Jean-Michel Basquiat

Robert Miller Gallery, New York
Sale: Christie's, London, Contemporary Art, 3 December 1992, Lot 71
Private Collection

Brussels, Galerie Eric van de Weghe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1992

Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kyoto 1992
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, Vol. I, p. 101, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, Vol. I, p. 93, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, Vol. II, p. 160, no. 4, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a stable thin crack to the paint where the canvas joins the wood support visible in the bottom left and right corners. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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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. Indeed, during this year Basquiat was prestigiously invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial, establishing the 23 year old artist as the youngest ever to have contributed. 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 to which the present work belongs. 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 creolized and grounded in the New York Downtown scene to deliver a voraciously broad, energetically spontaneous and complex cultural diaspora within the minimally assertive talismanic 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. In simultaneously possessing a Haitian, Hispanic and African-American heritage, Basquiat was able to channel sophisticatedly a multitude of languages, both spoken and visual, to forge a vanguard dialogue of identity politics at the forefront of the postmodern and postcolonial contemporary moment. Herein, Basquiat demonstrated a unique and prodigious ability spontaneously to recall and synthesize the most arcane of visual stimuli as a means to pioneer a new painterly code within the monolith of Art History. Concurrently redolent within Untitled (Slingshot) , the square canvas and rupturing stretcher bars evoke some kind of primitive shield, while the disguarded and antiqued paper of the central red line drawing synchronously recalls the pre-historic cartoons on the cave walls as Lascaux, the red chalk diagrams of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and an allusion to the widely available Henry Dreyfuss' Symbol Source Book exhaustively called-upon throughout the artist's immense oeuvre. Here Basquiat focuses our attention on an icon of a slingshot; associated with mischievous boyhood this basic weaponry is historically derived from the very earliest slings prevalent within classical mythology and used as hunting tools by ancient Andean civilisations, particularly the Incas. Teeming with a wealth of art historical and cultural referents channelled through an allusion to childhood and primitive culture, Untitled (Slingshot) is emblematic of a significatory re-alignment within the vernacular of contemporary painting.

 

Ephemerally constructed, loose yet assertively drawn, the central red pictogram underlined by the word 'SLINGSHOT' scrawled in the artist's archetypal capital print, confers an emblematic allusion 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" (Dick Hebidge, 'Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean Michel Basquiat and the "Dark" Side of Hybridity' in: Exhibition Catalogue, 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 work and physically desublimating the totemic aura surrounding the work of art as an object, Basquiat critiques the minimal iconicism 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 a 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" (the artist cited in: Henry Geldzahler, 'Art from Subways to Soho', 1983, in: Exhibition Catalogue, 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 but distilled with the symbolic expedience of an advertising logo. 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" (the artist cited in: Ibid., p. 51). Indeed 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 to 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 a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk or total artwork for the Hip-Hop generation. Interestingly, during the early 1980s the eponymous Detriot 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. Indeed, 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" (Franklin Sirmans, 'In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture', in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat, 2005, p. 92).