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Basquiat

A Quick Killing in Art

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

OVERDOSING ON ART

Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston, 1986

Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning sun. Inside the two-story brick building, Jean-Michel Basquiat was asleep in his huge bed, bathed in blue television light. The air conditioner was broken and the room felt like a microwave oven. The bathroom door was ajar, revealing a glimpse of a black and tan Jacuzzi tub. On the ledge of the tub was a small pile of bloody syringes. There was a jagged hole punched in the bathroom window. Beneath it was scrawled the legend "Broken Heart," with Basquiat's favorite punctuation, a copyright sign.

Kelle Inman, Basquiat's twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, was downstairs writing in the journal that Basquiat had given her. He usually slept all day, but when he still hadn't come down for breakfast by midafternoon, Inman got worried. When she looked into the bedroom to check up on him, the heat hit her full in the face, like a wave. But Basquiat seemed to be sleeping peacefully, so she went back downstairs. She and the housekeeper heard what sounded like loud snores, but thought nothing of it.

A few hours later, Basquiat's friend Kevin Bray called. He and Basquiat and another friend, Victor Littlejohn, were supposed to go to a Run-D.M.C. concert that evening, and he wanted to make plans with Jean-Michel. Kelle climbed back up the stairs to give Basquiat the message. This time, she found him stretched on the floor, his head cradled on his arm like a child's, a small pool of vomit forming near his chin.

Inman panicked. She had never seen anyone die, although Basquiat's drug binges had made the scenario a constant fear. Now it seemed like the worst had happened. She ran to the phone and called Bray, Littlejohn, and Vrej Baghoomian, Basquiat's last art dealer.

"When I got there," recalls Bray, "Kelle said she had called an ambulance. She took me upstairs. Jean-Michel looked like he was comfortably out cold. He was on the floor, lying against the wall, as if he had fallen down and didn't have the strength to get up, and was just taking a nap. There was a lot of clear liquid coming out of his mouth. We picked him up and turned him over. We shook him, and we just kept trying to revive him. It took a long time for the ambulance to arrive. But for a while, after the guys from the Emergency Medical Service came, we thought he was going to be okay. They were giving him shocks and IV treatment. Victor had to hold Jean-Michel up like this so the IV's would drain," says Bray, stretching his arms out in a cruciform.

Bray couldn't take it anymore. He went downstairs, where Inman, and two assistants from the Baghoomian gallery, Vera Calloway and Helen Traversi, were trying to stay calm. "We tried to take his pulse. His skin was so hot," says Calloway. Baghoomian called the studio just as the paramedics arrived. He was in San Francisco and Helen was forced to act in his stead.

"It was almost like it was some sort of business transaction," says Bray. "They put a tube in his throat and they brought him downstairs. They wouldn't tell us whether he was dead or alive and they took him outside. He had this beautiful bubbling red- white foam coming out of his mouth."

"We all hoped some miracle would happen," recalls Helen, who begins to cry at the memory. Outside on the pavement, a small crowd had gathered in horror and fascination. "I was about to leave on vacation with my wife," says filmmaker Amos Poe, who was a friend of the artist. "We watched as they loaded his body into the ambulance. I saw his father pull up in a Saab. I kept saying to my wife, 'Jean-Michel is dead.' He really lived out that whole destructo legend: Die young, leave a beautiful corpse."

At Cabrini Medical Center, Basquiat was pronounced dead on arrival. The cause, according to the medical examiner's death certificate, would be determined "pending chemical examination." A later autopsy report stated that Basquiat had died from "acute mixed drug intoxication (opiates-cocaine)." In the months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.

Basquiat was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn five days later. His father invited only a few of the artist's friends to the closed-casket funeral at Frank Campbell's; they were outnumbered by the phalanx of art dealers. The heat wave had broken, and it rained on the group gathered at the cemetery to bid Jean-Michel goodbye. The eulogy was delivered by Citibank art consultant Jeffrey Deitch, lending the moment an unintentionally ironic tone.

Blanca Martinez, Basquiat's housekeeper, was struck by the alienated attitude of the mourners. "They were all standing separately, as if it were an obligation," she says. "They didn't seem to care. Some looked ashamed." People began to leave the cemetery before the body was buried. Ignoring the objections of the gravediggers, Martinez tearfully threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin as they lowered it into the grave.

Basquiat's mother, Matilde, looking dazed, approached Baghoomian to thank him for his help to her son during his last days. Gerard Basquiat later admonished his former wife not to talk to the art dealer. The scene was already being set for a bitter battle over the estate of the artist.

The following week, appraisers from Christie's set to work taking inventory of the contents of the Great Jones Street loft: finished and unfinished paintings, other artists' works (including several dozen Warhols and a piece by William Burroughs), a vintage collection of Mission furniture, a closet full of Armani and Comme des Garçons suits, a library of over a thousand videotapes, hundreds of audiocassettes, art books, a carton of the Charlie Parker biography Bird Lives!, several bicycles, a number of antique toys, an Everlast punching bag, six music synthesizers, some African instruments, an Erector set, and a pair of handcuffs.

There were also a number of paintings in warehouses: following Andy Warhol's advice, Basquiat had tried to squirrel some of his work away from his ever-eager art dealers. According to Christie's, Basquiat had left 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171 paintings.

Artist Dan Asher walked by his old friend's loft and was astonished to see a number of Basquiat's favorite things in a Dumpster: his shoes, his jazz collection, a peculiar lamp made out of driftwood, Sam Peckinpah's director's chair. Asher salvaged a few items; he sold the chair to a collector.

It would be another year before Gerard Basquiat ordered a tombstone for his son. But for several weeks after the artist's death, he was commemorated by a small shrine some anonymous fan had placed by his door. Shrouded in lace, it held flowers, votive candles, a picture of Basquiat, some carefully copied prayers, and a Xerox of a David Levine caricature of the artist, complete with a caption: "In an age of limitless options and limiting fears, he still makes poems and paintings to evoke his world."

A formal memorial service was finally held at Saint Peter's Church in Citicorp Center, on a stormy Saturday in November. Despite the rain, wind, and bleak gray sky, several hundred people crowded into the church. Behind the pulpit hung a portrait of the artist as a young man, superimposed on one of his faux-primitive paintings. One by one, his former friends and lovers remembered Basquiat.

Gray, the band with which Jean-Michel had played at the Mudd Club, performed several songs. John Lurie played a saxophone solo. Ingrid Sischy, editor of Interview magazine, read a eulogy. Ex-girlfriends Jennifer Goode and Suzanne Mallouk tearfully read poems. And Keith Haring, AIDS-thin, reminisced about his friend. "He disrupted the politics of the art world and insisted that if he had to play their games, he would make the rules. His images entered the dreams and museums of the exploiters, and the world can never be the same."

Fab 5 Freddy, who knew Basquiat from his old graffiti days, "interpolated" a poem by Langston Hughes. "This is a song for the genius child. Sing it softly, for the song is wild. Sing it softly as ever you can — lest the son get out of hand. Nobody loves a genius child. Can you love an eagle, tame or wild? Wild or tame, can you love a monster, of frightening name? Nobody loves a genius child. Free [sic] him and let his soul run wild."

After the service, everyone went to M.K., the bank-turned- nightclub on lower Fifth Avenue. Owned by Jennifer Goode's brother, it was one of Jean-Michel's favorite places. In fact, it was his last destination the night before he died. He had come to the club looking for Jennifer. Now people stood around the big television set, sipping champagne and watching a flickering black-and-white video of Basquiat. A photographer from Fame magazine snapped pictures of the known and not-so-known: the jewelry designer Tina Chow, and her sister, Adele Lutz, David Byrne's wife. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. It was the perfect send-off for the eighties art star; part opening, part wake.

THE NOT-SO-BRAVE NEW ART WORLD

Basquiat's life spanned an historic shift in the art world, from Pop to Neo-Expressionism, from hip to hype. It was personified by Andy Warhol, the man who was to celebrity what Freud was to the unconscious. When Basquiat was born in December 1960, the Pop decade had just begun. In December 1961, Claes Oldenburg was showing household items in "The Store" down on East Second Street; the following summer Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans poured into America's consciousness when they were put on display in the window of Bonwit Teller and in the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Comic books, television, advertising itself; they all became fodder for the new movement. Mass media was both the new art's subject and its method of dissemination. Even America's landscape — with its Technicolor billboards — was innately Pop. "Pop art took the inside and put it outside, took the outside and put it inside," Warhol wrote in his bible of the era, POPism.

At Leo Castelli's gallery, a bastion of Abstract Expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, and Jasper Johns were showing paintings of modern detritus; bathroom fixtures, Ben Day-dotted bimbos talking in air balloons, American flags, Coke bottles. The Museum of Modern Art's symposium on Pop art, held in December 1962, included an early champion; Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler, a Warhol intimate who would become Mayor Ed Koch's cultural commissioner of New York. Geldzahler would also be instrumental in helping launch Jean-Michel Basquiat's career.

The sixties also brought a whole new breed of collectors into the forefront. Cab-fleet owner Robert Scull and his wife, Ethel, became avid collectors of the new art. One of Scull's passions was to discover the work on his own, buying right out of the artist's studio. The Sculls also liked to socialize with the artists they collected, throwing huge parties at their home on Long Island. This would also be a favorite activity of the nouveau riche collectors of the eighties, who seemed to crave the kind of high produced by being in close proximity to the Artist.

Pop art planted the seeds of the Neo-Expressionist art of the eighties — spawning its aesthetics and hype. Pop is "doing the easiest thing," Warhol had written. "Anybody could do anything." But art was also "just another job," one that could be turned, he soon demonstrated, into a moneymaking machine. Warhol took an American classic, the assembly-line, and applied it to art. He made no bones about it; he called his studio the Factory. Thousands of kids pouring out of art school with Bachelor of Fine Art degrees in the 1970s followed his lead.

They flooded into New York from all over the country in the middle to late 1970s, a new generation of would-be rock stars, artists, dancers, and actors. It was still possible to find cheap apartments in Alphabet City and lower Manhattan. There were few homeless. AIDS didn't exist. The city was an urban frontier, theirs for the taking. Before long, influenced by the Punk movement in England, wildly coiffed young people with multicolored Mohawks and safety-pinned clothes seemed to have taken over the East Village — then still a scary neighborhood full of shooting galleries. CBGB's on the Bowery became a mecca for the new bands: the Ramones, Television, the Talking Heads. Punk-rock boutiques began popping up around St. Mark's Place.

A new Bohemia was in the making, a wild nexus of music, fashion, and art that created a distinctive downtown aesthetic. Punk and the subsequent New Wave movements that quickly took over were a welcome antidote to the sterile Conceptual and Minimalist art that had numbed the art scene during the post-Pop decade, boring both critics and collectors. Even slam-dancing was preferable to the mindless throb of Saturday Night Fever music pulsing in the discos.

Like the sixties, this was a multimedia event, amplified by an English invasion of fashion and music that crisscrossed the Atlantic and was transmuted in Manhattan. It had its drugs of choice; instead of getting stoned on marijuana, speeding on amphetamines, or tripping on LSD, people snorted coke the way the stars in Godard films sucked on cigarettes, or got into cool, strung out heroin. The Sex Pistols replaced the Beatles; cute Paul McCartney became decadent Johnny Rotten, dressed in torn, black rags instead of psychedelic tie-dye. Johnny Rotten gave way to the robotic Devo and Klaus Nomi and the jubilant B-52's.

But there was another, more profound difference. Unlike the sixties, the new cultural movement had no real ideology, no revolution at its core. It was as if the veiled commercialism of such historic sold-out events as the rock musical Hair or Woodstock had been stripped of any pretext of politics. No one raised an eyebrow when ex-radical and Chicago 7 kingpin Jerry Rubin became a stockbroker and began to throw networking parties at the Underground.

There was also no generation gap: from the start, adults began to exploit the obvious possibilities. The late seventies paved the way for the eighties, which celebrated the materialism the sixties had rebelled against. New Wave everything from fashion to graphics was soon inundating Madison Avenue. Fiorucci, on Fifty-seventh Street, became the first uptown boutique to combine the new fashion, music, and art. And anything and everything was considered art.

Perhaps the most blatant exploitation by uptown of the downtown art scene was the marketing of the graffiti movement, which galvanized the art world in the late seventies and was completely passé by 1983. For a brief moment the inner-city artists, whose work had been followed for years by transit cops, not critics, were the darlings of Fifty-seventh Street and SoHo. But the "limousine liberals" — upscale dealers and pseudo radical collectors — soon got bored with baby-sitting and found some new neo movement to market.

Real estate played a major role in the new Bohemia and its shifting boundaries; as one area became gentrified, artists migrated to the next new place. At this point, SoHo, the industrial area south of Houston Street, was still full of textile outlets, floor-sanding companies, and riveters — and lofts that artists could live in under the Artist in Residence (A.I.R.) rental regulations. There were few, if any, residential amenities — Dean and DeLuca was just a tiny little gourmet store. And despite the growing artist population, by Fifty-seventh Street gallery standards, the neighborhood was still practically the Wild West. But by 1979, when Julian Schnabel, one of the first Neo-Expressionist art stars, had his first show at the Mary Boone Gallery on West Broadway, the cross-pollination between the East Village and SoHo was in full bloom. Within the next few years, SoHo would evolve into the Madison Avenue of the downtown scene.

By the end of the seventies, a whole group of downtown clubs had sprung up — from the Mudd Club on White Street in TriBeCa to Club 57 on St. Mark's Place, to Danceteria on Twenty-third Street, raunchy parodies of the fabulous Studio 54 where Warhol and his celebrity cronies — Bianca and Halston and Calvin and Brooke — were hanging out, with one big difference. People didn't just dance and do drugs and hob-nob in these clubs: they were venues for performance art, underground films, New Wave music. The Talking Heads — art students turned musicians — were paradigmatic of the scene. Artists were mixing up their media; music, film, painting, and fashion were recombining in innovative ways. From fashion to music, television was a central reference point for this burgeoning baby-boomer culture.

By early 1979, Jean-Michel Basquiat had established himself as an artistic persona: SAMO, the author of cryptic sayings scrawled on public spaces all over Manhattan — including, strategically, near SoHo's newest galleries. It was the beginning of his art career, and it segued neatly with the "discovery" of graffiti. At the time, it was convenient, but Basquiat had no intention of being lumped into a category with a bunch of kids who bombed trains. In fact, Basquiat was not a true graffiti artist; he didn't work up through the ranks as a "toy," earning the right to leave his tag on certain turf, and he never drew on subways; certainly the stars of Wild Style, Charlie Ahearn's graffiti film of the time, didn't consider Basquiat a real member of their group. Ultimately, Basquiat would be the only black artist to survive the graffiti label, and find a permanent place as a black painter in a white art world.

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Excerpted from Basquiat by Phoebe Hoban. Copyright © 1998 Phoebe Hoban. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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