An art critic's take. I, for one, can't wait to see the show.
YOUNG FUN by PETER SCHJELDAHL Basquiat???s best work. Issue of 2005-04-04 Posted 2005-03-28
Jean-Michel Basquiat, the subject of an important, intensely enjoyable retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, made nearly all of his best paintings, which are very good indeed, at the age of twenty-one, in 1982. He was not mature beyond his years. He expressed attitudes that are distinctly adolescent, when not childish, in a taunting, arch, almost self-parodic style that started going to pieces the moment it came together. Thereby, Basquiat closely resembled a poet who quit writing poetry before the age of twenty: Arthur Rimbaud. A quotation in this show???s catalogue from Rimbaud???s ???A Season in Hell??? sent me back to that work, written in 1873, which gave exalted, hilarious, altogether uncanny voice to teen-age narcissism:
My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. . . .What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings. . . . I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents. . . . I invented colors for the vowels!???A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. . . . I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Basquiat was like that, right down to the sprightly tastes and the romance of recondite erudition. His paintings bristle with antic self-instruction in history, anatomy, mythology, and education itself, as when he proposes an ideal order of knowledge: ???1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons.??? His innumerable masklike heads exhaustively anthropologize a tribal civilization that never was. And he regularly gave color to sound, finding painterly equivalents for the effects on him of his musical heroes???Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix. As for the deliberate ???derangement of all the senses??? that Rimbaud recommended to poets, Basquiat was only too game.
He was famous in the art world by the beginning of 1982, and rich soon afterward. Drugs, drink, sex, and bad behavior briefly fuelled, then devastated, his genius. He died of a drug overdose in 1988??????tragically,??? it says in a wall text at the show which a friend of mine testifies to having misread, at first glance, as ???traditionally.??? Indeed, Basquiat???s life and career adhered to a classical (in our day, tabloid) trajectory of rise, fall, and doom, though with an unusually sunny epilogue. Not only do his paintings now sell for ever more millions at auction; serious critical appreciation and art-historical validation, withheld from him in life, are coming around. Basquiat turns out to be the essential American Neo-Expressionist painter of the early nineteen-eighties, the one who made the most of that time???s revival???or pastiche, or lampoon???of long-lapsed and despised styles of showy subjectivity in modern art. Simply, he brought lyrical truth to a movement that swam and, ultimately, drowned in facetiousness. Simultaneous references, in one painting, to anatomy drawings by da Vinci and to the steel-driving man John Henry precipitate a funny, unfeigned paean to the literally and figuratively muscular in life, art, and legend. In terms of style, what Julian Schnabel performed with operatic bombast, David Salle with theatrical gall, and any number of others with academic irony, Basquiat brought off with spontaneous conviction. Whatever historical modes stirred him???Expressionism, ???primitivism,??? art brut, Pop???lived anew, for a spell, at his hands, as did the influence of paragons including Picasso, Dubuffet, Pollock, and Twombly. Meanwhile, his unhappy story gave a fresh, perhaps valedictory turn to the myth of the po??te maudit, a revelatory, self-immolating figure of terrible delight.
Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father???a successful accountant, with whom he had a difficult relationship???and a sensitive, emotionally unstable Puerto Rican mother, who nurtured his talent from an early age. He left home and high school at the age of seventeen and got himself discovered by the art world as the gnomic graffitist samo (for ???same old???). ???Pay for soup / Build a fort / Set that on fire,??? went a typically waifish seething, and catchily lettered tag. He strove to be a dandy, and was adept at charming or humiliating others while remaining opaquely cool. (On first meeting him, I mentioned the apparent influence on him of Dubuffet. ???Who???? he asked, with a look that booked me on a train to Siberia.) His first studio works were the sensation of ???New York/New Wave,??? a seminal 1981 group show at P.S. 1. The poet Rene Ricard published an influential essay about him (along with Keith Haring), titled ???The Radiant Child,??? in Artforum. Basquiat???s talent and persona might have been made to order for a moment when the prestige of international Neo-Expressionism trickled down to the streets and clubs of the East Village, and social mobility became talismanic in art even as it declined in society. The hundreds of paintings that he created in 1982 mirrored the roaring spirit of a time that, after the depressive seventies, had rediscovered the bliss of art, fashion, tremendous amounts of money in rapid circulation, and other forms of concerted indulgence.
The key artistic quality of Basquiat???s best work is a seeming paradox. Ostensibly a graphic artist???relentlessly lettering and cartooning, filling surfaces with sketchy forms, and using color, if at all, mainly to fill in drawn shapes???he is in fact a painter to the core, always concerned with a picture???s physical character and immediate impact. Every element interacts with every other and with the pictorial space, which develops rhythmic ins and outs and hollows and bumps across the surface, in the way of Cubism. Visually, lines work less as demarcations of the surface than as skinny shapes wriggling atop it. The longer you look at a good Basquiat???and you have to do it in person, because the bodily scale of his gestural marks is crucial???the jazzy push and pull of small and large masses, dark and light tones, and cool and warm colors becomes more, rather than less, complex. Even when a picture is made up only of words printed in black, like his early transcriptions of samo graffiti to paper and canvas, the visual impression may be coloristic???an effect of the brushed or paint-sticked lines activating rather than merely occupying their off-white grounds, which breathe and glow. You can???t learn to do this stuff. It???s about talent, served by commensurate desire and concentration???and joy. Plainly, after 1982 painting was increasingly less fun for Basquiat. Pictures become forced, congested, and inert. Nothing moves, in either sense of the word.
It is in the nature of all styles to burn out, but none perish as abruptly and irrecoverably as the precocious. Basquiat was in for a painful artistic crisis even if he could have kicked drugs and developed choirboy habits. As it was, the toll of his bad choices was exacerbated by exploitative dealers and collectors, corrupt companions, and the inevitable backlash that follows extravagant public success. (Would Rimbaud have finessed his looming difficulties by walking away from poetry if he had been as thoroughly rewarded with money, acclaim, and unlimited lovers? No.) Basquiat???s is one of the great horrible American lives, already told in a fine biography by Phoebe Hoban (mordantly subtitled ???A Quick Killing in Art???) and in a delectable movie by Schnabel, starring Jeffrey Wright and, in a revelatory interpretation, David Bowie as Andy Warhol???whose relationship to Basquiat was both calculating and kind. The Brooklyn show, which lacks some of the artist???s best paintings,
hardly exhausts a subject that interests in no end of ways. As a black artist, Basquiat isn???t the Jackie Robinson of the American art world???which, until quite recently, was woefully all but lily-white???so much as its Willie Mays, abolishing forever racial identity as remarkable in the field???s top rank. Meanwhile, he had fun with that tension. His witty painting of heads redolent at once of Picasso and of Africa might be seen to close a circle of appropriation that began when the Spaniard visited the Ethnographic Museum (now the Mus??e de l???Homme), in Paris, in 1907. Basquiat???s humor shares with Rimbaud???s a particular, visionary wisdom: that of the world surveyed by one too young to be answerable for anything in it.
He did produce the track though. I would have loved to see him produce some more shit. imagine if basquiat and rammellzee would have made an album ohmyfuckinggod!. shit would have been out of this world, literally.
you can probably get a profile pressing of the track on the cheap. they seem to hover around 10-30.
Comments
CORN
come the fuck on
Signifying = the first through nth element of hip hop.
Happy little clouds!
YOUNG FUN
by PETER SCHJELDAHL
Basquiat???s best work.
Issue of 2005-04-04
Posted 2005-03-28
Jean-Michel Basquiat, the subject of an important, intensely enjoyable retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, made nearly all of his best paintings, which are very good indeed, at the age of twenty-one, in 1982. He was not mature beyond his years. He expressed attitudes that are distinctly adolescent, when not childish, in a taunting, arch, almost self-parodic style that started going to pieces the moment it came together. Thereby, Basquiat closely resembled a poet who quit writing poetry before the age of twenty: Arthur Rimbaud. A quotation in this show???s catalogue from Rimbaud???s ???A Season in Hell??? sent me back to that work, written in 1873, which gave exalted, hilarious, altogether uncanny voice to teen-age narcissism:
My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. . . .What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings. . . . I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents. . . . I invented colors for the vowels!???A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. . . . I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.
Basquiat was like that, right down to the sprightly tastes and the romance of recondite erudition. His paintings bristle with antic self-instruction in history, anatomy, mythology, and education itself, as when he proposes an ideal order of knowledge: ???1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons.??? His innumerable masklike heads exhaustively anthropologize a tribal civilization that never was. And he regularly gave color to sound, finding painterly equivalents for the effects on him of his musical heroes???Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix. As for the deliberate ???derangement of all the senses??? that Rimbaud recommended to poets, Basquiat was only too game.
He was famous in the art world by the beginning of 1982, and rich soon afterward. Drugs, drink, sex, and bad behavior briefly fuelled, then devastated, his genius. He died of a drug overdose in 1988??????tragically,??? it says in a wall text at the show which a friend of mine testifies to having misread, at first glance, as ???traditionally.??? Indeed, Basquiat???s life and career adhered to a classical (in our day, tabloid) trajectory of rise, fall, and doom, though with an unusually sunny epilogue. Not only do his paintings now sell for ever more millions at auction; serious critical appreciation and art-historical validation, withheld from him in life, are coming around. Basquiat turns out to be the essential American Neo-Expressionist painter of the early nineteen-eighties, the one who made the most of that time???s revival???or pastiche, or lampoon???of long-lapsed and despised styles of showy subjectivity in modern art. Simply, he brought lyrical truth to a movement that swam and, ultimately, drowned in facetiousness. Simultaneous references, in one painting, to anatomy drawings by da Vinci and to the steel-driving man John Henry precipitate a funny, unfeigned paean to the literally and figuratively muscular in life, art, and legend. In terms of style, what Julian Schnabel performed with operatic bombast, David Salle with theatrical gall, and any number of others with academic irony, Basquiat brought off with spontaneous conviction. Whatever historical modes stirred him???Expressionism, ???primitivism,??? art brut, Pop???lived anew, for a spell, at his hands, as did the influence of paragons including Picasso, Dubuffet, Pollock, and Twombly. Meanwhile, his unhappy story gave a fresh, perhaps valedictory turn to the myth of the po??te maudit, a revelatory, self-immolating figure of terrible delight.
Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father???a successful accountant, with whom he had a difficult relationship???and a sensitive, emotionally unstable Puerto Rican mother, who nurtured his talent from an early age. He left home and high school at the age of seventeen and got himself discovered by the art world as the gnomic graffitist samo (for ???same old???). ???Pay for soup / Build a fort / Set that on fire,??? went a typically waifish seething, and catchily lettered tag. He strove to be a dandy, and was adept at charming or humiliating others while remaining opaquely cool. (On first meeting him, I mentioned the apparent influence on him of Dubuffet. ???Who???? he asked, with a look that booked me on a train to Siberia.) His first studio works were the sensation of ???New York/New Wave,??? a seminal 1981 group show at P.S. 1. The poet Rene Ricard published an influential essay about him (along with Keith Haring), titled ???The Radiant Child,??? in Artforum. Basquiat???s talent and persona might have been made to order for a moment when the prestige of international Neo-Expressionism trickled down to the streets and clubs of the East Village, and social mobility became talismanic in art even as it declined in society. The hundreds of paintings that he created in 1982 mirrored the roaring spirit of a time that, after the depressive seventies, had rediscovered the bliss of art, fashion, tremendous amounts of money in rapid circulation, and other forms of concerted indulgence.
The key artistic quality of Basquiat???s best work is a seeming paradox. Ostensibly a graphic artist???relentlessly lettering and cartooning, filling surfaces with sketchy forms, and using color, if at all, mainly to fill in drawn shapes???he is in fact a painter to the core, always concerned with a picture???s physical character and immediate impact. Every element interacts with every other and with the pictorial space, which develops rhythmic ins and outs and hollows and bumps across the surface, in the way of Cubism. Visually, lines work less as demarcations of the surface than as skinny shapes wriggling atop it. The longer you look at a good Basquiat???and you have to do it in person, because the bodily scale of his gestural marks is crucial???the jazzy push and pull of small and large masses, dark and light tones, and cool and warm colors becomes more, rather than less, complex. Even when a picture is made up only of words printed in black, like his early transcriptions of samo graffiti to paper and canvas, the visual impression may be coloristic???an effect of the brushed or paint-sticked lines activating rather than merely occupying their off-white grounds, which breathe and glow. You can???t learn to do this stuff. It???s about talent, served by commensurate desire and concentration???and joy. Plainly, after 1982 painting was increasingly less fun for Basquiat. Pictures become forced, congested, and inert. Nothing moves, in either sense of the word.
It is in the nature of all styles to burn out, but none perish as abruptly and irrecoverably as the precocious. Basquiat was in for a painful artistic crisis even if he could have kicked drugs and developed choirboy habits. As it was, the toll of his bad choices was exacerbated by exploitative dealers and collectors, corrupt companions, and the inevitable backlash that follows extravagant public success. (Would Rimbaud have finessed his looming difficulties by walking away from poetry if he had been as thoroughly rewarded with money, acclaim, and unlimited lovers? No.) Basquiat???s is one of the great horrible American lives, already told in a fine biography by Phoebe Hoban (mordantly subtitled ???A Quick Killing in Art???) and in a delectable movie by Schnabel, starring Jeffrey Wright and, in a revelatory interpretation, David Bowie as Andy Warhol???whose relationship to Basquiat was both calculating and kind. The Brooklyn show, which lacks some of the artist???s best paintings, hardly exhausts a subject that interests in no end of ways. As a black artist, Basquiat isn???t the Jackie Robinson of the American art world???which, until quite recently, was woefully all but lily-white???so much as its Willie Mays, abolishing forever racial identity as remarkable in the field???s top rank. Meanwhile, he had fun with that tension. His witty painting of heads redolent at once of Picasso and of Africa might be seen to close a circle of appropriation that began when the Spaniard visited the Ethnographic Museum (now the Mus??e de l???Homme), in Paris, in 1907. Basquiat???s humor shares with Rimbaud???s a particular, visionary wisdom: that of the world surveyed by one too young to be answerable for anything in it.
Yo Sloppy! It's Big Surge. Glad to see you on this pedazo. Hope all is well.
you mean the "sun god" song? did they sample rammelzee on there?
He did produce the track though. I would have loved to see him produce some more shit. imagine if basquiat and rammellzee would have made an album ohmyfuckinggod!. shit would have been out of this world, literally.
you can probably get a profile pressing of the track on the cheap. they seem to hover around 10-30.
No he didn't--he just put up the money and did the cover art.
Al Diaz was responsible for the backing track.
Like Warhol 'produced' the Velvet Underground.
So in music, a producer makes the beat, or shapes the vision of the band. They make it happen.
In film, they put up the money.
Why the difference in the term?