Jonathan Fineberg – Additive Aesthetics

Additive Aesthetics
by Jonathan Fineberg
At the beginning of The Anxiety of
Influence, Harold Bloom’s classic theory
of poetry, he states that “strong poets”
make poetic history “by misreading one
another, so as to clear imaginative space
for themselves.” Whereas “weaker talents
idealize,” first rate poets appropriate from
their predecessors and then live with “the
immense anxieties of indebtedness.” 1
Standing in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s
studio, in front of his 1983 painting Notary
[fig.1], an interviewer asked him: “Where do
the words come from?”
Basquiat: “Real life, books, television...”
“You just skim ‘em and start including...”
“No, man. When I’m working I hear them.
You know? I just throw them down.”
“This looks like a skull?”
“...It’s a casco,”
“A what?”
“A casco,”
“and these lines are, again, just lines?”
“That’s an astronomical diagram,
that’s a Puerto Rican word for helmet, that’s
a Roman belt buckle, that’s the evil eye,
the mal occhio...,” the artist pointed out one
image after another and then explained,
“You’re talkin to Marcel Duchamp and
you ask him, or even Rauschenberg, he
couldn’t tell you why something was next
to something else except that it was just
there...” 2
The imagery in Basquiat’s work
reveals his voracious appetite for
assimilating what he saw. He was also
an avid reader and recorded that on his
Fig. 3
Michael Hurson
Edward and Otto Pfaff, 1974-75
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Fig. 1
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Notary, 1983
paintings too. But what he picked up
on could be anything – sometimes the
most unlikely images or words. He also
made a canny appraisal of the works
of successful artists – often work that
seemed entirely different from his. He
didn’t really “misread” them, rather he
appropriated and redefined them to
fit his free train of thought and exploit
devices for his own ends in an additive
and more complex aesthetic. Basquiat’s
Untitled (Head with Green Eyes) [fig.2]
replicates the delicate line, child-like
simplicity, and anecdotal lightness of
Edward and Otto Pfaff [fig.3], a painting
by Michael Hurson, which Basquiat
saw in the 1978 New Imagist Painting
show at the Whitney Museum in New
York. By the time that influence
shows up in a major Basquiat painting
like Notary, he has denatured it with
his own powerful expressionism.
Basquiat layers the simple images
until they become intense, conflicted,
and disturbing.
Basquiat was a sophisticated
modern artist whom the art world treated
as an exotic “primitive” because he was
black. The same was true of Wifredo
Lam who preceded Basquiat by two
generations. Both identified as Black and
sought subjects that reconnected them
to their ancestry in the Black Atlantic.
Lam’s trademark iconography of the
1940s drew on the Santeriá religion and
practices of this African lineage, which he
had learned about in his childhood from
his godmother in turn-of-the-century
Cuba. Basquiat grew up in a middle class
household in Brooklyn and read to enrich
his understanding of his Afro-Carribbean
heritage. In particular, Basquiat studied
Flash of the Spirit, a book by Robert Farris
Thompson, a white Yale professor from
West Texas whose profound grasp of the
constantly mutating practices from Africa
in the African Diaspora produced some of
the most deeply researched, imaginative,
and influential scholarship ever written on
this art.
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Wifredo Lam
Sans titre, 1967
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Fig. 2
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled (Head with Green Eyes), 1981
Lam was raised in the small city of
Sagua la Grande, on the north coast of
Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth
century. He went to Spain for fifteen years
for his artistic education, fought for the
Republican cause on the front lines in the
Battle of Madrid, and fled to Paris in 1938
at the age of thirty-six. There he met
Picasso, who introduced him into Surrealist
circles, and then in 1941 Varian Fry’s
Emergency Rescue Committee spirited
him out of Nazi occupied France, through
Marseilles, along with André Breton and
other endangered artists and writers.
Lam returned to Cuba where he
abandoned more conventional styles of
European modernism for a personal style
of Afro-Cuban imagery, most famously his
femme cheval (seen, for example, on the
left edge of his 1942-3 painting The Jungle
[fig.4]) representing a woman fused with
the caballo [horse] of the orisha [the divine
spirit in the Afro-Carribbean Voodun
religion] who rides the possessed devotee.
The ritual was famously documented by
Maya Deren in her film Divine Horsemen:
The Living Gods of Haiti. Yet this painting,
The Jungle, also relies on a spatial structure
derived from Picasso’s Cubism and
metamorphic images influenced by French
surrealism. “I’m fifty-per-cent Cartesian,
and fifty-per-cent savage,” 3 Lam told his
early biographer Max-Pol Fouchet. He was
simultaneously an insider and an exotic
outsider to the sophisticated Paris and
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New York art scenes, just as Basquiat
was to the art world in New York.
In her monograph on Lam, Lowery Stokes
Sims points to “the inexorable inversion
of European colonization that occurred
as global trends in the post-World War
II era were marked by migrations of
populations from former colonies to
the centers of world economic, social,
and political power.” 4 While on the one
hand Lam exhibited at the established
Klaus Perls and Pierre Matisse galleries
in New York in the 1940s, alongside his
mainstream European and American
contemporaries, he also said he wanted
to capture “the Negro spirit, the beauty
of the plastic art of the blacks,” 5 like
“a Trojan horse that would spew forth
hallucinating figures with the power to
surprise, to disturb the dreams of the
exploiters.” 6
Wifredo Lam’s father was Chinese,
endowing this Afro-Cuban, half Chinese
artist with a complicated identity, forged
in destabilized meanings. He spent the
formative years of his career in Spain
and France and then worked in Cuba
and Haiti. He showed with the Abstract
Expressionists in New York and with
the French Surrealists in New York
and Europe, and was embraced by the
Cobra artists of Northern Europe at mid
century. Both Lam and Basquiat had
roots in the Black Atlantic and embodied
the hybridity of a new world identity.
But as Jordana Saggese pointed out,
in her book Reading Basquiat, one of the
important discoveries Basquiat made in
the writings of Robert Farris Thompson
concerned the mutability of culture in
the African diaspora: “Above all else,
Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit focuses on
the production, rather than the strict
preservation of African culture in the
Americas.” 7
In a painting like Lam’s late Untitled, done in
the 1960s [p. 22-23], the spectral presences
of the orishas persevere in the triangular
headed figure in the lower right with its
glowing eyes and upturned, limb-like
blades, but also in the simple configuration
of the elongated rhomboid at the base of
the truncated arm that lies horizontally
across the canvas. Citing Robert Farris
Thompson, Sims points to these diamond
shaped, criss crossed, and triangular forms
as representing the “four-point boundaries
of the soul’s orbit” which “guard the point
of entry/exit between realms of existence.” 8
At the same time, the attenuated arm
seems to harken back to the dark Spanish
Baroque crucifixions and martyrdoms of
Lam’s formative years in Spain.
Lam lived a long life, dying in Paris
at the age of eighty. Jean-Michel Basquiat
lived a sped-up life in New York. Raised in
Brooklyn, he exploded onto the New York
art scene in 1980 like a firework that rains
down brilliant light and then suddenly goes
dark; he died of a drug overdose in 1988
at the age of twenty-seven. The dynamic
complexity, the multivalency of images, and
the poetic layering of disparate trajectories
of thought and identity in Basquiat’s work
are among its meanings.
By 1980, Baquiat had cultivated
his innate gift for drawing by looking at
artists like Hurson for semantic distance
and simplified figuration, on the one hand,
and the new painterly expressionists
like Julian Schnabel, on the other. He
updated his romance with Abstract
Expressionism and Rauschenberg’s
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Fig. 4
Wifredo Lam
The Jungle, 1942-3
Collection Museum of Modern Art, NY
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evolutionary appropriation of found
objects and then found images with
Warhol’s redefinition of iconography
in art after 1960. Warhol’s redefinition
of media images themselves – rather
than the things in the world to which
they seemed to refer – into the real
subject of his paintings, led Basquiat
to take this idea of the reproduction
as subject to another level by literally
using the Xerox machine to reproduce
his own gestural marks. As Robert
Farris Thompson explained: “He was
fascinated with Xerox as a process and
a medium and so there’s Xeroxes of
Xeroxes, and pasting and collaging....It’s
as if he were saying, ‘O.K. I’m aware of
what happens when art is reproduced.
But I will reproduce the reproduction,
and when I have finished reproducing
the reproduction, I will reproduce the
reproduction of the reproduction of the
reproduction.’” 9
In Notary, Basquiat used Pollock’s
principle of “all-over” composition,
dispersing the pulsing energy of images,
words, and gesture so evenly across the
large, lateral triptych that he virtually
eliminates the issue of composition
altogether, as in a monumental poured
painting by Pollock. But unlike a
Pollock in which the subject matter is
the map of the artist’s existential act of
self discovery embodied in free gesture,
the multilayered content of the Basquiat
embraces the virtuoso autographic
brushstroke, but also a rich field of
profusely allusive images, and a play
of poetic texts. Some of the phrases
are simply lifted from the familiar, like
the line on all United States banknotes:
“this note is legal tender for all debts,
public and private.” Other words are
Wifredo Lam in his Albissola studio, 1963
30

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epeated – “46. Leeches, 47. Leeches” –
as if the replicated sound releases a new,
dislocated meaning, like the media images
in a painting by Warhol of Mourning Jackie
[Kennedy] or the Electric Chair. “It’s as if
he were dripping letters,” Robert Farris
Thompson continues. “If Pollock had
played with typography, if Pollock had
been scared by a linotype, he would have
come back as Jean-Michel.”
Endnotes
1. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 5.
2. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jean-Michel Basquiat: An Interview (1983), by Marc Miller
(New York: Inner-Tube Video, 1989) VHS. 34 mins. See also John Carlin, Jonathan
Fineberg, and Hart Perry, Imagining America: Icons of Twentieth Century American Art,
a two hour documentary film (NY: Muse Film & Television,
SCETV, & PBS, 2005).
3. Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifred Lam, (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, S.A., 1976), 45; cited in
Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 35.
4. Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 1.
5. Fouchet, op. cit.,188-9; cited in Sims, op. cit., 62.
6. Fouchet, op. cit.,187-8; cited in Sims, op. cit., 222.
7. Jordana Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014), 43-44. Basquiat assiduously read Robert Farris
Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (N.Y.: Random House, 1983) and then began to meet with him.
8. Sims, op. cit., 58-9; See the discussion of these motifs in Robert Farris Thompson, Face of
the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (New York: Museum of African
Art and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1993), 48-55.
9. Robert Farris Thompson interviewed by Jonathan Fineberg in: John Carlin, Jonathan
Fineberg, and Hart Perry, Imagining America: Icons of Twentieth Century American Art,
a two hour documentary film (NY: Muse Film & Television, SCETV, & PBS, 2005).
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Wifredo Lam
Untitled, 1972
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Publication © Galerie Gmurzynska 2015
For the works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wifredo Lam:
© 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich
Documentary Images of Wifredo Lam SDO Wifredo Lam
Editors:
Krystyna Gmurzynska
Mathias Rastorfer
Mitchell Anderson
Coordination:
Jeannette Weiss, Daniel Horn
Support:
Alessandra Consonni
Cover design:
Louisa Gagliardi
Design by OTRO
James Orlando
Brady Gunnell
Texts:
Jonathan Fineberg
Anthony Haden-Guest
Kobena Mercer
Annina Nosei
PRINTED BY
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ISBN
3-905792-28-1
978-3-905792-28-7