By Abayomi Folaranmi
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| Jean-Michel Basquiat, Acque Pericolose, 1981. |
I.
“Before you get to him, you have to walk through a lot of hot air, because he became a local and then a global legend, and you have to ignore the screeches of the vultures who deal his work. Had he turned up for the opening of the recent show nominally celebrating his fiftieth birthday (he, in fact, died in 1988, at the age of twenty-seven), he would surely have turned up several days late.
When you find yourself, however, face-to-face with what Jean-Michel Basquiat made, it’s a revelation, as the many thousands of Parisians, queuing for an hour recently to get into the show at the Musée d’Art Moderne, had sussed out for themselves. They were of all ages, but the majority were young.
Confronting his work, or being confronted by it, has little to do with High Culture or VIPs but a lot to do with seeing through the lies (visual, verbal, and acoustic) that are imposed on us every minute. Seeing those lies dismembered and undone is the revelation.”
Those words are from an essay on Basquiat by John Berger, to whom much of the rest of this essay is indebted to. As stated, he was speaking of the exhibition in celebration of Basquiat’s fiftieth birthday at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris, but he might as well have been referring to any occasion of seeing Basquiat, anywhere else in the world and at any other time. Most recently, the Barbican Art Gallery held the ‘first large-scale exhibition in the UK’ of his work.
Basquiat’s paintings are strange, difficult to grasp. They demand to be met on their own terms. They are an expression of a profound, highly individual sensibility, and require a selfless, entirely subjective response.
II.
Let us consider
Acque Pericolose, which Basquiat painted in 1981 when he was only twenty-one years old. From the Italian, the title translates as ‘dangerous waters’. It is also known in English as
Poison Oasis. Crudely rendered in what we might take to be a desert - whatever the setting, it is clear that it is barren. A figure stands in the centre, arms folded across its body in a gesture of vulnerability. It is a man; the phallus inscribed at the meeting of legs are telling. So, a naked man. He is black, and wears a shock of dreadlocked hair. Uneven white lines within his frame evoke a skeleton. He is flanked by two animals: a poised rattlesnake on the left and a bovine carcass on the right, with flies buzzing over the rotting remains. In what we may take as a background, there are arrows crudely drawn, primitive like the rest of the picture, reminiscent of cave paintings. The colours are jarring, patchy, psychedelic. And what of the titular waters? Above the bull, a daub of blue, defaced with black and red lines. Perhaps a pond. The red smears about the painting suggest blood.
III.
Let me lean on Berger again:
“He sensed that hidden truths cannot be described in any of the languages commonly employed for the promotion of lies; he saw every official language as a code of conveying false messages. His strategy as a painter was to discredit and split open such codes and to let in some vibrant, invisible, clandestine truths – like a saboteur. His ploy as a painter was to spell out the world in a language that is deliberately broken – ontologically broken.”
With Basquiat, the image comes before the word. This is true to nature: the infant looks, sees, feels before he ascribes names to objects. Adam named the animals only after the Lord had created them. Whatever man called a creature, that was its name. We explicitly identify the snake and the bull as animals out of habit. Subconsciously, we place the man, the black man, among them. Basquiat is the night marauder, smuggling images into our minds, shaking up the place, leaving with our innocence as bystanders.
IV.
“This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
V.
In a way, this painting, like so many others of this painter -and arguably all of them are- is a self-portrait. The dreadlocks, the undeniable blackness of the central figure.
VI.
An existentialist thread is woven into Basquiat’s work and it serves us to pick at the seams. There is always the problem of being-in-the-world, the original, inescapable problem. And especially for the black man. The negro, who in a racialised society is variously an animal or a zombie - a dead man walking, or standing still; always subhuman, is surrounded by death, danger and decomposition. Such a society is inimical to self-realisation.
VII.
May I be excused then for my skepticism upon seeing the well-informed, well-meaning white people of all ages, coming and going, talking of racism and tortured artists in the gallery rooms of the exhibition at the Barbican? How could they possibly claim to understand? And there were so relatively few black attendants too, for reasons I do not see much point in speculating on at present. The farce rather set my teeth on edge.
I must concede, of course, that being African and being voluntarily resident in a European country (to the extent that England can be called that), there’s a limit to what I can say about racism. That is to say, I can only practise some humility when I hear of the racial struggles of non-white people who have known no other reality than as minorities. The same applies even more so for people from such historically discriminatory societies as America or South Africa.
And yet, no one has a monopoly on existential struggles, with racism being just one of the several difficulties we must contend with. So, while I still doubt that white people can fully grasp the racial undertones of Basquiat’s work (that is, if even black people can do such a thing) there are certain universal things which speak to everyone: alienation, stagnation, hopelessness. Basquiat is a portal to radical freedom. As Berger tells us so insightfully, “each painted figure or animal or object imagined by Jean-Michel Basquiat has borrowed a T-shirt from Death in order to become impossible to arrest, invisible and free. Hence the exhilaration.”
VIII.
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
-T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’
VLADIMIR: …Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance....at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?
Samuel Beckett,
Waiting for Godot
IX.
This painting, again not unlike the rest of Basquiat’s oeuvre, functions as a memento mori. Death, or should I say mortality, was a subject which preoccupied Basquiat. And like so many great artists, he seemed to have an acute sense that he would die tragically (although, with the drugs he did any fool might have guessed it). He lived his brief life passionately, before overdosing on heroin at the age of twenty-seven, seven years after he painted ‘Acque Pericolose’. At the height of his fame, he was the among the most famous artists in the world, the first popularly recognised black painter. He remains one of the greatest artists in history; a paradox, at once primitive and modern, crude and nuanced. His was a tortured life, colourful and vigorous but in the end, quite dark.
X.
Art, of course -even popular art, with its inherent ephemerality- is one of the few means available to us of securing immortality. In spite of all the decay around us, art survives. Basquiat, with his complex, variegated consciousness are inseparable from his work. I have tried to avoid the hackneyed phrase, but I think is true that Basquiat lives on in his work, and therein he remains for those who are willing to go and meet him as they are.
