JEAN-MICHEL
Jean Michel Basquiat would have turned 60 today. Pretty sure I did the math right. He died in ‘88 at 27, so, yeah. I think 60!
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I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately, trying to channel, if you will. Flipping through a facsimile edition of 8 of his composition notebooks; Pausing over the beginnings of thoughts that turned into running themes in his paintings.
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Some of it is musing, some just part of thinking about NY, art, that amazing show just down the street from his old studio at the Brant Foundation on 6th street. Really something. Beautifully curated.
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Basquiat’s work has been reprinted on everything from sweatshirts to luxury leather bags to yoga mats. So much so that I wonder if people even know how political he was, how his paintings were a reflection of his experience in the black community, attacks on power structures and systems of racism. He was basically saying Black Lives Matter in the 80s, without spelling or screaming it out. I wonder if people know how direct he was in his criticisms and how he meditated on wealth v poverty, integration v segregation, and played with ways to express such dichotomies. I wonder. On his birthday, 33 years after he succumbed to heroin on Great Jones Street, I wonder.
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Henry Geldzahler, a curator and powerful figure in the NYC art scene until his own death in 1994, tried to neutralize the sting of Jean-Michel’s passing by referencing the ancient Greeks’ contention that lives are neither tragically short nor satisfyingly long. According to the Greeks each life is lived to its own termination, and should be valued on its own terms. In a 1993 essay, about a year after Basquiat’s first Retrospective at the Whitney, Geldzahler said in summary: One might think of Jean-Michel as a warrior, who fell too soon in a battle not of his making. I feel like that line can apply to a lot of people this year. But that’s a whole other story.
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