Boom For Real, or, Darkness Blazed My Name by James Romberger “Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger.” Aimé Césaire Jean-Michel Basquiat engaged a New York art universe that was, at that time, devoid of black stars. Basquiat used his grasp of color, marks, languages and history as weapons in a war of information, as tools of articulation to place himself within the pantheon of Western Art and in the wider Western literary canon, as well as in the canon of Caribbean Diaspora writers. In his work Basquiat enumerates the achievements of the white hegemony as crimes. He lists the omissions and contextualizes the whole with the Diasporan experience. He writes in Latin, English, French and Spanish, to elucidate and challenge supremacy, to assert his own identity as Diaspora, or to obscure his conversation from white gaze. He depicts himself as a commodity but claims himself, denies presumption of ownership by others and enters the capitalist economy on his own terms. He valorizes himself and falls apart before our eyes. Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, Basquiat became multilingual when very young. His Puerto Rican mother, Matilde Andradas, imbued him with an appreciation for art. His Hiatian father Gerard was an accountant, providing for a middle class childhood. While recovering from a car accident as a child, Basquiat was given the copiously illustrated Gray’s Anatomy by his mother, a textbook that would inform his later work greatly. His parents divorced and his mother was institutionalized. As a teenager, he read vociferously, eventually absorbing radical literature. Unfortunately, he embraced a romanticized view of heroin through his reading of William Burroughs, who yet gave him a semblance of beat sensibility with the use of cut-ups and fractured sentences. Burroughs, it might seem, also influenced the way he freely connected ideas. He became familiar with writers of Diasporan Literature like Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, and shared their omnipresent sense of displacement. Nonwithstanding the many obstacles presented to an artist of color in the hermetically sealed, overwhelmingly white high-end art world of the early 1980s, Basquiat felt destined for greatness and actively sought the attention of rich and famous artists like Andy Warhol. In the simmering world of the punk/grafitti/hip hop/reggae scenes in New York's East Village, Basquiat was a gnomic vagabond Xerox artist, cruising nightclubs and sleeping on the couches of various friends. He and his friend Al Diaz created a graffiti entity called SAMO and wrote poetic sentences on the streets of Soho with an obliquely critical tone directed at the wealthy people who lived and shopped there. When the powers of New York’s Fine Art world such as Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler scanned the scene at Club 57 and the Times Square Show, Basquiat's paintings stood out as adapted beautifully to the gallery format. His life accelerated as he was abruptly thrust into elite privileged spheres. Previously, he had no room to work on a large scale and in any consistent fashion, but with money he thereafter worked expansively and at a feverish pace. Now, he did not want for anything material, but he was caught in a similarly peripatetic flux as before. He moved from studio to studio, gallery to gallery, country to country, always living in the moment. His work is his conversation with here and now, as he reminds of this and that from then, riffing on the painted and written marks and color and the intertextual and self-referential meanings of the whole and of it as an object, human marks on a support. Belying the portrayal of him in Julian Schnabel’s film biography as a mumbling, bumbling junkie throughout his career, the volume of work Basquiat produced in his short life is that of a dedicated painter with little time for anything else but work. His mature work emerged in the early 1980s as his contemporaries in Grafitti achieved their moment of American Art world acceptance, but he did not share that movement's goals and form even when he was spraypainting on the street. Nor does his work have common ground with the decorative confections of his friends Keith Haring and Kenny Sharf, despite the fact that he is still most often placed in their context by Art pundits. Instead, his paintings relate to the aggressive subversions practised by his more calculatedly iconoclastic peers in the East Village scene such as David Wojnarowicz and David Hammons. Basquiat was subject to inversion of identification. As his contemporary Wojnarowicz’s multimedia works expose and excoriate a culture that refused to accept or acknowledge his homosexuality, Basquiat’s paintings layer and refashion the racist cultural signifiers imposed on him that did not reflect his image. Like Wojnarowicz, he used his art to highlight the omissions and disparities of the histories of Art and Civilisation. I can still recall how his painting resonated from the wall in a closely hung group show at CHARAS in the early eighties. It rivaled the intensity of the Alice Neel portrait across from it. Basquiat’s and my mutual friend, the painter Stephen Lack, told me recently that when on a trip to Haiti he had suddenly recognised Basquiat’s palette, adding, “Jean-Michel gave his paintings great import." The paintings had and have singular appeal in terms of their brilliant coloring alone and their marks always feel fresh, but there is much more going on in the work than that. According to bell hooks, to reach his goals Basquiat "assumed the role of explorer/ colonizer," he "journeyed into the heart of whiteness. White territory he named as a savage and brutal place." Once ensconced in the pantheon, Basquiat pursued the purposes of information dissemination. His messages were radical but effectively composed within specific referents to pass through the filtering apparatus of white art appreciation, as aesthetic smart bombs. As his stature grew in the highest nexus of art and fashion, the text began to predominate, the messages became more directed. The works had a radical impetus of exposing truths to the powerful, of Basquiat using his knowledge of art and history and his voice and position as battering rams to break down the wall of lies. The textual aspects of Basquiat’s works incorporate a sophisticated multilingual approach. His use of Spanish relates in poetical terms to the linguistic claims of the Nuyorican movement, in that he deliberately use languages and the purposeful obscuring of written text to address, or privatize his words from, specific aspects of his audience. This paradoxical offering and withholding of understanding is seen in the painting “Despues De Un Puno,” where the text prominent in the piece is intended to block comprehension, as in comments he was known to make in Spanish to acquaintances in the presence of presumably ignorant patrons. Rammellzee, an accomplished artist and theorist of weaponized lettering forms whose record Basquiat produced, commented that his friend’s writing was “unreadable…(he) crosses out words, doesn’t spell them right, doesn’t even write the damn thing right.” Basquiat’s work is not about the affirmation of the name and the evolution of illuminated lettering forms that characterize “graffiti” or aerosol art, nor are they about the public space issues that criminalize that movement. They rather articulate a position in regards to art and history, elucidated in a textual form where what is obscured or erased is given the same weight as what is visibly spelled out. Conversely, Basquiat does not close off the option of expansion of language, typically his text operates in the opposite direction too, in order to self-proclaim his multilingual fluency and expand the linguistic possibility of his reach. On the interchange of language, the fluid switching between Spanish and English within a sentence seen in bilingual Puerto Ricans, Juan Flores writes, “rather than compensating for monolingual deficiency, code switching often signals an expansion of communicative and expressive potential” (Flores 61). Basquiat is able to draw from a wider reservoir of signifiers with the languages at his command. His use of Latin operates differently; it functions as a valorization, a demonstration of mastery on the enemy’s terms. He knows the history of the conqueror and the actualities of his current position within it, how it relates to his body. His quoting of corporate symbology and recurring impositions of trademark and copyright symbols speak to issues of ownership, of his ancestors, of the land, of himself, his body and the products of his brain and hand. His methodology is a form of layering of textual and visual signifiers that resembles the approach of other artists of his generation such as Wojnarowicz and Christof Kohlhofer whose images consist of a profuse visual and textual “namedropping” invested with a multitude of sub-signifiers of shared experience. Basquiat communicated with the art world with their referents, their signifiers. In his paintings Basquiat links the significance of words or phrases set in proximity to each other in their context within the pictorial field. This allows associations to be followed by the viewer/ reader in a type of narrative of assimilated ideas Basquiat contexualizes the Diaspora experience with the Western canon as Césaire did with Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” while he also bridges the gap between visual and textual signification. A relatively spare piece to examine in this mode is "Per Capita." Large lettering in Latin dominates the background field or storefront space. Basquiat uses Latin like other poets to point to his scholarship and to place himself amongst the great classical poets, but perhaps also like Elisabeth Barrett Browning, who as a marginalized female poet uses a Latin header on a poem to state her equality to the male Victorian poets. Basquiat claims equality across racial lines. He affirms that he knows the canon and claims a stand on even ground. Further, the work is surmounted on the left by the inscription “e pluribus,” or "out of many" (sans unum or "one") as on coins and currency and on the right by “per capita” or "per head." In this way he points to the way white classicism hides the ugly truth of people counted like numbers, in a nation built with slavery. Down the left side are listed the names of states and figures in dollars. On closer examination, the highest amounts are tallied by predominantly white states, Connecticut and Alaska and the lowest are allocated to states with large African American populations such as Alabama. One is reminded of his affinity as a poet to Aimé Césaire, with his lists and his statement, “Your name voice of order? To me the whip’s corolla” (Césaire 17). This listing might reflect a type of ordering that allays the anxiety of those who are displaced. On a pictorial level, it depicts a boxer with a halo holding the torch of liberty. The shrunken, attenuated black figure with blank eyes wears oversized shorts with the logo “Everlast” emblazoned on it conspicuously. It is typical of the ambiguity and self-ironizing of Basquiat’s work. “Everlast” places the black male as existing forever, enduring and as the champ, he who can endure a pounding as well as deal one out, yet in the end still answers to the sponsors and handlers who see him only as a commodity. He points to the endurance of people of color as they are used by the dominant culture. The text qualifies the terrible skepticism of the piece with extreme brevity. In "Leonardo Da Vinci's Greatest Hits," on four vertical strips of canvas Basquiat arranges distorted renditions from "Gray's Anatomy" and Leonardo’s notebooks with an emphasis on legs and feet. He refers to "the bad foot, the left foot" and with "Return of the Prodigal" he identifies as the bad son. "Heel" is repeated, which might define as being under a heel, or down at the heel, a heel in the sense of bad, a villain, or an Achilles’ heel. In the bottom left is a muscular figure with a mallet like John Henry, building the railroad tracks that the whole is crossed with, tracks perhaps as reference to drugs, tracks that mark a slave to a habit, marks which take on the form of text themselves, used semantically to represent history. They unify the piece and lead on one path to Latin again with Latissimus, muscles of a strong back, on the other track to "studies of human leg plus the bone of the leg in man and dog." A dog can be trained to "heel." Further, the ever present influence of Césaire can be seen here and perhaps Basquiat draws on his idea, “that it is enough for us to heel the world, whereas the work of man has only begun” (Césaire 44). Basquiat feels the inherited burden. Yet perhaps it also recalls the anxiety caused by the sense of alienation from the body as a legacy of slavery. Césaire articulates the experience, and the determination of my biology, not a prisoner to a facial angle, to a type of hair, to a well-flattened nose, to a clearly melanian coloring, and negritude, no longer a cephalic index, or plasma, or soma, but measured by the compass of suffering (Césaire 43). The sense of the physical body is also in the piece as he refers to Shelley's poem, “Prometheus Unbound” about the bringer of fire Prometheus’ emancipation from torment as "Prometheus Bound," prefiguring release and again locating himself within the framework of revolutionary poets, but here insisting himself as both Prometheus the bringer of fire, a metaphor for the fire of his message and a reference to freeing himself from the long suppression, now pushed back into even earlier times. The poem cements the images of fighting back and rebellion together with flight and escape. The flight might be seen like Prometheus to claim his due or perhaps as away from the brutalization of exploitation. Basquiat trades in ambiguity and this is a hallmark of his work. Correspondences can be found throughout the text of Basquiat's work, as in "Hollywood Africans," a caustic piece painted mostly yellow with the footprints and portraits of his writer friends, Toxic and Rammellzee, with his own likeness simultaneously valorized as "hero.ism," villianized as "heel #3" and animalized with "paw." There were no Africans in Hollywood, just racist representations of savages, and servants. The reader is asked, "what is bwana" in the form of a question as in the TV game show Jeopardy and crossed out. It is as if Basquiat is saying and ventriloquizing white concerns, it's not real. The lines of races and assimilation are crossed and blurred. Seven stars is too many, it's pop, it's corn, Idi Amin may be a black dictator in the real Africa but the sugar cane in Hiati is incorporated and copyrighted to be exploited, it all adds up to the sum of white on black "gangsterism," it's real and the piece is priced at 200 yen. But eventually the now ran out, the paradoxes of his position and the fickle and judgemental nature of celebrity in the art world overwhelmed him. Frances Negron-Muntaner observes, While Basquiat envisioned commodification as a way out of the racialized body to the extent that it socially valorized him, the requirements of steady output undermined his independence and relationship to painting, making the artist fatally aware of his shameful status as a racialized subject, even under privileged conditions. The inversion struck again. Basquiat truly believed that he would be able to scale the heights on his abilities and worth. The tipping point was reached when the critical reaction to his collaborations with Andy Warhol hurts him. He was well othered, treated as a novelty brought to life by Andy’s divine intervention. It was now clear that in order to continue he would have to subsume himself and his art further into a system which truly does not regard him as an equal. He could not accept the sidekick role, couldn’t be subordinate when it was he who had invigorated Andy with his love and energy. Basquiat withdrew into himself. He lashed out at everyone, deservedly or not, the men and women who loved him, the gallerists that sold his paintings and drawings and the museums and collectors that bought them. Consumed by heroin, he fell into a nadir state. To the Art world he became a wild man, roasting in a spontaneous combustion of interiorized rage. Redefined as junkie, the world waited for him to implode, standing by while the fort burned. It's as if I'd like to return, and yet can’t discover why, now where to." Julia Burgos In less than a decade he produced a large body of work, sealing his fame and sacrificing himself in the process. The overwhelming loneliness and sense of displacement that Fanon and Césaire directed outward in rage through their writings in order to endure, in Basquiat’s case made him unable to function. He collapsed inward. He took the oppressions of millenia personally, internalizing the damage done no less than did the tragic Puerto Rican poet laureate Julia Burgos, and suffers a similar fate. In the end he died alone, like Burgos, and although they didn’t cut his limbs off to fit him into a pauper’s coffin as was done to her corpse, he was also dismembered. Parts of him are in many public and private collections. His art stands as a painterly, eloquent, accusatory text, a litany of sure marks which express the weight of centuries of dislocation, lists of crimes, testimony and evidence presented against the culture that ate him. Sources Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 2001. Negrón-Muntaner, Francis. "The Writing on the Wall" in Baricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture. New York/London, New York University Press, 2004. O'Brien, Glenn. "Basquiat and Jazz" in The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show. Gianni Mercurio, ed. Milan, Skira. 2006. Basquiat. Ed. Marc Meyer. (Catalogue for Brooklyn Museum Basquiat retrospective) New York/London, Merrill. 2005. Articles Flores, Juan. “La Carreta Made a U-Turn: Puerto Rican Language and Culture in the United States” in Divided Borders: Essays on Puerto Rican Identity. hooks, bell, “Alter of Sacrifice: Re-membering Basquiat.” Art In America, 6/93. Pg. 74 Basquait, Jean-Michel Hollywood Africans 1983 Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas 84 x 84 in (213.4 x 213.4 cm) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits 1982 Acrylic, oil paintstick, and paper collage on canvas Schorr Family Collection; on long-term loan to the Princeton University Art Museum Per Capita 1981. Acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas. The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut Despues de un Puno, 1987 Acrylic, oil paintstick, and paper collage on canvas Private collection