology’.35 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s thesis thata fantasy was never individual, but always a group fantasy,began to circulate. 36 As a result of the propagation ofcollaboration ‘from kindergartens to universities’,37 the ideabecame broadly accepted in society. This meant that thesignificance of a temporary collaboration, such as the onebetween Warhol, Basquiat and Clemente, was found not inits initiation, but rather in the physical act of creation andthe artworks themselves. Warhol and Basquiat subsequentlycontinued their collaboration. A comment by Basquiat hintsat the intensity of this project: the two worked together ‘ona million paintings’,38 without rules: ‘we used to paint overeach other’s stuff all the time’.39 Over the years 1984 – 85,Warhol and Basquiat created more than 150 collaborations,which account for more than ten per cent of Basquiat’spainting oeuvre.‘COPY-AND-PASTE’ AS THE TRADEMARK OF‘REPRO-CULTURE’ IN THE LATE 20 TH CENTURYThe multidisciplinary practices of a number of artists in the1980s reflect the increasing ‘technical reproducibility’ 40 ofimages and works of art, which today is almost taken forgranted as the basis of our society and communicationstructures. Hans-Jürgen Seemann in his book Copy: Aufdem Weg in die Repro-Kultur in 1992 summarised: ‘We livein a repro-culture: imitation, reproduction and emulationbecome the “trademarks” of our society. We find copying in18BOOM, BOOM, BOOM FOR REALthe media, fashion, sciences and art. And nowadays peopleeven copy themselves’.41 Basquiat too sampled from everything that he perceived. He collaged aspects of his everydayenvironment and proclaimed that he constantly needed‘source material around [him] to work off’.42 As SuzanneMallouk recalled, ‘He picks up books, cereal boxes, the newspaper or whatever is around. He finds a word or phrase andpaints it on his board or canvas’.43 It is this appropriation ofthe everyday, the incidental, as well as the seeminglysignificant, that makes his work so distinctive. His principleof ‘copy-and-paste’ seems to echo an early anonymousgraffito: ‘Only Xerox is live, you are just a copy’.44 Basquiat’swork is ‘knowledge-based’, yet he samples from whatsurrounds him and what he chooses to surround himselfwith. As in the ‘copy-and-paste’ sampling of the internet andpost-internet generations, he consciously copies and transforms the materials he finds into his own aesthetic. In doingso he plays a part in the ‘copy society’,45 in which ‘the processof copying’ is ‘a key cultural technique of modernity’.46Basquiat’s work was inspired by the ‘cut-up’ technique,pioneered by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. In hisshort essay ‘Minutes to Go’, Gysin concisely summarisedthis unorthodox attitude to language: ‘Pick a book / anybook / cut it up / cut up / prose / poems / newspapers / magazines /the bible / the koran / the book of moroni / la-tzu / confucius /the bhagavad gita / anything / letters / business correspondence /ads / all the words’.47 The technique involved cutting up textand rearranging the individual pieces to obtain a new text.In the context of the emerging hip-hop culture at thebeginning of the 1980s, this chimed with the sensibility ofthe ‘copy society’, bringing Burroughs to popular attentionagain. Basquiat created an equivocal memorial to Burroughsin his triptych Five Fish Species (1983, pp. 216–217). In thework he includes ‘BURROUGH’S BULLET ’ and ‘1951 ’ asreferences to 6 September, the day on which Burroughs,under the influence of drugs, shot his wife Joan Vollmer inMexico City when he restaged the apple scene fromFriedrich von Schiller’s drama Wilhelm Tell.48 In the spiritof Burroughs, whose work often addressed the ruthlessnature of life’s ups and downs, Basquiat made hismonument to the writer a radical acknowledgement of thisbrutal incident. Basquiat associates Burroughs’ eventfullife, his break with societal norms and his far-reachingartistic innovations with life as a permanent and relentlesscut-up. For Burroughs, ‘Life is a cut-up. As soon as youwalk down the street your consciousness is being cut byrandom factors. The cut-up is closer to the facts of humanperception than linear narrative’.49Basquiat’s letters, words, marks and figures create a pictorialrhythm equalling the spoken poems of Dadaists such asRaoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters and the latter’sUrsonate (1922–32). As Fab 5 Freddy perceptively remarks,

Fig. 5: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jimmy Best, 1981 (detail). Spray paint andoil stick on metal, 244 244 cm (96 ⅛ 96 ⅛ in.). Private collection.‘If you read the canvases out loud to yourself, the repetition,the rhythm, you can hear Jean-Michel thinking’.50 Basquiat’sart can be considered in the space between Gysin’s andBurroughs’ ‘cut-up’ technique, ‘concrete poetry’51 and theemerging spoken word of the hip-hop scene. Sampling andscratching as well as ‘copy-and-paste’ are part of Basquiat’sart practice. His work appears just like a ‘language ofrupture’,52 a concrete poetry of hip-hop created in a ‘cut-andpaste’ process. It offers what Laura Hoptman describes inreference to contemporary collage and assemblage as theopportunity ‘to experience information simultaneously’; the‘horizontal cloud of information’ shifts in Basquiat’s worktowards a poetic condition.53BOOM, BOOM, BOOM FOR REAL‘Boom for real’54 was one of Basquiat’s ‘trademark phrases’,55similar to his crown motifs and the and signs. Yet‘Boom for real’ was more the spoken and the performedthan the drawn word. Only on occasion did he write‘ BOOM FOR REAL ’, as seen in Jimmy Best (1981, Fig. 5)or the drawing Untitled (Crown) (1982, p. 218). Unlikemany of his other words, applied with heavy strokes ofoil stick, the phrase ‘ BOOM FOR REAL ’ appears to beadded casually, connoting a graffiti tag in a public toiletor prison cell – the exception being the bold lettering onthe concrete wall in Downtown 81. ‘Boom for real’ wasmore of an expression and artistic strategy; as DiegoCortez underscores in Tamra Davis’ documentary film:‘He had the expression “Boom for real” – explosion – andthen you end up with fragments rather than the Cubist andpost-Cubist way of building sections, hatching thingstogether, a quilt work. Jean-Michel’s work was not abouta quilt, it was about a galaxy of reality that has beenagain exploded. So everything is equal’. 56 This readingcan also be drawn from Nicholas Taylor’s recollections,placing the origins of this phrase in a TV interview witha ho

christian campbell 33 works 58 archive 2. new york/ new wave 66 introduction 68 exhibitionism carlo mccormick 72 works 90 archive 3. the scene 98 introduction 100 samo 's new york glenn o'brien 104 works 146 archive 4. jazz 156 introduction 158 basquiat, bird, beat and bop francesco martinelli 162 works 178 archive 5. encyclopaedia