Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (Slingshot) is full of semiotic power, cultural signification and semantic ingenuity. These bare bones of word and image confidently assert Basquiat's mastery of a powerful and culturally loaded visual lexicon. Executed in 1983, the year Basquiat truly cemented his international reputation, Untitled (Slingshot) is testament to the accomplished and ambitious pictorial intelligence of an artist at the apex of his career. The works produced in late 1982 and throughout the following year demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated project heralded by the significant corpus of highly ambitious works stretched over jutting corner supports and exposed stretcher bars. As though physically dismantling and reconstituting the canon of painting from the inside out, these works communicate an anachronistic, regressive yet wholly innovative painterly codex grounded in an allusion to nascent cultural origins. Within Untitled (Slingshot), childhood symbols, juvenile popular culture and art history are grounded in the New York Downtown scene to deliver a voraciously broad and energetically spontaneous marriage of painting and drawing, image and text.

Distinctly rebellious and nomadic, Basquiat's work is fundamentally rooted within a multilingual pluralism derived from his tripartite ethnicity. Simultaneously possessing a Haitian, Hispanic and African-American heritage, Basquiat was able to channel a multitude of languages, both spoken and visual, to forge a unique form of identity politics in art. Basquiat demonstrated a prodigious ability to recall and synthesize the most arcane of visual stimuli; the resulting works pioneered an entirely new painterly codex rife with allusion. In Untitled (Slingshot), the square canvas and rupturing stretcher bars evoke some kind of primitive shield, while the discarded and antiqued paper of the central red line drawing simultaneously recall the pre-historic cartoons on the cave walls at Lascaux, the red chalk diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, and an allusion to the widely available Henry Dreyfuss' Symbol Source Book which Basquiat exhaustively called upon throughout his short but prolific career. Here Basquiat focuses our attention on the central drawing of a slingshot. Associated with mischievous boyhood, this basic weaponry originated from the earliest slings prevalent in classical mythology and used as hunting tools by ancient Andean civilisations. Teeming with a wealth of art historical and cultural referents, Untitled (Slingshot) is emblematic of crucial re-alignment within the vernacular of contemporary painting.

Ephemerally constructed, loose yet assertively drawn, the central red pictogram underlined by the artist’s archetypal capital print, 'SLINGSHOT', alludes to childhood in both quality of line and subject. Indeed, the boyish confidence and child-like freedom with which Basquiat synchronised a multitude of divergent visual citations belies the ambition and seriousness of his artistic project. As outlined by Dick Hebridge: "In his regressive enactment of childhood forms and memories, in the reduction of line into its strongest, most primary inscriptions, in that peeling of the skin back to the bone, Basquiat did us all a service by uncovering (and recapitulating) the history of his own construction as a black American male" (D. Hebidge, 'Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean Michel Basquiat and the "Dark" Side of Hybridity' in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1993, p. 65). By employing a disarming child-like quality, Basquiat critiques, recapitulates and forges an emergent and totally independent voice for marginalised subjectivity within the meta-narrative of high art.

Famous for walking over his canvases, Basquiat desublimates and critiques the purist forms associated with pantheon of Twentieth Century Modernism. In a nod to Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, Basquiat reveals an inherent formalism in the flurry of monochrome brushwork surrounding the two layers of drawings on paper. However, ripped, roughly pasted on canvas and frantically over-painted like an over painted city wall covering graffiti, Basquiat's cartoon-like draftsmanship on paper subtly unravels any allusion to immaculate and transcendent materiality. Typically candid, modestly effacing and characteristically disregarding of hierarchy, Basquiat described the melding of works on canvas and paper in an interview with Henry Geldzahler in 1983: "I'd been sort of living off this pile of drawings from last year, sticking them on paintings" (J. M. Basquiat in conversation with H. Geldzahler, 'Art from Subways to Soho', 1983, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1999, p. 49). Akin to Basquiat's blunt explanation of these 1983 works, Untitled (Slingshot)'s spare conflation of line, paint, image and text calls forth a debt to the innovation of Cy Twombly's lyrical handwriting and symbolic forms. Though famous for rarely acknowledging artistic influences, Basquiat cited Twombly during the very same year this work was produced: "My favourite Twombly is Apollo and The Artist, with the big 'Apollo' written across it" (Ibid., p. 51). It was during the artist's nascent foray into working on canvas that Basquiat gleaned from Twombly the license to draw, write, scribble, collage and paint simultaneously; by 1983 this had evolved into an authoritative lexica of symbolic marks and subjects nurtured by and immediately derived from the artist's urban existence.

From late 1982 until the end of 1983, Basquiat created some of the most self-assured works of his entire career. Manifest within this period, the works illustrate a heightened integration with the emerging music scene of downtown New York. Embodying the critical attitudes and methods of early Hip-Hop, the works produced in 1983 are permeated with a marked combination of pop culture references and B-Bop allusions to pioneer an aesthetic for the Hip-Hop generation. Interestingly, during the early 1980s the eponymous Detroit based studio band, 'Slingshot', were producing disco/breakbeat mash-ups of Michael Jackson, Steely Dan and songs by AC/DC, the very type of music popularised by the B-boys of Brooklyn's street corners. Moreover, 1983 was the year Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released "The Message", the breakthrough song of the vanguard music scene in Brooklyn which laid the very foundations of present day Hip-Hop. Testament to Basquiat's personification of this cultural movement, Untitled (Slingshot) encompasses the boundary-crossing appropriative methodology of a turntablist in subtly spinning a wealth of narrative. To employ Franklin Sirman's analogy; "like the best Hip-Hop", Untitled (Slingshot) "takes apart reassembles the work that came before it... it dismantles its historical precedents by showing mastery over their techniques and styles, and puts them to new uses, in which the new becomes the final product layered over the past" (F. Sirmans, 'In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture', in: Exh. Cat., New York, Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat, 2005, p. 92).