J.Michel Basquiat

“What is it about art anyway, that we give it so much importance.

Art is so respected by the poor because what they do is an honest way to get out of the slum.

Using one sheer self as the medium.

The money earned to prove pure and simple of the value of that individual: the artist.

The picture of a mother´s son who is in jail hangs on her wall as a proof, even the most wretched. And this is a much different idea than the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. But you could never explain to someone who uses God´s gift to enslave that you have used god´s gift, to be free”.

-       BASQUIAT

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic.
Just because the body is rotten—
That is all fantasy.
What is found now was found then.
If you find nothing now,
You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
—Kabir [1]

1.    [1] From Kabir’s poem “Think While You Are Alive,” in Robert Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 48.

“I never know if I’m really alive, anyway, it doesn’t worry me that much: I think I’m immortal” –Jean Michel Basquiat.

Underlying Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sense of himself as an artist was his innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward through his creative acts. This recognition of his role first manifested itself in street actions wherein, under the tag name of SAMO, he transformed his own observations into pithy text messages inscribed on the edifices of the urban environment. This effort quickly became the basis for his early artistic output, including a series of text-image drawings executed in early 1981. Containing a single word, a short phrase, or a simple image referring to a person, event, or recent observation, each drawing refined an external perception down to its core.

His paintings proclaimed the existence of a more basic truth locked within a given event or thought. As his career unfolded, the young artist applied the same intense scrutiny previously reserved for the world around him to the emotional and spiritual aspects of his own being.

Basquiat saw that drawing as capturing what was for him the dichotomy that existed between the freedom of expression demanded by his own creative activity and the requirements of societal responsibility.

“The natural desire of men for the exalted, for a concern with our relationships to the absolute emotions…. We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth.… The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation.”[2] ^{(The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2010)}

[2]

Bibliography:

Basquiat, J. M. Gallery of art. Gallery of Jean-Mivhel Basquiat. The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat , New York.

The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. (2010). The artist. Obtenido de The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat: http://www.basquiat.com/artist.htm#

 Kabir’s poem “Think While You Are Alive,” in Robert Bly, The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 48.

The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. (2010). The artist. Obtenido de The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat: http://www.basquiat.com/artist.htm#

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