Was Basquiat a Willing Sacrificial Lamd or Unsespecting Art World Victim
In this bracing essay from A.i.A.'s June 1993 consequence, the influential thinker bell hooks analyzes the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat as a form of sacrifice: his ritual offerings were the parts of himself that had to exist repressed and erased for him to win success in a white-dominated fine art world. In the course of her argument, hooks deconstructs the dismissals of Basquiat's paintings past white critics who found them derivative or "primitive." "Looking at the piece of work from a Eurocentric perspective, 1 sees and values only those aspects that mimic familiar white Western artistic traditions," hooks writes. "Looking at the work from a more than inclusive standpoint, we are all better able to see the dynamism springing from the convergence, contact and conflict of varied traditions." —Eds.
Is your all on the chantry of sacrifice laid? —Black church song
At the opening of the Basquiat exhibition at the Whitney last fall, I wandered through the crowd talking to the folks about the art. I had just one question. It was most emotional responses to the work. I asked, what did people experience looking at Basquiat'southward paintings? No i I talked with answered the question. They went off on tangents, said what they liked most him, recalled meetings, mostly talked about the show, but something seemed to stand up in the way, preventing them from spontaneously articulating feelings the work evoked. If art moves us—touches our spirit—it is not easily forgotten. Images will reappear in our heads against our will. I oftentimes think that many of the works that are canonically labeled "peachy" are simply those that lingered longest in individual memory. And that they lingered because while looking at them someone was moved, touched, taken to another place, momentarily born again.
Those folks who are not moved past Basquiat's work are usually unable to recollect of it as "smashing" or even "skilful" art. Certainly this response seems to characterize much of what mainstream fine art critics recollect about Basquiat. Unmoved, they are unable to speak meaningfully about the work. Ofttimes with no subtlety or tact, they "diss" the work past obsessively focusing on Basquiat'due south life or the development of his career, all the while insisting that they are in the all-time possible position to judge its value and significance. (A stellar example of this tendency is Adam Gopnik's piece in the Nov. 9 upshot of the New Yorker.one) Undoubtedly it is a hard task to make up one's mind the worth or value of a painter's life and/or piece of work if one cannot go close enough to feel anything, if indeed 1 tin simply stand at a altitude.
Ironically, though Basquiat spent much of his brusk adult life trying to get close to pregnant white folks in the established art world, he consciously produced art that was avattier,a wall between him and that earth. Similar a clandestine chamber that tin can only exist opened and entered past those who can decipher subconscious codes, Basquiat'due south painting challenges folks who call back that by merely looking they tin "see." Calling attention to this attribute of Basquiat's style, Robert Storr has written, "Everything about his piece of work is knowing, and much isnearknowing.ii Yet the piece of work resists "knowing," offers none of the loose and generous hospitality Basquiat was willing to freely give as a person.
Designed to be a closed door, Basquiat'due south work holds no warm welcome for those who arroyo it with a narrow Eurocentric gaze. That gaze which tin only recognize Basquiat if he is in the company of Warhol or some other highly visible white figure. That gaze which can value him simply if he tin can be seen as part of a continuum of contemporary American fine art with a genealogy traced through white males: Pollock, de Kooning, Rauschenberg, Twombly, and on to Andy. Rarely does anyone connect Basquiat's work to traditions in African-American art history. While it is obvious that he was influenced and inspired by the work of established white male artists, the content of his piece of work does not neatly converge with theirs. Fifty-fifty when Basquiat can be placed stylistically in the exclusive, white male person art guild that denies entry to most black artists, his subject matter—his content—always separates him one time again, and defamiliarizes him.
It is in the content of his work that serves every bit a barrier, challenging the Eurocentric gaze that commodifies, appropriates and celebrates. In keeping with the codes of that street culture he loved then much, Basquiat's piece of work is in your face. Information technology confronts dissimilar optics in dissimilar ways. Looking at the work from a Eurocentric perspective, one sees and values but those aspects that mimic familiar white Western creative traditions. Looking at the work from a more inclusive standpoint, we are all better able to see the dynamism springing from the convergence, contact and disharmonize of varied traditions. Many artistic blackness folks I know, including myself, gloat this inclusive dimension of Basquiat, a dimension emphasized in an insightful discussion of his life and work by his close friend, the artist and rapper Fred Braithwaite (a.k.a. Fab v Freddy). Braithwaite acknowledges the sweetness of their artistic bonding, and says that it had to do with their shared openness to influence, the pleasure they took in talking to ane another "about other painters likewise as nearly the guys painting on the trains."three
Basquiat was in no way secretive about the fact that he was influenced and inspired by the work of white artists. It is the multiple other sources of inspiration and influence that are submerged, lost, when critics are obsessed with seeing him solely connected to a white Western artistic continuum. These other elements are lost precisely considering they are often not seen, or if seen, not understood. When art critic Thomas McEvilley suggests that "this black artist was doing exactly what classical Modernist white artists such equally Picasso and Georges Braque had done: deliberately echoing a primitive style," he erases all of Basquiat's singled-out connections to a cultural and ancestral retention that linked him direct to "primitive" traditions.4 This then allows McEvilley to brand the absurd proposition that Basquiat was "behaving like white men who think they are behaving like black men," rather than sympathize that Basquiat was grappling with both the pull of a genealogy that is fundamentally "black" (rooted in African diasporic "primitive" and "high art" traditions) and a fascination with white Western traditions. Articulating the distance separating traditional Eurocentric art from his ain history and destiny and from the collective fate of diasporic black artists and black people, Basquiat'south paintings testify.
To bear witness in his work, Basquiat struggled to utter the unspeakable. Prophetically called, he engaged in an extended artistic elaboration of a politics of dehumanization. In his work, colonization of the black torso and mind is marked by the anguish of abandonment, estrangement, dismemberment and expiry. Scarlet pigment drips like blood on his untitled painting of a black female, identified only past a sign that reads "Detail of maid from 'Olympia.'" A dual critique is occurring here. Offset, the critique of the way in which imperialism makes itself heard, the way information technology is reproduced in civilization and fine art.This image is ugly and grotesque. That is exactly how information technology should be. For what Basquiat unmasks is the ugliness of those traditions. He takes the Eurocentric valuation of the great and cute and demands that we acknowledge the brutal reality it masks.
The "ugliness" conveyed in Basquiat paintings is not solely the horror of colonizing whiteness; information technology is the tragedy of blackness complicity and betrayal. Works likeIrony of a Negro Policeman (1981) andQuality Meats for the Public (1982) document this stance. The images are nakedly fierce. They speak of dread, of terror, of existence torn apart, ravished. Commodified, appropriated, made to "serve" the interests of white masters, the black body as Basquiat shows it is incomplete, non fulfilled, never a full image. And when he is "calling out" the piece of work of blackness stars—sports figures, entertainers—in that location is withal the portrayal of incompleteness, and the bulletin that complicity negates. These works advise that assimilation and participation in a bourgeois white image tin can lead to a process of self-objectification that is just as dehumanizing equally whatsoever racist assail by white culture. Content to exist only what the oppressors want, this blackness image tin can never be fully cocky-actualized. It must always exist represented as fragmented. Expressing a immediate knowledge of the fashion absorption and objectification lead to isolation, Basquiat's black male figures stand alone and apart. They are not whole people.
It is much too simplistic a reading to see works likeJack Johnson (1982),Untitled (Saccharide Ray Robinson), 1982, and the like, as solely celebrating black culture. Appearing always in these paintings as half-formed or somehow mutilated, the black male body becomes, iconographically, a sign of lack and absence. This paradigm of incompleteness mirrors those in works that more explicitly critique white imperialism. The paintingNative Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982) graphically evokes images of incomplete blackness. With wicked wit, Basquiat states in the lower right-hand corner of the piece of work, "I won't even mention gold (oro)," equally though he needed to remind onlookers of a conscious interrogating strategy backside the skeletal, cartoonlike images.
In Basquiat'south piece of work, mankind on the black body is almost ever falling abroad. Like skeletal figures in the Australian aboriginal bark painting described past Robert Edward (X-ray paintings, in which the artist depicts external features as well as the internal organs of animals, humans, and spirits, in order to emphasize "that at that place is more to a living thing that external appearances"5), these figures take been worked down to the os. To do justice to this piece of work, then, our gaze must exercise more than than reflect on surface appearances. Daring u.s.a. to prove the heart of darkness, to motility our optics beyond the colonizing gaze, the paintings ask that we hold in our retentivity the bones of the dead while nosotros consider the world of the black immediate, the familiar.
To see and understand these paintings, one must be willing to take the tragic dimensions of black life. InThe Fire Side by side Time, James Baldwin alleged that "for the horrors" of black life "there has been almost no linguistic communication." He insisted that it was the privacy of black experience that needed "to be recognized in linguistic communication." Basquiat's piece of work gives that individual anguish creative expression.
Stripping away surfaces, Basquiat confronts usa with the naked black image. There is no "fleshy" black body to exploit in his work, for that torso is diminished, vanishing. Those who long to exist seduced by that black body must await elsewhere. Information technology is fitting that the skeletal figures displayed again and again in Basquiat's work resemble those depicted in Gillies Turle's bookThe Art of Maasai.6 For both Maasai art and Basquiat's work delineate the violent erasure of a people, their culture and traditions. This erasure is rendered all the more problematic when artifacts of that "vanishing culture" are commodified to enhance the esthetics of those perpetrating the erasure.
The world of Maasai fine art is a world of bones. Choosing not to work with pigments when making paintings or decorative art, the Maasai use bones from hunting animals in their art to give expression to their relationship with nature and with their ancestors. Maasai artists believe that bones speak—tell all the necessary cultural information, take the identify of history books. Basic go the repository of personal and political history. Maasai fine art survives as a living memory of the distinctiveness of black civilization that flourished most vigorously when information technology was undiscovered by the white man. It is this privacy that white imperialism violates and destroys. Turle emphasizes that while the bones are "intense focus points to prime number mins into a deeper receptive state," this communicative ability is lost on those who are unable to hear bones speak.
Fifty-fifty though socially Basquiat did not "diss" those white folks who could non move beyond surface appearances (stereotypes of entraining darkies, pet Negroes and the similar), in his work he serves notice on that liberal white public. Calling out their inability to let the notion of racial superiority go, fifty-fifty though it limits and restricts their vision, he mockingly deconstructs their investment in traditions and canons, exposing a commonage gaze this is wedded to an esthetic of white supremacy. The painting Obnoxious Liberals (1982) shows us a ruptured history by depicting a mutilated black Samson in chains and so a more gimmicky black effigy, no longer naked only fully clothed in formal attire, who wears on his trunk a sign that boldly states "Not For Sale." This sign is worn to ward off the overture of the large, almost overbearing white figure in the painting. Despite the incredible energy Basquiat displayed playing the how-to-be-a-famous-artist-in-the-shortest-amount-of-fourth dimension-game—courting the right crowd, making connections, networking his mode into high "white" art places—he chose to make piece of work in a space where that process of commodification is critiques, particularly equally it pertains to the black body and soul. Unimpressed by white exoticization of the "Negro," he mocks this process in works that announce an "undiscovered genius of the mississippi delta," forcing us to question who makes such discoveries and for what reasons.
Throughout his work, Basquiat links imperialism to patriarchy, to a phallocentric view of the universe where male egos become attached to a myth of heroism. The epitome of the crown, a recurring symbol in his work, calls to and mocks the Western obsession with beingness on top, the ruler. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson suggests that the icon of the crown reflects Basquiat's ongoing fascination with the subject matter of "royalty, heroism, and the streets."seven McEvilley interprets the crown similarly, seeing it as representative of a "sense of double identity, a purple selfhood somehow lost only dimly remembered."8 He explains that "in Basquiat's oeuvre, the theme of divine or royal exile was brought down to earth or historicized by the concrete reality of the African diaspora. The rex that he in one case was in another world (and that he would be again when he returned in that location) could be imaged concretely as a Watusi warrior or Egyptian pharaoh."9
At that place is no uncertainty that Basquiat was personally obsessed with the idea of glory and fame, but this obsession is also the subject of intense cocky-interrogation in his paintings. Both Thompson and McEvilley neglect to recognize Basquiat's mocking, bitter critique of his ain longing for fame. In Basquiat'south piece of work the crown is not an unambiguous image. While it may positively speak the longing for glory and power, information technology connects that desire to dehumanization, to the general willingness on the part of males globally to commit any unjust human activity that volition lead them to the acme. In the paintingCrowns (Peso Neto), 1981, black figures wearable crowns merely are sharply contrasted with the lone white figure wearing a crown, fort it is that figure which looms large, overseeing a shadowy world, as well as the world of black glory.
In much of Basquiat's work the struggle for cultural hegemony in the West is depicted as a struggle between men. Racialized, it is a struggle between black men and white men over who volition boss. InCharles the First (1982), we are told "Most Young Kings Get Thier [sic] Head Cut Off." Evoking a political and sexual metaphor that fuses the fearfulness of castration with the longing to affirm dominance, Basquiat makes information technology clear that blackness masculinity is irrevocably linked to white masculinity by virtue of a shared obsession with conquest, both sexual and political.
Historically, competition betwixt blackness and white males has been highlighted in the sports loonshit. Basquiat extends that field of competition into the realm of the cultural (the affiche of him and Andy Warhol duking it out in battle attire and gloves is not as innocent and playful equally information technology appears to be), and the territory is music, in detail jazz. Basquiat'south work calls attending to the innovative ability of black male jazz musicians, whom he reveres as creative father figures. Their presence and work embody for him a spirit of triumph. He sees their creativity exceeding that of their white counterparts. They enable him not only to give nascence to himself equally black genius but also to accept the wisdom of an inclusive standpoint.
Braithwaite affirms that Basquiat felt there was a cultural fusion and synthesis in the piece of work of black male person jazz musicians that mirrored his own aspirations. This connection is misunderstood and belittled by Gopnik in his essay "Madison Avenue Archaic" (notation the derision the title conveys) when he arrogantly voices his indignation of Basquiat's work being linked with that of not bad black jazz musicians. With the graciousness and loftier-handedness of an old-world paternalistic colonizer, Gopnik declares that he can accept that the curator of the Basquiat show attempted to place him in a high-art tradition: "No harm, possibly, is done past this, or by the endless comparisons in the catalogue of Basquiat to Goya, Picasso, and other big names." Simply, Gopnik fumes, "Whatis unforgivable is the endless comparisons in the catalogue essays of Basquiat to the masters of American jazz."10
Gopnik speaks about Basquiat'south ain attempts to play jazz and then gain to tell us what a lousy musician Basquiat "actually" was. He misses the point. Basquiat never assumed that his musical talent was the aforementioned as that of jazz greats. His attempt to link his work to blackness jazz musicians was not an exclamation of his ain musical or artistic power. Information technology was a proclamation of respect for the artistic genius of jazz. He was awed by all the advanced dimensions of the music that affirm fusion, mixing, improvisation. And he felt a stiff affinity with jazz artists in the shared will to push button against the boundaries of conventional (white) artistic tastes. Jubilant that sense of connection in his piece of work, Basquiat creates a black creative community that can include him. In reality, he did not live long plenty to search out such a community and merits a space of belonging. The only space he could claim was that of shared fame.
Fame, symbolized by the crown, is offered as the merely possible path to subjectivity for the black male person artist. To be un-famous is to be rendered invisible. Therefore, 1 is without pick. You lot either enter the phallocentric battlefield of representation and play the game or you are doomed to be exterior history. Basquiat wanted a place in history, and he played the game. In trying to make a place for himself—for blackness—in the established art globe, he assumed the role of explored/colonizer. Wanting to make an intervention with his life and work, he inverted the image of the white colonizer.
Basquiat journeyed into the heart of whiteness. White territory he named as a savage and vicious place. The journey is embarked upon with no certainty of return. Nor is at that place any fashion to know what y'all will find or who you will exist at journey's finish. Braithwaite declares: "The unfortunate matter was, once one did effigy out how to get into the art work, it was similar, Well, shit, where am I? Yous've pulled off this amazing feat, you've waltzed your fashion right into the thick of it, and probably faster than anybody in history, merely once you lot got in you were standing around wondering where you were. Then, Who's here with me?"eleven Recognizing art-earth fame to exist a male game, one that he could play, working the stereotypical darky prototype, playing the trickster, Basquiat understood that he was risking his life—that this journey was all about sacrifice.
What must be sacrificed in relation to oneself is that which has no place in whiteness. To be seen by the white art earth, to be known, Basquiat had to remake himself, to create from the perspective of the white imagination. He had to become both native and nonnative at the same time, to assume the blackness defined by the white imagination and the blackness that is not different whiteness. As anthropologist A. David Napier explains, "Strangers inside our midst are indeed the strangest of all—non because they are so alien, merely because they are so close to usa. Equally many legends of 'wildmen,' wandering Jews, and feral children remind us, strangers must be similar u.s.a. but unlike. They cannot be completely exotic, for, were they so, nosotros could non recognize them."12
For the white art globe to recognize Basquiat, he had to cede those parts of himself they would be interest in or fascinated by. Black only assimilated, Basquiat claimed the space of the exotic as though it were a new borderland, waiting just to be colonized. He made of that cultural infinite inside whiteness (The land of the exotic) a location where he would be re-membered in history even as he simultaneously created fine art that unsparingly interrogates such mutilation and self-distortion. As cultural critic Greg Tate asserts in "Nobody Loves a Genius Child," for Basquiat "making it…. meant going downwardly in history, ranked beside the Great White Fathers of Western painting in the optics of the major critics, museum curators, and art historians who ultimately determine such things."13
Willingly making the sacrifice in no way freed Basquiat from the pain of that sacrifice. The pain erupts in the private space of his work. It is amazing that so few critics discuss configurations of pain in Basquiat'south work, emphasizing instead its playfulness, its celebratory qualities. This reduces his painting to spectacle, making the piece of work a mere extension of the minstrel evidence that Basquiat frequently turned his life into. Private pain could exist explored in art considering he knew that a sure world "defenseless" looking would not see information technology, would not even wait to find information technology there. Francesco Pellizzi begins to speak about this pain in his essay, "Black and White All Over: Poetry and Desolation Painting," when he identifies Basquiat'due south offerings as "self-immolations, Sacrifices of the Self" which do not emerge "from desire, but from the desert of hope."14 Rituals of sacrifice stem from the inner working of spirit that inform the outer manifestation.
Basquiat's paintings comport witness, mirror this most spiritual understanding. They expose and speak the ache of sacrifice. A text of absenteeism and loss, they echo the sorrow of what has been given over and given upward. McEvilley's insight that "in its spiritual attribute, [Basquiat'southward] subject area thing is orphic—that is, it relates to the aboriginal myth of the soul equally a deity lost, wandering from its true home, and temporarily imprisoned in a degradingly express body," appropriately characterizes that ache.15 What limits the torso in Basquiat'due south work is the construction of maleness equally lack. To be male, defenseless up in the endless cycle of conquest, is to lose out in the realm of fulfillment.
Significantly, there are few references in Basquiat'southward work that connect him with a earth of blackness that is female person or to a world of influences and inspirations that are female. That Basquiat, for the well-nigh part, disavows a connection to the female in his piece of work is a profound and revealing gap that illuminates and expands our vision of him and his work. Simplistic pseudo-psychoanalytic readings of his life and work lead critics to suggest that Basquiat was a perpetual boy ever in search of the father. In his essay for the Whitney catalogue, critic Rene Ricard insists: "Andy represented to Jean the 'Good White Father' Jean had been searching for since his teenage years. Jean's mother has ever been a mystery to me. I never met her. She lives in a infirmary, emerging infrequently, to my knowledge. Andy did her portrait. She and Andy were the near important people in Jean'south life."16
Since Basquiat was attached to his natural father, Gerard, likewise as surrounded past other male mentor figures, it seems unlikely that the significant "lack" in his life was an absent father. Perhaps it was the presence of too many fathers—paternalistic cannibals who overshadowed and demanded repression of attention for and retentiveness of the female parent or whatever feminine/female principle—that led Basquiat to be seduced by the metaphoric ritual sacrifice of his fathers, a sort of phallic murder that led to a death of the soul.
The loss of his mother, a shadowy figure trapped in a world of madness that caused her to be shut away, symbolically abandoned and abandoning, may have been the psychic trauma that shaped Basquiat's work. Andy Warhol'due south portrait of Matilde Basquiat shows united states the grin image of a black Puerto Rican woman. It was this individual, playfully identified by her son as "bruja" (witch), who start saw in Jean-Michel the workings of creative genius and possibility. His begetter remembers, "His mother got him started and she pushed him. She was actually a very good creative person."17 Jean-Michel also gave testimony, "I'd say my mother gave me all the primary things. The art came from her."18 Yet this individual who gave him the lived texts of ancestral knowledge as well as that of the white W is an absent-minded figure in the personal scrapbook of Basquiat as successful artist. It is every bit if his inability to reconcile the force and power of femaleness with phallocentric led to the erasure of female person presence in his work.
Conflicted in his own sexuality, Basquiat is nevertheless represented in the Whitney catalogue and elsewhere as the stereotypical blackness stud randomly fucking white women. No importance is attached by critics to the sexual ambiguity that was so central to the Basquiat dive persona. Even while struggling to come to grips with himself as a subject rather than an object, he consistently relied on sometime patriarchal notions of male identity despite the fact that he critically associated maleness with imperialism, conquest, greed, endless appetite and, ultimately, decease.
To be in bear upon with senses and emotions across conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious. This is the oppositional location Basquiat longed for all the same could non attain. This is the feared location, associated not with meaningful resistance merely with madness, loss and invisibility. Basquiat'due south paintings evoke a sense of dread. Just the terror there is non for the world as it is, the decentered, disintegrating Westward, that familiar terrain of decease. No, the dread is for that unimagined infinite, that location where one can alive without the "same old shit."
Bars within a process of naming, of documenting violence against the black male self, Basquiat was non able to chart the journeying of escape. Napier asserts that "in naming, we relieve ourselves of the burden of actually considering the implication of how a different way of thinking can completely transform the conditions that brand for meaningful social relations."19 A master deconstructivist, Basquiat was non and then able to imagine a concrete earth of collective solidarities that could change in whatsoever fashion the status quo. McEvilley sees Basquiat'southward work as an "iconographic celebration of the idea of the terminate of the world, or of a certain paradigm of it."20 While the work conspicuously calls out this disintegration, the mood of celebration is never sustained. Although Basquiat graphically portrays the disintegration of the West, he mourns the impact of this plummet when it signals doom in black life. Carnivalesque, humorous, playful representations of expiry and decay just mask the tragic, cover it with a thin veneer of commemoration. Clinging to this veneer, folks deny that a reality exists beyond and beneath the mask.
Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs recently suggested that many black folks "have striven to maintain undercover enclosed spaces inside our histories, inside our lives, inside our psyches about these things which disrupt our sense of self."21 Despite an addiction to masking/masquerading in his personal life, Basquiat used painting to disintegrate the public image of himself that he created and helped sustain. Information technology is no wonder then that this work is subjected to an ongoing critique that questions its "actuality and value." Failing to accurately represent Basquiat to that white art world that remains confident it "knew" him, critics claim and colonize the work within a theoretical apparatus of appropriation that can diffuse its power by making it ever and just spectacle. That sense of "horrific" spectacle is advertised by the paintings chosen to don the covers of every publication on his work, including the Whitney catalogue.
In determination to The Fine art of the Maasai, Turle asserts: "When a continent has had its people enslaved, its resources removed, and its lands colonized, the perpetrators of these actions can never agree with contemporary criticism or they would have to condemn themselves."22 Refusal to face the necessity of potential self-condemnation makes those who are to the lowest degree moved by Basquiat'southward work insist on knowing it all-time. Understanding this, Braithwaite articulates hope that Basquiat's work will be critically reconsidered, that the exhibition at the Whitney will finally compel people to "wait at what he did."
But before this can happen, Braithwaite cautions, the established white art earth (and I would add the Eurocentric, multiethnic viewing public) must get-go "expect at themselves." With insight he insists: "They accept to try to erase, if possible, all the racism from their hearts and minds. And and then when they await at the paintings they can see the art."23 Calling for a process of decolonization that is certainly non happening (judging from the growing mass of negative responses to the show), Braithwaite articulates the but possible cultural shift in perspective that tin can lay the groundwork for a comprehensive disquisitional appreciation of Basquiat's piece of work.
The work past Basquiat that haunts my imagination, that lingers in my memory, isRiding with Death(1988). Evoking images of possession, of riding and being ridden in the Haitianvoudoun sense—equally a procedure of exorcism, 1 that makes revelation, renewal and transformation possible—I feel the subversion of the sense of dread provoked by so much of Basquiat'due south work. In its place is the possibility that the black-and-brownish figure riding the skeletal white bones is indeed "possessed." Napier invites the states to consider possession equally "truly an avant-garde activeness, in that those in trance are empowered to go to the periphery of what is and can be known, to explore the boundaries, and to return unharmed."24 No such spirit of possession guarded Jean-Michel Basquiat in his life. Napier reports that "people in trance do non —as operation artists in the west sometimes practice—exit wounded bodies in the human being world."25 Basquiat must go down in history as one of the wounded. Yet his fine art will stand as the testimony that declares with vengeance: nosotros are more our hurting. That is why I am most moved past the one Basquiat painting that juxtaposes the paradigm of ritual sacrifice with that of ritual recovery and render.
Endnotes
1. Adam Gopnik, "Madison Avenue Primitive," The New Yorker, Nov. 9, 1992, pp. 137-39.
2. Robert Storr, "Two Hundred Beats per Minute," in John Cheim, ed., Basquiat Drawings, New York, Robert Miller, 1990, n.p.
3. Fred Braithwaite, "Jean-Michel Basquiat," Interview, Oct. 1992, p. 119.
iv. Thomas McEvilley, "Royal Slumming: Jean-Michel Basquiat Hither Beneath," Artforum, Nov. 1992, p.95."
five. Robert Edward, Aboriginal Bark Painting, Adelaide, Rigby Limited, 1969, n.p.
6. Gillies Turle, The Fine art of Maasai, New York, knopf, 1992.
7. Robert Farris Thompson, "Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Fine art of Jean-Michel Basquiat," in Richard Marshall, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.
viii. Thomas McEvilley, "Royal Slumming," p. 96.
9. Ibid.
10. Gopnik, "Madison Avenue Archaic," p.139 .
11. Braithwaite, "Jean-Michel Basquiat," p. 123.
12. A. David Napier, "Culture as Cocky: The Stranger Within," in Foreign Bodies: Operation, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology, Berkeley, Academy of California Press, 1992, p. 147.
thirteen. Greg Tate, "Nobody Loves a Genius Child," Village Voice, Nov., 14, 1989, p. 33.
14. Francesco Pellizzi, "Black and White All Over: Poetry and Desolation Painting," Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, 1989.
xv. McEvilley, "Royal Slumming," p. 96.
xvi. Rene Ricard, "Earth Crown ©: Bodhisattva with Clenched Mudra," in Marshall, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, p. 49.
17. Gerard Basquiat, quoted in Marshall, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, p. 233
18. Jean-Michel Basquiat, quoted in ibid.
xix. Napier,Foreign Bodies, p. 51.
twenty. McEvilley, "Royal Slumming," p. 97.
21. Kalamu ya Salaam, "Interview with Marlon Riggs," Black Film Review 7, no. 3 (Fall 1992), p. 8
22. Turle, The Art of the Maasai, north.p.
23. Braithwaite, "Jean-Michel Basquiat," p. 140.
24. Napier, Foreign Bodies, p. 69.
25. Ibid.
Source: https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/from-the-archives-altars-of-sacrifice-re-membering-basquiat-63242/
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