Caribbean Beat — November/December 2017 (#148)

© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar, New York, courtesy the barbican art gallery
Hollywood Africans (1983, acrylic and oil stick on canvas), by Jean-Michel Basquiat
from Basquiat’s notebooks installed in an intimate space. (Tragically,
the cheap notebooks were disbound to allow their display
in conventional frames, as though the pages were individual
works — an act of archival vandalism.) Here, Basquiat’s graphomania,
dry humour, and sharp ear for the subtleties of speech are
at their most stark, and it’s obvious he could also have had a very
different career as an avant-garde poet.
Indeed, going back to the SAMO days, text was always a
dominant element in Basquiat’s work, rendered in a distinctive
hand and deployed for its visual qualities as much as its
semantic ones. His phrases, tags, and lists collect a vocabulary
obsessed with history and power relations, race stereotypes,
money and spirituality, the art world’s cynical commercialism,
and the culture of celebrity which Basquiat both enjoyed and,
paradoxically, mocked. None of these phenomena has receded
in the three decades since Basquiat’s early death.
Created in a very particular time and place — a gritty, risky
New York long lost to rampant gentrification — Basquiat’s work
retains a freshness and urgency that feels utterly contemporary,
in an age of renewed ethnic tensions and reality-show politicians.
He was a slyly knowing rebel who’s become, in his afterlife, an
unlikely kind of exemplar: in the age of Brexit and border walls,
it’s bracing to remember that the most iconic American artist of
recent decades was the son of a Caribbean immigrant.
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