JM BASQUIAT and the DRAGON in MARSEILLE. The word "dragon" comes from the Indo-European word drakon (Greek) and draco (Latin) ("to see clearly", "piercing gaze"). In alchemy, the dragon represents the chaos-world that contains a certain potential for order; the dragon is thus the symbol of primordial energy. JM Basquiat painted his dragon almost everywhere, so it's absolutely clear that this isn't street art on Velvet Underground drugs, even if the bourgeois velvet is caressing the street hairs, there's an order behind it, and a hell of an order for the velvet-lined guys of the esoteric federations. "To Whites every Black holds a potential knife behind the back, and to every Black the White is concealing a whip." - René Ricard, "The Radiant Child," 1984
Do you remember the moment in your childhood when you woke up to the dangers and injustices of the adult world? In the life Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American artist of Haitian/Puerto-Rican descent, that moment -- in which he glimpsed the hidden knives and whips -- stretched from his troubled early teens until his death at the age of twenty-seven in 1988. Money, fame and drugs never dimmed the visions of racial injustice and historical abuses of power that both haunted him and fueled his imagination. Jean's sustained adolescent rage became the engine of his bracingly original art. To cope, and to assert his individualism, Basquiat developed an aesthetic parallel universe with its own impenetrable language of words, signs and symbols. In the words of Marc Mayer, the Director of the National Gallery of Canada, Basquiat "...speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a matador." An auto-didact whose work parodies and subverts education and history, Jean-Michel Basquiat was the greatest outsider artist of the Twentieth Century.
Since his death, the art market has increasingly anointed him as one of its greatest insiders. Thousands of artists, would-be-artists, and poseurs have tried to emulate his trenchant precocity, and the results have been predictably lame. Basquiat's prickly intelligence is hard to match, and the esoteric poesia of his finest works is impossible to imitate.
At Gagosian Gallery, on West 24th Street, an exhibition of over fifty works includes Basquiat's "In Italian," a quasi-religious diptych which displays an inflamed, contrarian and ultimately indecipherable commentary. It is worth commenting that this vital painting is now thirty years old: three years older than Basquiat was when he died of a drug overdose. The initiated alchemists who trained him? Did they overdose?
Dragons are the heirs of the chthonic creatures of Indo-European mythologies, which most often took the form of monstrous snakes.
In the end, dragon symbolism mainly refers to the following elements :
celestial power,
natural forces: raw energy to be harnessed,
cycles and the power of metamorphosis,
mystery, the hidden, darkness,
anger,
evil (Christian approach),
ignorance or knowledge,
trial: the dragon must be fought to restore order to the world,
heroism: defeating the dragon, or riding it like a horse, means becoming a hero, accessing the mysteries of life and immortality, becoming wise,
combat and war: the dragon is present on many coats of arms and military emblems,
duality: quite often, dragons come in pairs, circling each other and devouring each other, symbolizing positive and negative, or yin and yang intertwined.
The title of the work offers viewers a suggestion -- that the painting is "In Italian" -- but there are several languages required to "read" the image. Basquiat often included words in his paintings and "In Italian" does have a single Italian word "SANGUE," (blood) which has been crossed out and replaced by its Latin counterpart:"SANGRE." There are also phrases and words in English, a mangled Italian name - is it Paulo? - and one word each in Spanish (AGUA) and Dutch (HOEK). So, inquiring visitors to Gagosian Gallery might start by asking: "Why the reference to Italian?" Blood is the HOLY GRAIL? It's up to you...
Italy and Italians played a major role in Jean's short career. The Italian Neo-Expressionist painter Sandro Chia was an early advocate for Basquiat's work, and helped introduced Jean to a dealer who had recently moved from Rome to SoHo: Annina Nosei. Basquiat later became friendly with artists Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, and his first one-man show - "Paintings by SAMO" -- was held at the Emilio Mazzoli Gallery in Modena in May of 1981.
Basquiat, who did not keep track of how many works he gave to Mazzoli, later told friends that the dealer had gotten a "bulk deal" and had ripped him off. On his second trip to Italy some years later Basquiat was detained by Italian customs officials before his departure, as the much wiser artist was carrying roughly $100k in cash, a sum they couldn't believe a young black visitor had earned simply by selling paintings.
Of course the title "In Italian" may not have anything to do with Jean's experiences in Italy. It may simply be a way of saying that the painting is in a graffiti style. The term "graffiti" was first coined to describe the inscriptions and drawings found on the walls of ancient Roman ruins and later evolved to take on the connotation of vandalism.
The main character of "In Italian" - a blue headed figure on the right panel - seems to stand for some kind of Christ as he might have appeared in a Baroque painting. After all, the phrase "CROWN OF THORNS" is printed above his cranium, with "THORNS" crossed out. The words SANGRE (Spanish for blood) and CORPUS© (Latin for body) are among other words and markings that appear on the figure's body, seemingly added up by a yellow cross that might be a plus sign which turns them into some sort of equation. Christ-like figures with floating crowns of thorns and African features make notable appearances in other Basquiat works.
In the left panel, the carefully labeled "DIAGRAM OF THE HEART PUMPING BLOOD" might be a reference to the "Sacred Heart," a symbolic representation of Christ's love for humanity, and also an emblem for many Roman Catholic institutions. It should be mentioned that although Jean did attend a Catholic high school -- where religious images must have made an impression -- he used religious imagery in a free-wheeling and personal way, hybridizing and personalizing holistically form and esoterics rites.
Added to this Voudou/Catholic mix of esoterica are two images of Washington quarters, both dated 1951. Is it possible that the year 1951 refers to the beginnings of the American Civil Rights movement? It was, after all, the year that the father of an 8-year old African American sued the Kansas State School Board so that his daughter could attend an all-white school. That may or may not be the case, but in the left panel of "In Italian" LIBERTY is suspiciously crossed out and "IN GOD WE TRUST" is reduced to a sarcastic scrawl. Also, the. Freemason George Washington's right eye stares directly at the viewer, giving gallery-goers the creepy "mirada fuerte" (strong gaze) found in many Picasso portraits. Picasso was initiated with Braque by the MARTINIST lodge in Paris.
Those familiar with Basquiat's life story will also recognize that the heart diagram was likely recalled from Jean's early study of the book "Gray's Anatomy," which he read with morbid curiosity while recovering from being struck by a car when he was very young. And as it turns out, the "Christ" figure actually began as a portrait of Basquiat's friend and studio assistant Stephen Torton, who later recalled that Jean added the "CROWN OF THORNS" inscription after the two of them fought over a woman. One of the interesting aspects of "In Italian" is that it is, to some degree, a collaboration. Stephen Torton made its distinctive criss-crossed stretcher bars, and a graffiti artist known as "A1" made the group of small attached canvases that Basquiat biographer Eric Fretz says are like the small panels often found on the "predella" (platform) of an altarpiece.
Puzzling out Jean's meanings is an engaging game, but "In Italian" was never meant to be translated. Jean's best works manage to pull off a balancing act: they mix references, cultures and images with conviction, but elude coherence. Does "In Italian" have things to say about racism? Very likely, yes. Does it subvert religion, culture and language to make a personal moralistic statement? Probably. Can it be assigned a fixed message? YES for shure!!!!!.
The best way to understand "In Italian" is to keep in mind what Basquiat once said about his art in general: "It's about 80% anger. wich is symbolically the operative alchemy"
I'd say that the other 20% is mystery.????
YES the mystery of the sponsors
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
February 7 - April 6, 2013
Gagosian Gallery
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
www.johnseed.com/2013/02/jean-michel-basquiat-80-anger-an...
Artistic creation: What does it take for an artist to be understood? How does some of them remain whereas others are doomed to oblivion?
The first precaution to bear in mind when one look at art as a market is that the extreme valuation of some works is only made possible by their infinite reproducibility. The « authentic » and » original » , ie what economists call « scarcity », those even before the era of mass reproduction , reach insane prices (it is as simple as that) as a mechanical effect.
From that point of view, the impressionists figure stars from which one may only contemplate an incident light. A light from a period before the great slaughter of 1914-1945 , which europeans can only look across an abysmal gap. There is also an emotional aspect, in addition to let’s say « unreasonable » pricing of some works of art that has something to do with neurotically clinging to relics from before the great ruin. Painters from that time maybe had a pre- science , an intuition of a world about to be upset, as their work also is a celebration of being present to life, with the palms of virtuosity handed over the first of them , Claude Monet. Like a golden age forever lost .
Andy Warhol, a friend and mentor of Jean- Michel Basquiat, took his position in the so called Western (as maybe « nevermore » european) field of art with intelligent insight, the specific era he had to deal with, while at the same symbolizing it in his work , focusing on copying large scale drawing, or drawing soups cans, so that contemporary art acquires its full role of figuration of the forces specific to the society he lived in. And also, their very effect on our souls , as a work of art is, by its gross futility, a mirror to our inner selves. His artistic gesture was at once the testimony of an aesthetic distress and a strong sense of political commitment.
Andy Warhol came back to drawing in the evening of his life under the caring and filial influence of Jean-Michel Basquiat, as a return to the fundamental unity of the artistic gesture, with a pleasure of its own, the irreducible experience, so fundamentally human, that is the practice of an art. Here is for: They were artists, and no marketers.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988. His success disturbed many of the self proclaimed guardians of good taste in the world of contemporary art. But if the guardians of the temple of good taste were disturbed in their sleep, it’s somewhat that they felt threatened.
The life and works of Basquiat, besides being very illustrative of his time, raise questions of many kind. In particular, our fate as organic beings in a society magneted by an ultra liberalized economy. Yes, nothing less.
What makes that one is an artist or not? Basquiat’s life was a comet soon broken. He died at 27 years of a heroin overdose. His fate belonged to the deadly trap of a toxic parental couple. Yet Jean-Michel Basquiat was the custodian of a powerful and mysterious force, closely linked to his Haitian origins (iwa). This strength led him to assume the function of a messenger. Our collective unconscious is bathed in ancient mythology. Jean-Michel Basquiat comet awakens the imago of mythical Hermes, messenger of the gods. He was kind of a summary of the eighties, promised to speed and brilliance. The coherence of his life and work confirms the healthy bias to consider man as a total being. Man is language. From birth to death. Oscar Wilde had drawn our attention on the fact that his life was his real work of art … his material production were only second, ensuring his position as a tolerable living being to others, market, society, history, etc …
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Why does this artist so undeniably talented (he’s not the only one) stay in our collective mind? What makes that his work skyrockets in the market of contemporary art? The highest New York society, the aristocracy of finance and short-lived success, this part of the apple led by men of utmost anxiety about death and time, decided to make him a king. Or is that his talent had something magical, an occult truth that is communicated only to a certain level of our subconscious? Jean-Michel Basquiat, like many artists, was a medium. The top of the toast ot the town is at the toast of the town because there the fear of losing is the strongest. No other place in society is inhabited by such a centrifugal force. Homo homini lupus (the wolf is the social animal par excellence). The anxiety was particularly acute in the 80’s when some financial successes were exponential however speculative: the feeling of usurpation exploded in the unconscious. As such, Jean-Michel Basquiat cleverly played the role of the Court Jester. Taking the political position of belonging to a minority as an emblem, he plays on the guiltiness of the dominant. He is the little particle of sand in the infernal machinery of a perfect anattainable Eden that some of us desperately try to realize on earth, voracious of broken dreams, fueled with the energy of individuals neurotically clutched to existence, always wanting more, more and more … to the point that they are eternally hungry (see in this respect the main character of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis). Basquiat himself had no illusions about what he desired: the best of what Manhattan had to offer: money, success, fame. In the 80s, « everything was possible » Surprisingly, we say « everything is possible » when so little is.
His art, falsely spontaneous, extremely refined, claims his belonging to a dynasty of great painters. But it also expresses, among other things, the voice of the minorities, enslaved and humiliated, that helped build a powerful nation. He sensed, in the 80s, that their time was about to come. Those who have nothing to lose. So he strikes where it hurts. First as a graffiti artist: Origin of Cotton (see below) right on the wall of a factory. An accurate summary of what needs to be expressed here in the context of the sparkling success of the Reagan years. For those at the top stuff themselves constantly, they must suffer eternally in Hell. Thus is formed a monstruously organic human economy: a Leviathan, a monster colder than cold. Basquiat, middle class, the son of an accountant, knocks on the door of the elite. His social and geographical mobility comes down to the crossing of the Hudson river. While still homeless at the end of 70s, he wrote short poems on the walls under the name SAMO (Same Old Shit). He is aware that in the city, eyes are everywhere. Manhattan is so small in his greatness, like the ego that make it live, vertical empty and abstract. Finally, it is a land acquired on the exchange of trinkets.
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