Is Basquiat a "Punk?" Part II: Coloured Squares

Basquiat seems to (and has suggested as such) be heavily influenced by a second generation AbEx painter Cy Twombley. This makes for an extraordinary kismet.

One day Twombley is said to have been in his kitchen scribbling on a pad of paper with Willem DeKooning. He was a figurative abstractionist at this point and in a relationship with Rauschenberg, but when DeKooning saw his notes he remonstrated to him that these scribbles were his truth. “This is it. This is you!”

Basquiat, as an extremely well educated, though homeless, Haitian youth could easily distill and was excellently positioned to absorb Twombley’s gesture into a personal street style. The Colombia article profile on Basquiat lacerated him as a Nibelungen: a hypocrite in prostration to Mammon, and yet his work is what it is.

Like all artists he makes work because he needs to and ultimately a greater public takes possession.

The same article quotes Basquiat as having “Derridean ‘ecriture’ and acknowledges that Basquiat is part of a greater postmodern and post-structuralist flood of individualist style. The term post here belies an inherent contradiction: A group in which the individuals bear no resemblance to one another. On the contrary public personal writing is the period. And is the period we presently live in. Call it the Ecriturean period, or Tagtime.

Basquiat was street and the street in NY in the late 70’s and 80’s was provocatively decorated with graffiti.

“Tagging” your name to the sides of buildings is an act of provocation, yes, but most importantly tagging breaks the glass wall of the establishment. The walls that once alienated are now owned, and become the plaza for human interaction and personal competition with other taggers. This act of defiance integrates the alien with the environment and to a community of brothers and brethren.

And so the alien, the punk Basquiat, comments on the rattle in his mind in Hollywood Africans. In three years of super stardom Basquiat dropped 500 canvases. Each one speaking to his personal narrative of the Haitian voodoo child as Samo King at war with the dharmakshetra- here, being the ‘war-field’ of vocation. There is an artlessness to Basquiat’s musings—a flow of intelligence.

Much like in a stream of consciousness bathed in hip hop, Basquiat free writes on the canvas wall he has created: 1940’s Gangsterism. Samo the king… Samo: the same old. The Hollywood walk of fame. Sun glasses and black men in baseball hats is the Hip the Hop. Tobacco is slavery. Paw Paw, RMLZ, RZA and 200 yen, toxic sugar cane. Haiti, the triangle trade. Basquait as Picasso… self-portrait as a heel. Is it plastic space or is it reading? Is it poetry or painting?

It’s Hans Hoffman, but it’s Phillip Guston as well. It’s like reading a re-education of Lauryn Hill and it’s the right thing at the right time.

And better even now, than then.

Cicero said in his seminal work on public speaking Orations that the speaker should appear to have invented the speech with plain spoken vernacular right there on the spot. The hours practiced on craft result not in a delivery that is clean and perfect, but in a delivery that engages with its raw charisma. Though voluminous hours were spent mastering this sense of ease -- This is punk.

Practice is sincerity over authenticity. Practice so the flow naturally comes… Jack Flam quoted Matisse in his essential Matisse on Art:

“Think of the acrobat, who executes his number with ease and an apparent facility. Let’s not lose sight of the long preparatory work which permitted him to attain this result,”

This artlessness is embodied by Basquiat’s command of plastic space and the off-hand sketching of thoughts. He has the pure feel of an athlete in the zone. This is pure intelligence. This is the Colossus Sunny Rollins’ effortless memorization of melody, tone, harmony and a concurrent ad hoc delivery.

However, in popular culture the term “punk” is used most often to refer to an antagonist counter-culture, and typically a ‘white antagonist,’ but I want to use Basquiat to define punk, although I believe it is something of a cultural conflict for a black artist to be punk.

You see to be black and be called “punk” is a derogatory word that means homosexual. And I believe through his associations with gay artists that Basquiat probably discretely understood the subversive intent of being ensconced in the New Wave punk scene.

Punk means something very different for blacks.

It’s an old, old term. It originates from a 17th century English term for ‘prostitute’ (like the Spanish ‘puta’) and like Jazz connotes spunk (note: the word Jazz like spunk is also derived from slang for gyzym). Little Richard described being called punk in the 1930’s in David Ramsey’s Prayers for Richard. By then Punk in the black community simply meant a black male prostitute. And, then punk just became synonymous for the f word-a homosexual. And I don’t mean a stick of wood.

If you dig deep into the fragility of the white punk soul, the ‘Iggy Popness’ of punk also reveals it’s elemental androgyny.

Paul Mooney and Richard Pryor have their own punk issues to contend with (even Aries Spears in his standup video {(see in Part I)} asks if Mooney is a punk—He actually says ‘Is that ni**er gay?’) These are issues that contemporary black comic Kevin Hart artfully pokes and prods. Kevin’s stature is such that no amount of bravado will overcome the essential comedy of a midge jumping up and down attempting to be seen and heard in a crowd of “actual” men.

Though this shouldn’t be a space for a “white” man to discuss the fragility of black masculinity. Charles Stephens here has an excellent article on his personal experience of “punk” name-calling for young black gay men in the Advocate that bears further reading:

All the same, in Richard Pryor’s autobiography he mentions the rape he suffered as a young boy from a neighbor. He remembers receiving this same man and his son in his trailer on a film set many years later. That Pryor so coolly accepted the invitation and sat with his rapist and signed his son’s album is a testament to the depth of Pryor’s cool. Pryor personified, even in his personal life, a sublime cool that permeated every aspect of his life.

“Fuck it.” said the beautiful man. As Richard Pryor said about cunnilingus and everything else that was avant garde for blacks:

“They was wrong about everything else!”

On stage Pryor was a lion.

He was not cool -- He was punk.

He ate white people alive. He ate the hierarchy. He eviscerated Chevy Chase and ate him. He ate hecklers and he ate life. His masculinity as man always under threat; and yet, his braggadocio and bravado was a killer. He showcased his life under threat and then laughed in the face of it.

That black men have so much to fear (just like the rest of us) is what makes Hart and Pryor’s tacit and feral acknowledgement of their own “failure as men” so fucking funny.

“Why do you blacks always hold on to your johnsons” says Pryor in his affected nasal tones.

“You done took everything else, motherfucker.”

And like this Pryor transcends The Safe for The Real… This is punk.

To be black and punk is not the same as to be white and punk.

Basquiat might not be punk in the black sense... (he is not generally known to be a cocksucker). Though his association with Warhol is intriguing.

Just as Hendrix’s style and dress made him a “punk suspect” within the black community. In 1940 Little Richard was also called “a punk” for his sashay gait and lisp.

Ramsey said of these priapic Don Juan punks:

“This was the freak, the circus showman, the vamping diva, the Holy Ghost.”

And I would add: this is Basquiat.

All that said, Hollywood is a space where Black masculinity is tested and displayed.

Basquiat, Hart, Mooney, Pryor, and Spears all acknowledge and subvert that space.

Was Basquiat calling out, in the most refined of ‘Hip-Hop language’ – “playing the dozens” or “insulting the mama” – propping himself up in the classic self-proclaiming fashion of African artists, and shouting down the “Hollywood Africans” and the new “Hip-Hop Millionaires” as slaves? Guston was an idealist, he felt for people. Basquiat also felt for people and for the black experience, but perhaps it was his own self-interest he was absorbed in, as he snorted coke in Paris off framed glass drawings of Picasso.

Perhaps he was just putting himself in the same boat?

Like when Prince carved “Slave” into his face.

Is a Hollywood African an Owned African?

In Part III we talk more about the meaning of Cool and in Part IV we talk more about the meaning of Hip. We are doing this to further define Punk within Derrida’s oppositional theory and why I believe Basquiat is best defined as Punk.

The problem with this whole notion of defining punk is that of course, we are seduced by orthodoxy and dogma. Perhaps like Basquiat himself.