Revisiting Basquiat’s Life and Death in the Fast Lane

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a New York artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. He died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at age 27. He was rarely seen on the West Coast, so the current display of his works on paper and poems by his friend Kevin Young will be an eye-opener for some viewers.

Titled “Two Cents,” it’s a traveling show visiting the gallery at Otis College of Art and Design. It was organized by Amy Cappellazzo for the gallery she directs at Florida’s Miami-Dade Community College. She contributed an essay to its particularly smart small catalog, which also includes thoughts by Elizabeth Alexander and John Yau.

Basquiat started his art life as a formally untrained graffiti writer. He worked the streets until art luminaries with the heft of an Andy Warhol brought him in from the cold. For the 10-year trajectory of his little comet he got more than his allotted 15 minutes of notoriety.

Since his death he’s had the misfortune of being turned into a cult figure. Blown out of any reasonable proportion by a full-dress retrospective at the Whitney Museum and a feature film directed by Julian Schnabel, Basquiat has been made pop-mythic. This puts his art in the unenviable position of inviting a polarized reaction.

If we didn’t live in a society quite so hysterical it might sound reasonable to say that Basquiat’s brief life, like that of the Viennese proto-Expressionist Egon Schiele, ended too soon to allow fulfillment of great promise--and let it go at that.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of graffiti-oriented artists whose work is as interesting and promising as Basquiat’s. We pay attention to Basquiat less because he was a superior artist than because he became a media phenomenon. Since there’s widespread belief today that being successful is as good as being good, the work is probably most productively examined to ask if that’s true.

The exhibition gives Basquiat an excellent chance to be himself. It consists mainly of sketchbook pages full of casual visual and written notations. There are a few small, informal paintings. If any sensation emerges from the whole, it’s a kind of lighthearted desperation. It seems like the work of someone thrust into a situation for which he feels unprepared but determined to cope.

In one characteristically untitled set, the artist ruminates on “a penal colony with cigarettes, girls and dancing.” Was the artist fooling around or expressing the way the art world felt to him?

Repeatedly Basquiat produces sheets with hip, lyrical surfaces that, on examination, look like he’s giving himself a cram course in Western civilization. One particularly pungent page is festooned with sketches of everything from Picasso’s bicycle-seat bull’s head to the Venus of Willendorf, Stonehenge, Homer and the ancient pyramids.

The sense of a man in a controlled frenzy of self-teaching comes across again in paintings rendered like chalkboards, white on black. One developed to the point of showing black skulls and aggressive, joyous Abstract Expressionist markings that suggest just how striking a hybrid of street and museum art Basquiat might have made, vouchsafed the time. The skulls, a regular motif, suggest how persistently death was on the young artist’s mind.

A small painting of a zonked-out guy in the city streets is certainly more vital and gritty than, say, late Dubuffet, but it lacks the veteran’s structural lean. The largest painting on view, “Toxic,” tells the downside of the story. Mainly it’s composed of collaged sketches like those on view. The central figure of a black man wearing only a silly fedora shows the artist freezing up in front of a big canvas.

Poor Kevin Young’s poems tend to get marginalized by Basquiat’s reputation and visually flashier medium. Given a chance, Young is very impressive. His verse tends to a kind of short-lined staccato, unrhymed rap scrawled on walls, plastic sheeting or even in the form of a telegram. They’re like lists of definitions for street argot that slowly blossom into sensuous and biting insights.

“Eroica,” for example, begins “Beam: to look / Bean: to sun / Bat: an old old / Woman / Man Dies / Man Dies.”

The poems are often obviously based on Basquiat’s work, in this case his word-and-image painting, “Eroica II.” It employs the same list motif, including such humorous definitions as “Banana: Attractive Light Skin Black Female,” but against a background repeating “Man Dies” like a body count. The work is from 1988--surely the artist’s prediction of his own demise.

So, evidently, being successful without quite being good can kill you. In a romantic way Basquiat was heroic in undertaking to discover that. Only the act of saying, “Sorry, I’m, not ready,” would have been more courageous. In this culture that’s practically a sin.

* Otis College of Art and Design, 2401 Wilshire Blvd.; to Oct. 19, closed Sundays and Mondays; (213) 251-0555.