Jean-Michel Basquiat - Now’s the Time

May 1, 2015 • City, Culture, In the Magazine

By Grady Mitchell

From now until May 10, the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) will house a collection of almost 85 Jean-Michel Basquiat pieces. Entitled Now‘s The Time, the retrospective is the first of its kind on Canadian soil, backed by a chorus of voices declaring that right now is, in fact, the perfect moment for Toronto to host such a show. According to many in Toronto’s creative community, as well as the exhibition’s curator, Austrian art historian and critic Dieter Buchhart, the atmosphere in the city mirrors that of New York of the early 1980s that birthed Basquiat’s incandescent career.

Perhaps it seems strange to proclaim that now is the perfect time to show an artist who died three decades ago. But Basquiat’s appeal has only grown in the intervening years. Even stripped of its political and historical context, his work remains as vibrant and challenging as the day he set his paintbrush to canvas.

Although Basquiat is most often cited for the way he pulled influences off the streets—graffiti, comics, jazz, hip hop—Buchhart argues that Basquiat also drew inspiration from high-minded masters like Twombly and Picasso. In particular, Buchhart sees a parallel between Basquiat and Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, most famous for his iconic painting The Scream. Although Basquiat and Munch lived and worked a century apart, Buchhart sees a related intensity of vision in both artists.

The fury that is apparent in Basquiat’s work is paralleled by the turmoil of his life story, tragically cut short on August 12, 1988 by a heroin overdose. Born to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s public art career began at age 17 with spray painted messages scrawled across Manhattan walls as one-half of graffiti duo SAMO (standing for “same old shit”), as well as hawking painted t-shirts and small prints to tourists. Preserving these initial influences, Basquiat was among the first to bring the graffiti style and mindset to the world of high art.

With their frenzied sense of momentum and haphazardness, Basquiat’s paintings and drawings are urgent, intimate and raw. His work, with its rough-edged and staccato appearance, is like a visual interpretation of the concept of record scratching, the keystone hip hop technique that arose in the same era as the artist himself. With repetitions of letters, seemingly random lists and phrases that beg to be read aloud, his work is like poetry, rounding out the pieces with a tactile auditory element. If the erratic arrangement of his strokes reflect the improvisational nature of jazz, his inclusion of poetic text is a nod to the influence of rap and hip hop.

Today, we have creative hurricanes like Jay-Z and Kanye West charging into visual arts, fashion, and design—whatever medium intrigues them. Basquiat helped lay the track for black artists to pursue, well, just about whatever they want, especially in his subscription to the Warholian idea that art is good business, and good business is the highest form of art. Rather than bashfully separating creativity from cash, Warhol and his Factory protégés, Basquiat among them, made no qualms about profiting from their talent. Even before his death, Basquiat’s pieces sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Large sums that he unfortunately poured into his dangerous habits.

Of course, as playful as Basquiat’s catalogue appears, it’s also barbed. Now’s the Time arrives at a very pointed moment for race relations in North America. Crises like Ferguson and Eric Garner’s death place added emphasis on the ground Basquiat broke for black artists and minority creatives of all types. It’s no accident that the exhibition’s launch coincided with the beginning of Black History Month.

Racial tension is something Basquiat encountered in his own life. In 1983, another young New York artist named Michael Stewart was beaten by police in a subway station, later dying of his injuries. The eleven officers involved claimed he’d been painting graffiti. None were convicted. It didn’t take much imagination to substitute Stewart, a young black street artist, for Basquiat, just a few years older.

Basquiat took Stewart’s death harshly. One of the paintings in Now’s the Time was an attempt on his part to deal with the tragedy. Simply titled The Death of Michael Stewart, it shows a gang of pink-skinned cops beating a central black figure with batons. It would be nice to think that, in the years since Basquiat’s death, race relations in North America have improved; that the trail Basquiat blazed for non-white artists has continued to push forward. Evidently, we still have a long way to go.

In an effort to pull the spotlight from Basquiat’s torrid life and reposition it on his work, Buchhart has divided Now’s the Time into chapters. Rather than organize the pieces chronologically, he’s grouped them based on themes, including “Street as Studio” and “Playing the Trickster: Cartoons and Provocations.” He’s pulled the show’s title not only from the exhibit’s apt timing (and an excerpt of Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech), but also from a song recorded by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, two of Basquiat’s favourite musicians.

Basquiat’s appeal doesn’t appear to have flagged in the 27 years since his untimely death. Earlier this year, a 1983 piece entitled Genius of the Mississippi sold for over $20 million. It’s intriguing, if ultimately only frustrating, to imagine what might have happened had Basquiat kicked his heroine addiction and continued painting. The fact is, we’ll never know what might have been. But at least we have Now’s the Time.

Now’s the Time will be showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario until May 10, 2015.

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