By Sam Ben-Meir
ROME, Italy – For international collage artist, Michael Anderson, Jean-Michel Basquiat is the single most significant artist of the last fifty years: “Picasso, Pollack, Basquiat,” he tells me. There is no denying the immense influence of this extraordinary painter, who in a short but meteoric career of seven years produced an astonishing body of work with over a thousand paintings and a thousand drawings.
At Sothebys recently, Basquiat’s painting of a skull, “Untitled” (1982) sold for $110.5 million; a record price for an American painter, placing him in the art history pantheon alongside Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. However, if we are to truly approach these works at all, it is necessary to get beyond the din of the market – the “screeching vultures” as the late John Berger puts it – and give our attention to the sophistication and wit of this painter, the sincerity and exuberance of his canvases.
There is no escaping violence in Basquiat, and while it is sometimes presented upfront, with the intention to arrest and confront the viewer – as in “The Death of Michael Stewart” (1983) – there is just as often an indeterminate sense of menace. In “Side View of an Oxen’s Jaw” (1982) Basquiat may be invoking the story of Samson – the Nazarite who, as told in the Book of Judges, slew the masses of Philistines armed with only the jawbone of an ass.
“Oxen’s Jaw” is on display at the Chiostro Del Bramante, in Rome. The cloister-turned gallery is currently offering “Jean-Michel Basquiat: New York City” – an extensive exhibition presenting nearly one hundred significant works, including acrylics and oils, as well as drawings, silkscreen prints and ceramics completed between the years of 1981 and 1987.
While the association with Samson may not seem immediately obvious, we know that Basquiat was thinking about Samson because the hero appears in “Obnoxious Liberals” (1982) one of his most effective canvases. Samson is depicted as a black figure, head shorn, chained to the classical columns that he is about to topple, bringing the entire temple of the Philistines crashing down upon them – and himself. Basquiat clearly identifies with Samson, who is in many ways the prototypical hero-martyr. “St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes” (1982) is one of Basquiat’s most famous works: Joe Louis was another hero-martyr, a boxing champion who was humiliated and exploited because of racism in America.
Samson is not an incidental figure for Basquiat: he is central. The artist is brilliantly appropriating Samson’s story to critique and condemn the false status quo. Basquiat chooses to present the penultimate moment, just as Samson is about to redeem himself and exact a devastating toll on his oppressors. This is Samson after he has fallen and been betrayed by Delilah; after he has had his eyes gouged out by his captors. This is Samson as he is about to perform his last and greatest heroic feat.
Samson is a stand in for the artist himself. In his reinterpretation of Samson, Basquiat reinfuses the figure with a subversive energy – a rebellious, explosive potency. Basquiat is deeply interested in the heroic and this is where we must begin if we are to grasp the meaning of Samson references in Basquiat’s work.
The heroic was to be found on the street: in “Embittered” (1986), also on view, the word ‘EROICA’ (heroic) is spelled out over thirty times (to be precise, the word is written out in groups of eight consisting of dual columns of four – and like the name ‘Samson,’ Basquiat inscribes a rectangle around ‘EROICA,’ as if to emphasize its significance. At the center is a black accordion player (a street performer); this figure, who reappears in other works, is not unrelated to the Samson in “Obnoxious Liberals.” Both characters are variations on the black protagonist, one who is often the most readily identifiable subject of Basquiat’s work. Above and below the accordion player are words and phrases associated with boxing: “KNOCKOUT,” “RING,” “GLASS JAW,” “SOFT BELLY,” “WHITE TRUNKS,” “WASHED UP,” and “EVERLASTING,” one of Basquiat’s favorites. Jean-Michel’s art is inseparable from language – that is, from the power and sometimes the impotency of names, lists and phrases: and even among his earliest pieces we find him charting words and letters in semi-incantatory ways.
Some of the later paintings seem to suggest that – perhaps not unlike Samson – Basquiat saw the end was near, that he was coming to terms with his own self-destruction (he died in 1988 from a heroin overdose). In the final piece included in this show, “Gravestone” (1987), we see a work which consists of three doors joined together, and the word “perishable” crossed out at the top center. This piece was a tribute to Andy Warhol (who died that year), and it evokes the painted panel altars of medieval and renaissance art. Like so much of his work, it represents Basquiat’s pattern of salvaging and resurrecting the rejected and discarded. Perhaps this is what attracted Basquiat to that penultimate moment in the story of Samson – where, in the very wreckage and ruin of the man, strength is found to bring down his enemies.
Basquiat’s appropriation of Samson (a bit of Jewish folklore), is especially noteworthy at this time, in light of the reignited debate concerning cultural appropriation – “the unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore…” as Susan Scafidi, law professor at Fordham defines it in a recent NY Times article by Kenan Malik. “It is difficult to see,” Malik writes, “how creating gated cultures helps promote social justice.” Basquiat’s reinvention of Samson, as a black American hero-martyr, is a case in point. If we deny artists the right to draw on, and enter into dialogue with cultures other than their own, then we stifle our capacity to understand not only one another, but ourselves.
Basquiat’s work remains, like Samson himself, an explosive and uncontrollable force; barbed and defiant –biting, and sometimes witheringly funny in his critique of the racism, greed and moral apathy of American society. He takes a wrecking ball not only to false barriers between conceptualism and expressionism, painting and writing, improvisation and composition, and ultimately between art and life; but also to the various social, political and artistic edifices we have built atop lies. As Berger’s observed, if Basquiat is an artist whose work is about “seeing through lies,” then we cannot deny his timeliness and the claim his work ultimately makes on us.
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Sam Ben-Meir, PhD is an adjunct professor at Mercy College. His current research focuses on environmental ethics and animal studies. sam@alonben-meir.com