Jean-Michel Basquiat

Vrej Baghoomian, Inc., New York
Bernar Venet, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1992, p. 249, illustrated (on exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian, 1988)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 1st. ed., vol. I, p. 299, illustrated in color and vol. II, p. 145, illustrated in color (on exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, 1988)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Pratt, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 2nd ed., vol. I, p. 365, illustrated in color and vol. II, p. 219, illustrated in color (on exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian Gallery, 1988)
Exh. Cat., Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper, 1997, p. 163, illustrated in color (at Vrej Baghoomian exhibition, 1988)
Tony Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999, p. 288, illustrated in color 
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, 3rd. ed., vol. I, p. 363, illustrated in color and vol. II,  cat. no. 1988.6,  p. 266, illustrated in color and p. 287, illustrated in color (on exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian exhibition, 1988)

Piecing together the vast and eclectic range of cultural influences that went into the creation of The Dingoes That Park Their Brains With Their Gum is like working out the ingredients of a great dish by taste alone: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, a mélange of cultural flavors that combine into the uniquely brilliant and idiosyncratic Basquiat. Largely self-taught, he could draw on a visual vocabulary that was encyclopedic in scope: from African masks to Italian renaissance art and comic strips, advertising billboards to hip-hop and graffiti. With this painting, the title alone seems to be derived from the kooky headings of the comic strip Krazy Kat, such as The Other Side of The Shore of Here or A Katnip Kantata in Key of K, as well as the anagrammatic doubletalk of Jess Collins’ Tricky Cad and nonsense poetry from Edward Lear to Alfred Jarry and the Dadaists.

The three dingoes are set against a field of cerulean blue, an impenetrable surface of intense color that mimics the walls upon which Basquiat drew as SAMO© in the late seventies. Instead of any sense of depth, the figures float forward off this surface of color, preserving the intensity and expressionistic power of graffiti. The dingo itself is a variety of Australian wild dog, an essentially solitary scavenger which is however capable of collaborating to bring down a prey. In Street II (1977), Philip Guston, another artist who actively borrowed from comic strip sources, also chose to depict a stray dog as an icon of life on the street, as he gamely licks abandoned trash as a stream of indifferent feet walk past. Basquiat had experienced life on the streets of Brooklyn after leaving home at the age of eighteen, and may well have chosen dingoes as animal representatives of the vicissitudes of this precarious existence, sometimes chased away and sometimes welcomed with unexpected generosity.

Basquiat may also have been inspired by the tragic history of dingoes, which were subject to one of the largest planned animal exterminations in history during the 1880s, following the introduction of sheep farming into Australia. Dingoes were shot, trapped and poisoned on a massive scale, regardless of whether they were truly wild or the domesticated hunting companions of the native aborigines. Eventually the great Dingo Fence – the longest man-made barrier in the world at the time at 5,320 km - was constructed from coast to coast to keep them out of the fertile south-eastern portion of the continent. Therefore, if foxes are cunning, lions are proud, pigs greedy and mice cowardly, anthropomorphically the dingo would be synonymous with segregation, exclusion and subjugation to an overriding economic interest.

To apply a single interpretation to Basquiat’s idiosyncratic lexicon of signs and symbols would be reductive, but on one level the artist appears to borrow the imagery of the Christian martyrs for his dingoes. The dingo on the left resembles a canine St. Sebastian, pierced by numerous white streaks, scratched onto the surface with a paintstick. Like St. Sebastian, he has apparently survived this onslaught as he points to the box and continues talking, although his comments are censored by “keep frozen”. His eyes are also still round unlike the cartoonish Xs of his two ‘dead’ companions. The third dingo is being burnt alive, like the English Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary, and the middle one has been pierced in similar fashion to the figure on the left.

The violence is alleviated by the wit and irony with which it is depicted. Sketched with the freedom and vigor of a comic book character, the immolated dingo is a reworking of the international packing label for frozen material, a pictogram of a penguin with a bow tie intended to be comprehensible to any language (and yet utterly western in its iconography). To this same figure, Basquiat has added teeth and a capitalist’s top hat to match the penguin/dingo’s tux and is roasting him on a variation of the internationally recognized “flammable material” pictogram: “keep frozen” meets “highly combustible”. It’s humorous, but it also speaks of the irreconcilability of opposing needs, of conservative interests (keep frozen, an elegant gentleman in a tux and top hat) against reactionary activism (the ``highly combustible’’ label). The white heightening on the face of the beige dingo, hinting at a skull, recalls the “Toxic” and “Danger of Death” international shipping labels and the central cube – apparently the bone of contention – is straight out of the “Handle with Care” pictogram (which looks disturbingly close to a pair of hands worshipping the box). By appropriating these shipping labels, a code of symbols that governs the handling of all goods shipped round the world, the artist has tapped into a universal language of warnings and commands that jealously protect property, here represented by a rudimentary box.

The Dingoes That Park Their Brains With Their Gum is a work of wit, intelligence and an acute satiric mind. It illustrates to perfection what makes Basquiat a great artist: the vitality and originality of his drawing style, his heady mix of polemic and introspection and his facility for absorbing sights and images, reworking them in his own myriad mind and then giving the world something vitally new and alive. “Every aspect of his work seemed symbolic of his disdain for conformity, watching him paint, wielding his brush like a weapon” Keith Haring, his friend and fellow artist recalled, explaining why Basquiat was “The supreme poet: every gesture symbolic, every action an event” (in ``Remembering Basquiat’’, Vogue, November 1988).