Basquiat: Was he a genius or charlatan?

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Sanur

At the opening of an exhibition on Jean Michel Basquiat at Darga Gallery in Sanur, Bali, gallery owner Jais HadianaDargawidjaja revealed that she wanted to build a cultural bridge between Indonesia and the world.

That she chose Basquiat this time may have been triggered by the fact that so many Indonesian contemporary paintings have been inspired by the Haitian-Puerto Rican painter who came to personify the American art scene of the '80s.

A first glance at his paintings on display at the gallery induces the notion of looking at a number of Yogya artists: skeletal figures and mask-like faces, cartoonish images and imagery derived from the street and the environment.

Yet, while Basquiat may have shared his youth and drug use with some of today's young Indonesian painters, his intellectual background and depth of experience was surely his alone.

An avid reader from early childhood, he also took an early interest in art, which his mother encouraged. She took him to museums and at the age of six, he already had a card identifying him as a "junior member" of The Brooklyn Museum.

Aware that great artists like Michelangelo had studied anatomy, she gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to read when he was recovering from an operation. While helping him to heal, it also led him to immerse his consciousness in drawings and the names of parts of the human body.

Multilingual, Basquiat had the ability to deal with both history and facts in several languages. He was as fluent in Spanish as he was in English.

His ability to blend and confront what was traditional and best in his cultural experience, like jazz, blues and opera, with what was exciting in terms of the popular technologies seething all around him in New York, transformed the imagination of 20th century American art, states art critic Robert Farrais Thomson in his essay on Basquiat's art.

"What identifies Jean-Michel Basquiat as a major artist is courage and full powers of self-transformation. That courage, meaning not being afraid to fail, transforms paralyzingly self- conscious 'predicaments of culture' into confident 'ecstasies of cultures recombined."

Basquiat's works are marked by texts and used graphic symbols including the crown, notary seal, the letter 'S', copyright symbol, dollar sign and symbols taken from the Symbol Sourcebook by Henry Dreyfuss.

The icon of a crown is a recurrent symbol as can be seen in various works in the Darga exhibition. Black emaciated figures or skulls, bared teeth and the crossing-out of letters or words, as well as his copyright sign, also belong to his marked features.

But behind the graphic and textual signs masquerading as graffiti are thoughtful conceptual insights, according to art critic Cavan Wee.

The texts in his paintings came to be known not as added 'decoration' or words that should explain what he intended to say, but rather as the multilingual power of his background, and an imaginative alliance of knowledge and play, reflecting the books he read and the worlds he lived in middle-class Haitian Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Museum, the graffitero streets, the music of his own noise band and the New York Soho art scene.

He was careful to place his street texts not just anywhere, but predominantly along the strategic byways of Soho and the East Village, sometimes even at art openings, where they were bound to be seen by influential people. Apart from social texts, they also constituted advertisements for himself.

Born in 1960 in New York, a crisscross of island-mediated African influences at the time, Basquiat, at age 17, along with friend Al Diaz, began spray-painting cryptic aphorisms on subway trains and around lower Manhattan and signing them with the name SAMOc (Same Old Shit): "SAMOc as an end to mind-wash religion, nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy," "SAMOc saves idiots," "Plush safe he think; SAMOc."

For two years Basquiat lived on the streets, playing music and taking drugs. When he was 21, he became famous for his colorful, graffiti-style paintings. His first exhibition in 1980 was named the Times Square Show; it took place in an abandoned warehouse displaying work from artists of the punk and graffiti underground scene of New York. In 1981, Basquiat exhibited alongside artists such as Keith Haring and Andy Warhol.

Within a short space of time Basquiat became well-known in the world of art and just two years after his first exhibition he was noted as one of the best-selling artists of North America and Europe. But it was short-lived. In 1988 he was found dead on the floor of his studio from a drug overdose.

It was rumored that he was spending in excess of US$2,000 dollars per week on drugs.

Representing the dispossessed and the marginal, he lived in the paradox of American culture and modern life. His social demands took the shape of graffiti, which lost its political edge while assimilating with mainstream art.

Art critic Jean Couteau finds that Basquiat is a great artist, for the fact that he was the first "non-mainstream" American to have been embraced by mainstream visual art with such perfection.

But a retrospective of 1992 written in Art of the 20th Century had people of that time ask, "Genius or hoax?" Hailed as a genius, he was also accused of being the exotic mascot of various gallery owners, a totally commercial creation who was picked off the streets, given a paintbrush and a lot of cocaine and then told that he was an artist. The New York Times, Newsweek the New York Observer -- all chose their camp.

The truth is, his art left no one indifferent.

Jean-Michel Basquiat Through Feb. 24 Darga Gallery Komplek Sanur Raya No. 20-21 Jl. Bypass Ngurah Rai, Bali

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