Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only black American painter to have made a substantial mark on the history of art. He is amongst the most influential artists of an international movement started around 1980 which was marked by the post-modern return to figurative painting. He died at age 27. Basquiat is art's answer to Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker. Although his work might look unsophisticated at first, it is evidence of a powerful poetical and visual gift. Basquiat was getting an international echo with his work before most of the artists his age had time to finish art school. Luckily, Basquiat has left us a trenchant summary of his early life in Untitled (Biography), 1983. JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT BORN DEC. 22/1960/BROOKLYN/NY MOTHER: PUERTO RICAN (FIRST GENERATION) FATHER: PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI (DIVORCED) - [NAME OF TOWNI ST. ANNS ? P.S. 1O198 P.S.45 (SOME CATHOLIC SCHOOL DURING TEAR + 1/2 IN PUERTO RICO -) I.S.293 CITY AS SCHOOL 11th GRADE DROPOUT PUT A BOX OF SHAVING CREAM IN PRINCIPAL'S FACE AT GRADUATION NO POINT IN GOING BACK FIRST AMBITION: FIREMAN FIRST ARTISTIC AMBITION: CARTOONIST EARLY THEMES WERE: 1. THE SEAVIEW FROM VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA 2. ALFRED E. NEUMAN 3. ALFRED HICTHCOCK (HIS FACE OVER + OVER) 4. NIXON 5. CARS (MOSTLY DRAGSTERS) 1 Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire 6. WARS 7. WEAPONS 8. MADE DRAWINGS OF OOPICK+FRITZ+WAIR+YABOO WITH MARC PROZZO A. SENT DRAWING OF A GUN TO J.EDGAR HOOVER IN THIRD GRADE (NO REPLY) TAUGHT SECOND GRADERS WHEN I WAS IN THE FOURTH GRADE (CARS MADE OF PAPER CLIPS MASKING TAPE + FASTENERS) SCHOOLING: SOME ACADEMIC LIFE DRAWINGS IN NINTH GRADE (WAS THE ONLY CHILD THAT FAILED) EARLY MUSIC INFLUENCES: WEST SIDE STORY THE "WATUSI" ROUND `BOUT MIDNIGHT WALKING HAPRY BLACK ORPHEUS As far as it is possible to verify, the information in this Biography is correct. Basquiat shows his great sense of humour with the idea of a sea view from the bottom of the sea. Some of his early poems are equally witty and even have punch lines. PUBLIC FIGURE HIM FIGUREHEAD THE PENCILCLUB AMASSED A GREAT FORTUNE TO SHOOT A MAN THRU A CANON HE WAVED BACK CAN YOU SHOW THE NUMBER OF SHARES OF STOCK OR IS IT 200 SHARES OF STOCK NO PAR VALUE. HAVE YOU ANY BOOKS OR RECORDS HERE TO LOOK AT THAT WOULD REFRESH YOUR RECOLLECTION - DO YOU OWN OR HOLD STOCK IN ANY BUSINESS, CORPORATION, COMPANY OR INDIVIDUAL CONCERN - 2 Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire JUST ANSWER YES OR NO I WILL RAISE MY VOICE I WILL STAND UP AND LOOK YOU IN THE EYE AND I WILL DO THE SAME YOU CAN TELL ME GO TO HELL - AND I WELL TELL YOU THIS EXAMINATION IS OVER - Basquiat's comment in the Biography that he was the only child to fail an academic drawing class and his letter to J. Edgar Hoover (no reply) highlight his need to see his failures as funny inversions of reality. The humour insulates him from any sting they might contain. There is also an obvious craving for attention or recognition, sometimes positive, but sometimes negative, for example when he uses the slapstick of putting shaving foam on the principle's head on graduation day. At an alternative high school in Brooklyn Basquiat met Al Diaz. The two created SAMO, a catchy name for an umbrella identity under which they pursued various collaborative artistic projects together. Alongside the SAMO project Basquiat also played in a band and made disposable art: T-shirts and postcards. Although they are not without artistic merit and have a certain dada charm, Basquiat probably knew that he had not yet translated his talents into a coherent perspective. At night he would go to a certain number of hip downtown night clubs. By intuition or through what people were telling him in these clubs, where he was becoming a noticeable feature, he worked out who, what and where was important in terms of the visual arts. Basquiat launched his offensive on the contemporary art establishment by spray painting poems or sentences prominently on walls close to venues where things were happening. This was the time of his most natural position, and one in which he would enjoy great leverage: that of an attacking outsider. The sprayed sentences, signed SAMO, have Basquiat's final formulation and his signature spray paint writing, which is capitalised, very regular and omits the vertical line in the E's. They are simple, cool, detached and sophisticated. Some of these phrases or poems have survived on paper. One of his phrases reads: PAY FOR SOUP/BUILD A FORT/SET THAT ON FIRE 3 Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire This is a game plan. First, get in position. Then create an artistic vision and style you can live in, then set it on fire, thereby destroying it, or maybe yourself. Pay for soup could be the years ‘78-'80, build a fort ‘81-'86, and set that on fire `87-'88. The Biography mentions that Basquiat's earliest ambition was to become a fireman. Maybe not to put out fires, but, like in Fahrenheit 451, to start them. why fire? Because... FIRE WILL ATTRACT MORE ATTENTION THAN ANY OTHER CRY FOR HELP Basquiat enjoyed attacking the art world from the outside. As success and acceptance came, however, it would recast him in an inside role, and critics of his work often said that the raw street energy would be sapped by a more comfortable life style made possible by money and fame. For Basquiat to remain an outsider and avoid becoming comfortable or satisfied transgressions of artistic and behavioural norms would have to proceed at the same rate as the recognition of his work would draw him into the inside. This was possible for a time, as the Fun Gallery show in 1982 demonstrated. A group of paintings done around 1985 featuring unusual supports and particularly raw imagery and execution, to which Link Parabole, 1985 (p.104) belongs, is another example. However, with his huge talents it would only be a matter of time, and in the eighties probably a short time, before the wave of recognition caught him from behind and drowned him in the mainstream. Another problem with outside mess, highlighted by Rimbaud, is that outsiders are not truly outside the system. It is simply a role that society allows some artists to play. They are more turning cogs in the machine. This is not only a theoretical insight, but also a historical one. The avant-garde has, since its inception, been continually sucked up into mainstream consciousness as time passes. Artaud thought he had found a defence to this in the art of the insane and of those too young to be within the system, but his ideas were picked up in the recognition of what Dubuffet has termed art brut. It therefore seems that there is an intellectual connection between Basquiat and art brut, and also, to some extent, an aesthetic and stylistic one. 4 Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire Some of Basquiat's early poems have an aesthetic sensibility. They are content wrought effortlessly into form. A steady undercurrent of socio- artistic criticism pervades them, which can also be seen in Basquiat's art. THE GREAT UNWASHED GOTHIC PAINTING EYES IN ANGRY TO BE ANSWERED RAPTURE RECORDED PROOF EFFORTLESS SLAPPING SENSE IN TERMS OF TICKING SUITCASES DENIES EVER SEEING STERILE DIVIDER MOST PRESSING MOSS RETREAT - THE WHOLE LIVERY LINE BOW LIRE THIS WITH THE BIGMONEY ALL STUFFED INTO THESE FEET BLEACHED ASSASIN CURATES MILAGE OVER A DISTANCE EAVESDROPPING MORE OFTEN DISCRIMINATING THE LOW BROW MIGHT BE THE DOCTOR'S BROTHER AND THIS OTHER MAN LITTLE NAZI TEA SETS WITH EAGLES ON THEM BRONZE THIS HIGH BRICE INLAY Gothic painting comes to mind when Basquiat uses gold paint and paints halos and crowns over figures, and more substantially when he tries to imbue the figures in his work with magical qualities in an art that will work if the viewer can transcend the magic's physical representation. Livery line, big money, bleached assassin curates, are words with a hard racial edge. Rather than trying to overcome what he might have considered a handicap Basquiat turned being black to his advantage. Despite a keen sense of unfairness about a perceptible racist undercurrent in American society as a whole, he was not an activist or militant. The use of some imagery, specifically black or African, leaves no trace that would allow an uninformed viewer to suppose the painter was black. Being so was simply an important part of his daily life. Police harassment of and brutality against blacks was something which 5 Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire touched him to the core because it could always have been him. It was specifically what being black meant to him as an unalterable part of who and what he was, as part of his identity, that the subject most interested him.