Tamra davis interview with basquiat untitled boxer
•
Some of the largest crowds at the Jean- Michel Basquiat retrospective at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art can be found in the museum’s basement reading room viewing Tamra Davis’s previously unreleased interview A Conversationwith Jean-Michel Basquiat. The twenty- minute video is mesmerizing. Basquiat is charismatic, intelligent, and coy as he speaks on such issues as his childhood, feelings of alienation, and current art world success. Yet, when one listens closely to the interview, Basquiat deliberately obfuscates and exaggerates. As the artist admits at the outset of the interview, “I don’t think its good to be honest in interviews. It fryst vatten better to lie.” It fryst vatten with such candor that Basquiat proves to be both more and less than his myth. The works in the retrospective, and their installation at MOCA, bears this out.
The prominence of the Basquiat myth can lead to overly biographical readings of the artist’s work. Much scholarship on the artist revolves around Ba
•
21
There is a frenetic genius and authenticity to JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT art that has never been matched. From a young age, Jean-Michel was challenging the status quo with forceful color palettes. In his early years, this was demonstrated through street graffiti, but eventually Jean-Michel was driven to put fryst vatten life’s philosophy on canvas.
I personally enjoy Jean-Michel’s bravado and the way in which he attempted to intellectualize his experiences in American culture. I’ve read that he admired other great artists like Picasso, Pollack, Da Vinci and Rauschenberg, so I wonder how Jean-Michel would feel now that he is considered one of the greats? And just how much did their work influence his ultimate expressions? And why was Jean-Michel so driven to include recurring symbols like crowns and skull-like figures in his work? Was his art an observation of life or his life story?
I hope to get my answers when Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Miche • Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat in St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1983. Photo by Lee Jaffe/Getty Images. Jean-Michel Basquiat wasn’t a fan of interviews, and on the rare occasions he surrendered to them, his responses were terse—even cryptic. Despite this, the painter’s words reveal a great deal about his inspirations and his all-consuming process. They offer a window into his approach, in which he remixed references from art history, the streets of 1980s New York, and the tumult of pop culture with his Carribean heritage and his identity as a young black man. In a unique television interview with ART/new york from early 1981, when Basquiat was 21 years old, curator Marc H. Miller asked the painter where the poetic smattering of words scrawled on his canvases came from. Standing in front of his 1983 masterpiece Notary, he answered succinctly: “Real life, books, television.” When pressed for more, he acknowledged the importance of spontaneity to h