This post records my visit to an exhibition in Holland which contained a key part of my past, the Times Square Show. That experience I relected on in my memoir "Art Worker", which was built in part on these Art Gangs blog posts.
PIC: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s cover for “Rammellzee vs. K Rob” single, called the most valuable hip-hop record collectible; Red Bull did a retrospective of Rammellzee’s work in 2018, and produced an amazing 9-minute video for it
We recently trekked to Heerlen, a Dutch town not far from the touristic old city of Maastricht, to see "Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene." The curators chose to recollect the Times Square Show of 1980, Jean-Michel’s first public art exhibition, so like several other Colab artists, I had a piece in the exhibition. It’s a collaboration with Jean-Michel, actually, albeit somewhat inadvertent.
Why was the show in Heerlen? It was not clear. The city isn’t so exciting. It’s basically a busted mining town whose leaders have made a long series of bad urban decisions.
It has a deep history. The Romans built a camp there called Coriovallum in order to control a road junction, and the town was an agrarian center for centuries, bouncing often into the hands of various rulers. A coal mining boom at the turn of the last century brought climate-killing prosperity to the town, and they decided to raze their historic center. That is why tourists go to Maastricht. When coal got cheaper elsewhere starting in '65 (hooray global capitalism!), Heerlen lost 60,000 jobs.
As it seems was their habit, the city then demolished its major industrial landmarks, the tallest mine chimneys in Europe, called -- "Lange Lies" (tall Liz), and "Lange Jan" (tall John). They have a 12th century church and defensive tower (a combination you see also in Maastricht), but it was weirdly renovated inside into a blank nothing in the 1950s. A garden dwarf-style pilgrim statue smirks from a niche over the entrance.
I don't mean at all to laugh at Heerlen... but the author Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) was born there, which tells you a lot. I love his writing, but it is seriously crazy and bleak.
They do have one jewel. The museum is housed inside an old department store, the Modehuis Schunck. It's now called the Glass Palace, built by Frits Peutz, and it is a startling building for 1935.
The restaurant on top of it is Michelin rated, and served me a “speciaal Basquiat-bier”, an IPA, which was, like the Glaspalast, startlingly good.
”Same Old Beer” by Brouwerij De Fontein at Brasserie Mijn Streek, Heerlen
I’ll have to read the catalogue to discover the special relevance Jean-Michel Basquiat’s story had for Heerlen, but it was clearly a big deal there. The museum did many special events and education projects around the show during its run. Banners were hung everywhere along the shopping street, and during our time in the museum troops of schoolchildren came through.
As an art tourist parachuting in from a global city, my main interest was in how the show dealt with “my” history. But still I wonder: Why Basquiat here?
Most of the art in the Times Square Show of 1980 dealt directly with urban themes. What did Heerlen get from this? Just a flash in the national pan? (The Queen visited.) Or some important cultural stimulus? A short plug for the catalogue says the NYC of the ‘70s and ‘80s “mirrors the post-industrial character of the city of Heerlen, the vacancies and drug problems that followed the region’s economic downturn” in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Hmmm...
Marc Miller was hired as a consultant for the show, and he promoted the extensive inclusion of work by Colab artists from the Times Square Show. Marc told me the curators had intended to include Dutch artists influenced by Basquiat and the graffiti movement. They didn’t. Maybe, fearing for their walls, the powers that be put the ‘ixnay’ on that part of the show. (I’ve seen that happen before.) Or they ran out of room.
There’s a monitor playing Manfred Kirchheimer’s 1981 documentary film Stations of the Elevated, the first to document the graffiti movement in New York City. Jean-Michel’s relations with graffiti artists like Rammellzee, the Iconoclastic Panzerist prophet of Afro-Futurism (1960?-2010), who dressed like a Japanese transformer and had his major art career in Europe are not explored. Al Diaz’s role in SAMO©, Basquiat’s first art project, is not mentioned. Diaz has recently revved up his art career after a strong showing in the Howl! Happening exhibition last year “Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat.” That show coincided with the release of Sara Driver’s film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of J-MB which was playing in the gallery. The film makes the case for the show, as various NYC people speak of the artist, like Lee Quiñones, who says, “He knew he only had a short time.” Diaz said the same.
It was fascinating to see the documents of the apartment J-MB shared with Alexis Adler in her photos of Jean-Michel and his objects, plus some drawings and texts he left her during the years. Not long after, he was hanging with other graffiti artists at Art-Rite editor Edit DeAk’s loft apartment in Soho, as a tagged-up wall excavated some years ago proved.
With his neo-expressionist cryptograms of American mestizo identity, Basquiat marked a major changing of the guard in “American art.” I was dismissive when Stefan Eins called Colab an art movement. Fashion/Moda (Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА), Eins’ project in the South Bronx, was a crucial pivot point during the late ‘70s-early ‘80s. But I get it now. “Colab” is not just the historic organization with the generic name (in full, Collaborative Projects, Inc.). It is a description of what was going on then, and in a way generally in post-modern art – multimedia experimentation with social relevance, and artists working together fluidly between projects, i.e., artists like musicians like filmmakers. All of this was wrapped up in NYC in the '60s – I am boiling it together with Fluxus, an important radical precursor movement with which Eins himself was involved -- '70s, and '80s, a multi-cultural anti-academic bohemia. So art historians in the future can talk about "colab" with the now-canonical Jean-Michel and David Wojnarowicz, both of whom did all of that.
(I’ve been blogging about Wojo’s work in anticipation of the big show coming to Reina Sofia museum in Madrid this May ‘19. One of the posts includes a consideration of the Times Square Show in relation to him.)
More specifically about the show, one thing I think they missed is Basquiat’s clear and close involvement with fashion, and the experimental radical clothing designers and marketing of the day. He was making t-shirts in Alexis Adler’s apartment. At the Times Square Show, after he left me in the lobby to deal with the imbroglio over the sign, he went directly upstairs to see the girls in the Fashion Lounge. He sprayed at least one mural on the wall there, and maybe he helped Mary Lemley and the others paint up some of the 500-pound bale of clothing that comprised the principal part of that installation. Sophie Vieille, a participant in that installation, tells the story on the website of the Hunter College exhibition, “Times Square Show Revisited” (2012).
Photo of 'rediscovered' wall painting made by graffiti artists visiting the late Edit DeAk's loft on Wooster Street during the late '70s, early '80s.
Jean-Michel’s work can be seen briefly in Andrea Callard’s slide show record of the TSS, which was clicking away in the gallery. It seems rather indifferent.
The perspicacious art critic Anthony Haden-Guest wrote of this fashion connection in an article for Vanity Fair not long after Jean-Michel's death, a pre-digital text now online. Haden-Guest tracks Jean-Michel into the lair of Andy. the premier "sellout" artist he most admired who was running a magazine dedicated to fashion and media celebrities, Interview.
"Visiting the actual Factory, he sold Warhol a few more Xeroxes for a dollar. Warhol gave him four or five cans of expensive Liquitex paint, which he slathered on more clothing and sold at Patricia Field’s shop on Eighth Street.
"Basquiat was by then a natural choice to star in a movie about downtown called The New York Beat. It featured Debbie Harry, was financed by Rizzoli, directed by the photographer Edo (later questioned in the [Andrew] Crispo [murder] case), written by Glenn O’Brien, and based loosely on Basquiat’s own life. ‘It never came out,’ O’Brien says, ‘because a couple of the Rizzolis went to the slammer.’"
The rest of the article is a harrowing read. I can’t go on with it. Basically, Jean-Michel was sucked up into the tornado of international jet set new wave art culture business. And, like his jazz heroes, he drugged himself up to get through it all. Which finally killed him.
I read Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (2004), which was dark enough. Haven’t yet tackled Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat (2014) about his relationship with Suzanne Malouk. It’ll just put new perspective on my last sight of him, in an elevator in the Cable Building, riding up to work on his last NYC show. He was puffed up, looking woebegone and dazed. We didn’t say anything to each other.
Every step of his whirlwind trip to fame and death reveals some important aspect of the superheated moment when the art market went global.
Like David Wojnarowicz, Jean-Michel Basquiat is a kind of prism of his moment. And, like Wojo, Basquiat as a cultural figure represents the forceful emergence of a previously minoritarian position in American-Western art. Both were in their way history painters, the highest genre in the classic hierarchy of kinds of painting. I’m talking deep art history, what – climate apocalypse aside – can remain of these artists in 100 years. Basquiat was more. He was the Jackie Robinson of the western art market, the post-colonial ice breaker for waves of artists of African heritage who had previously been frozen out of the mainstream. Today his work commands some of the highest auction prices, long eclipsing stars like Jasper Johns.
As a prism of his times, Basquiat’s work and importance remains available for what we all, like School of Paris around Picasso, can get out of him, reflections of the intense interest in his work and story. It’s great for Colab, and for the artists of the Times Square Show, who can hitch a ride on the back of the great black whale.
LINKS
"Basquiat: The Artist and His New York Scene", Schunck, Heerlen, NL. Feb-June, 2019 https://basquiat.schunck.nl/
Heerlen – “It has a deep history”
I took all that from “Heerlen,” Wikipedia in English
Ashleigh Kane, “The story of SAMO©, Basquiat’s first art project”, Dazed Digital, September 2017
http://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/37058/1/al-diaz-on-samo-and-basquiat
"Zeitgeist: The Art Scene of Teenage Basquiat" at Howl! Happening Gallery, 2018
https://www.howlarts.org/event/zeitgeist-the-art-scene-of-teenage-basquiat-2/
Boom For Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat - Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUsy5RObL2U
the writer of this blog flashes by in this trailer with a building shape on his head
Stream Sara Driver’s film here
https://www.boomforrealfilm.com/
"recently excavated tagged-up wall"
“151 Wooster: Where The Basquiat At?”, by Sheila, Gawker, December 2007
https://gawker.com/334080%2F151-wooster-where-the-basquiat-at
Historic graffiti mural discovered in Manhattan building, December 2007
http://grafarc.org/news/2007/12/historic-graffiti-mural-discovered-in-manhattan-building/
Stefan Eins
on Wikipedia
artist’s website – http://www.oneunoeins.com/
Fashion 时装 Moda МОДА
is on Wikipedia
the “imbroglio over the sign”
The story of the collaborative sign board I made with Basquiat is briefly told in the Schunck exhibition catalogue. It’ll be more fully described in my next book – Some Title TK from Some Publisher.
“Times Square Show Revisited” - Sophie Vieille interview; Hunter College CUNY art gallery, 2012
www.timessquareshowrevisited.com/accounts/sophie-vieille.html
Anthony Haden-Guest, “Burning Out,” Vanity Fair November 1988
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1988/11/jean-michel-basquiat
classic hierarchy of kinds of painting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_genres
Thanks for the lowdown! I remember they got the glass replaced in the store front and I thought it would never happen. "Times" was good.
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