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                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 88

ART

The Purple Haze of Hype


By ROBERT HUGHES

    EXHIBIT: "JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT"
    WHERE: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
    WHAT: More than 90 paintings, drawings, constructions and
othar media

    THE BOTTOM LINE: The show recapitulates the overhyping of
a limited '80s talent.

    The exhibition of the works of the late Jean-Michel
Basquiat that opened at Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American
Art last month is billed as a retrospective. It does cover the
artist's working life: about nine years. But since it aims to
present the deceased as the black Chatterton of Postmodernism
-- the "marvellous boy," cut off in his prime by a drug overdose
at the age of 27 -- it more resembles a parody of a funeral
rite, performed over a slender talent encased in a sarcophagus
grossly too large for it. There had to be room in that box for
the 1980s as well.

    First, the eulogy by the museum director, David Ross. "Who
killed Basquiat, ask the artist's friends and foes alike," Ross
writes. "Art dealers? The white world? Self-serving collectors?
The excesses of the '80s?" And while we're at it, why not toss
in the CIA, the military-industrial complex, or little green
men -- oops, vertically challenged other-pigmented males --
from Mars? Perhaps some imitator of Oliver Stone is waiting in
the wings to do just that: there are truckloads of Basquiat
works in Beverly Hills. The plain truth -- that Basquiat killed
Basquiat, that nobody but he was sticking the needles in his arm
-- is not going to get much airing at this solemn farce of
heroic victimology.

    Up come the mourners: six catalog essayists, rending their
garments and mangling their syntax. Their rhetoric is sublime,
beyond parody. "Since slavery and oppression under white
supremacy are visible subtexts in Basquiat's work," intones one,
"he is as close to a Goya as American painting has ever
produced." "The paintings are alive and speak for themselves,''
cries another, "while Jean remains wrapped in the silent purple
toga of Immortality." A third, between decorative quotes from
Michel Foucault, extols Basquiat's "punishing regime of
self-abuse" as part of "the disciplines imposed by the principle
of inverse asceticism to which he was so resolutely committed."
Resolute commitment to inverse asceticism, apparently, is p.c.
for addiction.

    The acme of vapid pretension is reached by the former art
dealer Klaus Kertess, who thinks Basquiat's drug addiction was
in some large way socially therapeutic. "Heroin," Kertess
opines, "seems to have played some role in the formation of the
discontinuous maps of mental states that are his paintings and
drawings. Heroin seems to have helped him fuse his line with his
nerve endings as they responded to, parodied and sought to heal
a disturbed culture."

    It appears that everyone did everything to Basquiat,
turning him into the all-purpose, inflatable martyr figure of
recent American art. Mainly, they loaded him with more money
than he knew what to do with and more praise than he could
handle; the art market, like the ceiling of the Emperor
Elagabalus, opened and smothered him in tons of roses. Some
martyrdom.

    The malignant Other -- racial, cultural, critical, you
name it -- bulks so large in this hagiographic exercise that
one is surprised to find that the catalog nowhere mentions the
one thing that Others did do for Basquiat in the last couple of
years of his life: namely, get his pictures going when he was
too zonked to do so himself. This operation was performed
during the final six months by an artist named Rick Prol, at $15
an hour. Of course, artists have long used studio assistants.
But under the circumstances, it seems hypocritical to gush
about Basquiat's last works in terms of the uniqueness of his
hand, its emotional urgency and so forth.

    This show provides plenty of evidence of Basquiat's
graphic industry, but not much that he ever tried to deal with
the real world through drawing. He had no idea how to discipline
himself into making a creative accord between its forms and the
marks on paper or canvas. He just scribbled and jotted, picking
up stylistic pointers from older artists he admired, among them
Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet. He could only rehearse his own
stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for "head" or "body," over and
over again.

    Consequently, although Basquiat's images look quite vivid
and sharp when one first sees them, and though from time to
time he could produce an intriguing passage of spiky marks or
a brisk clash of blaring color, the work quickly settles into
the visual monotony of arid overstylization. Its relentless
fortissimo is wearisome. (An exception is some of the works on
paper, which attain a delicacy of placement and interval absent
from the paintings.)

    Much is made of Basquiat's use of sources -- vagrant
code-symbols, quotes from Leonardo or African bushman art or
Egyptian murals. But these are so scattered, so lacking in
plastic force or conceptual interest, that they seem merely the
result of browsing and doodling rather than looking -- homeless
representation. For polemical purposes, any rough sketch of a
cartoon African carrying a crate next to a white with a topee
and a gun can be turned into a "devastating" indictment of
colonialism -- but this doesn't make Basquiat into an artist
with an articulate social vision. As for his poetic effusions
and snatches of writing, they are mostly fey blither.

    The life was so sad and truncated, and the art that came
out of it so limited, that it seems unfair to dwell on either.
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? Basquiat had talent --
more than some of the young painters who were his
contemporaries, though this may not be saying much. The trouble
was that it did not develop; it was frozen by celebrity, like
a deer in a jacklight beam. In the '80s Basquiat was made a cult
figure by a money-glutted, corrupt and wholly promotional
art-marketing system. He died in 1988, a year before the bull
market collapsed and took his prices down with it. Now the same
system, bruised but essentially unchanged, is trying to
revalidate those prices in hard times by strumming on the theme
that Victimhood Is Powerful. What has descended on Basquiat is
not the "silent purple toga of Immortality" -- it's the loud
purple haze of hype, all over again.