Basquiat and Black Identity
Jean-Michel Basquiat had a complex relationship with his identity as a black artist, Ellen Atlanta explores the prophetic figure and why his work is more relevant than ever to black culture.
Basquiat died in 1987, but his paintings still live and breathe. Approaching his large canvases in the Barbican’s Basquiat: Boom For Real exhibition, you can still smell the acrid hints of paint. A smell of extremes, both fresh and obnoxious, sharp yet infinitely recognisable. Much like Basquiat himself.
Basquiat became one of the highest selling artists in history and broke the record for a black artist when his untitled 1982 self-portrait sold for £85 million this year. Despite this, his legacy still lives in the shadow of discrimination, simultaneously revered for and plagued by his work as a ‘black artist’.
Basquiat had a love/hate relationship with identity, it was a playground for experimentation but he was hyperaware of the stereotypes he faced. Nevertheless, you can’t separate Basquiat from his blackness, because his work was deliberately political, arresting and confrontational. It was hidden in every layer of his dense creations, from his black protagonists to repeated use of the words ‘Milk’, ‘Soap’ and ‘Cotton’, used to discuss whiteness, white-washing and slavery. It was both nuanced and a slap in the face. He made his blackness difficult to ignore and yet wanted you to ignore it.
The duality of Basquiat’s own experiences with his black identity echoes the world we live in today; in which prominent black creatives lead in fields across the arts; but a time in which the power balance hasn’t shifted, in which black citizens are being killed by the police at an exorbitant rate in America, and incarceration of black bodies is occurring at a disproportionate rate in the UK. Basquiat found himself stuck in the middle: a prodigy or an intruder? A genius or a chancer? Vastly intelligent or overly intellectualised? Warhol’s contemporary or Warhol’s mascot?
The fine line he tread has paved the way for a succession of black male creatives with a political voice, Basquiat appears in lyrics by Jay-Z, A$AP Rocky and Kanye West; his exploration of his black, queer identity is reincarnated in Frank Ocean.
The exhibition’s curators had to deal with this balance. Basquiat: Boom For Real is careful not to make any mention of the drug abuse, the addiction, the overdose, that ruled much of his life and eventually killed him. To do so would only perpetuate an essentialised version of black masculinity, one that allows critics to dismiss his work as the ‘primitive scribbles of an addict’.
The same doubt exists today. It’s hard not to question if he truly understood it all, if every item, line and stroke really was all created with intent. We are taught off the bat to doubt him. He knew that, he had to place the crown over his own name; assert a position for himself.
Basquiat was celebrated, but the art world continued to operate in racist terms. There was an irony in the work he was creating; in what he was selling. The story of slavery sold back to those who had benefitted from it the most. He became a cash asset for the mega rich. Towards the end, whilst his paintings were reselling for thousands, he was struggling with debt and addiction, still unable to hail a cab that would stop for him. We fetishized his work, commodified it, and let it destroy him.
(left) Basquiat, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983 - (right) Banksy’s piece outside the exhibition
It’s this hypocrisy that Banksy wanted to highlight with the piece he painted outside the exhibition, depicting a Basquiat figure being stopped and searched by police. Banksy himself wrote of the hypocrisy of the Barbican hosting the exhibition; “a place that is normally very keen to clean any graffiti from its walls”. However, it also acts as an extension of Basquiat’s piece The Death of Michael Stewart. A wider cultural commentary of the treatment of young black men in society today, in which black people are eight times more likely to be stopped and searched in the UK. A society that wants Basquiat the genius but not Basquiat the boy. As Basquiat said himself, “It could have been me”.
And it could have been, Basquiat painted countless self-portraits, each taking different obscure forms. A featureless black figure that at many times, could symbolise any young black boy. ‘Basquiat the artist’ was a character, an illusion that he had invented. A character that he designed, determined to find fame and fortune. A character used to infiltrate the uber-white art world. Charismatic, magnetic, beautiful and mysterious. A character he used drugs to sustain. As poet Rene Ricard said, “One must become the iconic representation of oneself in this town”.
The sign of an iconic artist is that they are able to sum up their time whilst surmounting it. Thirty years on, and we are living in Basquiat’s time.
Basquiat: Boom for Real is at Barbican Art Gallery, London, from 21 September to 28 January.