Hollywood Africans: Is Basquiat a Punk?
What is Punk? Is Punk Cool? Is Jesus Hip?
Part I: The Sugar Hill Gang
I would like to talk about Jean Michel Basquiat. Specifically I would like to talk about Hollywood Africans, a painting by Basquiat from 1983. Visually I would like to examine the painting in formalist terms in regards to what its text says—by this definition text is its color, surface, and marks; I would also like to, if the reader would allow, to place Basquiat in cultural context. In reading about Basquiat there is, to me, an uncomfortable tendency to refer to his ignoble death as indicative of his mindset as painter. As the deaths of Bourdain and Robin Williams might color, unforgivably, the interpretation of their work.
But, Back to Basquiat, this essay, in four parts, asked a series of questions in the title. “Is Basquiat a punk?” for example. So, within this essay I would like to examine what Punk is, and whether Basquiat is that? I believe he is.
His associates, musical choices, and street cred all point to a proto punk aesthetic. His close friendships with out gay men, Keith Haring and Andy Wharhol are intriguing and certainly very progressive; his band Gray is daring late 70’s spoken word trance pop with strings, and this describes Basquiat’s painting almost exactly.
However, we should speak to Basquiat as a punk who unwittingly might be proto Hip-Hop. In that his interests could be described as materialistic and self-indulgent more so than utopian or anarchic. Basquiat seems to be selling anti-materialist art to an self-flagellating materialist market. As Thomas Frank puts it,
"The countercultural idea has become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance for the confines of tradition now permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation."
- Colombia University Magazine on Basquiat -
Last night I was listening to the Velvet Undergound’s last album Loaded and a song came up that speaks to Basquiat and perhaps his conflicting impulses: To be punk, to speak out, to be black, and to want to make a few bucks while doing so…
“Jenny said, when she was just five years old
You know there's nothin' happening at all
Two TV sets, two Cadillac cars
Ahhh, hey, ain't help me nothin' at all
Not at all
One fine morning, she heard on a New York station
She couldn't believe what she heard at all
Not at all
Despite the amputation
You could dance to a rock 'n' roll station
It was all right”
- Lou Reed 1973 -
Lou seems to be articulating exactly what Frank has said, that the contradictions of the young artist to make an income while possessing authentic counter-culture cred are implicit. What is explicit is that the high end market wants their purchases of ripped jeans and Basquiat paintings to make them feel cool, street, and/or authentic.
How do we learn to spit against the wind, how do we dance upon a pin?
People might say it killed Basquiat, like it killed Hendrix, and Cobain. Look, Keith Richards is still alive. These are accidents. I would just say the notion of going to art school or joining the Academic establishment is thick with hypocrisy. A young art student today must study Paul McCarthy and think intelligently on how to best disrupt our society to make any money off of them.
My wife didn't know that this was a vagina plug... so I thought I better just fill in the blank here.
Basquiat had the same problem growing up with Picasso hanging over his head. Its why Basquiat and Tony Shafrazi defaced Guernica. What else is there to do?
To speak about Basquiat and his cultural and social context I believe we must also ask what it means for Basquiat to be black painter who did not want to be thought of as “a black painter.” And perhaps that being regarded as “punk” is very different within the black community than it is within a white one.
“I don’t want to be a black artist I want to be an artist” said Basquiat
I will need to answer to these definitions:
Let’s begin a discursive process to understand this whole tangle. We are looking at a painting by Jean Michel Basquiat. It is titled Hollywood Africans, and is housed at the Whitney Museum of Art.
A title like this immediately reminds me of the genius Aries Spears and his virtuosic impersonation of Paul Mooney in his comedy album Hollywood, Look I’m smiling.
“Hollywood loves ni**as that smile, Aries. I am too real for them.” Says Mooney
In formal terms of plastic space we have a painting here that is post war and informed by the mid-century critic Clement Greenberg’s notions of truth and honesty in the picture plane. Paintings are flat. Paint and color exist on the picture plane and then out in our head. Any illusionistic penetration into a perceived cubic space is a lie. And lies are bad he says. The people need to hear the truth so let your paintings act on the surface. Hans Hoffman is the primary proponent of this teaching and all American Abstract Expressionist (AbEx) painters stem from his line.
Post war, in New York City, a small broke coterie of European geniuses imprinted on a beaten American youth (even the author is within this lineage as a student of Chicago’s Elizabeth Rupprecht, who herself was a protégé of Hoffman).
Hollywood Africans resemble Hoffman’s AbEx with its large passages of hot and cool colored squares moving forward and back in the picture plane. This painting, “Hollywood Africans” has perhaps draped Hollywood Gold over squares of black and sky blue. Colored Squares could easily be the title of Part II of this essay… (the part about Bill Cosby).
