Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music

I go to see Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on a Saturday, and it is a scene. The place is packed with people. There are throngs, queues, strained necks, jostling, some impatience. Maybe that last descriptive is my own, as this is not the atmosphere that I would normally covet when viewing an art show. Because I’m an introvert, art and I have agreed to convene on more solitary terms. But above all, palpable in this many-chambered exhibition: excitement. A buzzing; the din of voices competing with music overhead; nostalgia more laced with energy than with loss; unrequited desire; clumsy lust. Because all of us in these rooms, like many of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contemporaries, want to be close to him. Years after his death on August 12, 1988, at age twenty-seven, we remain seduced by his brilliance, his “close-to-the-edgeness.” Young deaths are classically tragic; sometimes heroic. “Royalty, heroism, the streets,” Basquiat once replied when asked what his subject matter was. The triumvirate seems rather autobiographical, and the insistence of these themes and the conviction of their expression conjures the stage for an energetic ambience that the audience completes. Basquiat is an artist whom I consider in volumetric terms. Here I am not referring to his prolificity — he produced roughly a thousand drawings and a thousand paintings in his short life — rather, “volume” for me speaks to the way he filled spaces; how he held or altered time; the way he affected place; the way he set the tenor in a room; how he was always moving; how he defined a moment; how historic he was from the beginning. The voracious way he consumed information, facts, data, comments, slogans, and mantras and then could splinter these items so that they took on different shapes and sounds made his oeuvre some great onomatopoeic critique on capitalism and race with a sense of urgency that would come to be both a statement of that moment and a harbinger of things to come. A harbinger of things now arrived. Jean-Michel BasquiatSeeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, exhibition view,Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2022.Photo: courtesy of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Beyond making astute predictions about the insatiable appetite of capitalism, Basquiat also foretold the force of soundbites, the danger of description taken out of context; he both rejoiced in and cautioned against the precipice of words as they dissolve into noise; he provoked dissonance and revelled in seriality, which are the machinations of the digital world and the exhaust of social media. In fact, Basquiat’s feverish pacing in amassing otherwise disparate media that often resulted in a collision of context could be seen as an analogue bridge to digital social media. His favourite art historian was Robert Farris Thompson, who was a specialist on African and Afro-Atlantic cultures and whom Basquiat commissioned to write an essay for the catalogue of his show at Mary Boone in 1985. In this essay, Thompson proclaims, “Basquiat is not afraid of the hi-tech wolf. He sees enormous fun and potency. He sees ways of rhythmizing phonetic writing, literary allusion, and chromatic structure all at once.” There is indeed a sense of the “all at once” at Seeing Loud — there is plenty of fun and potency, and everything else that Thompson names, here. For all the things that did work in the show — the vestiges of SAMO, the impressive collection of Polaroids of Basquiat and his glamorous friends, including Debbie Harry, Keith Haring, and Madonna; the samples of early collages, such as the Anti-Baseball Card Product series that he made with Jennifer Stein in the late 1970s; the music videos in which he played cameo roles; the music videos representative of the birth of hip-hop, clips of interviews with Glenn O’Brien on the set of TV Party; the reggae, jazz, and hip-hop presiding each in their own room; the black-and-white photos of his band Gray (the ones titled The band Gray, 1980, taken by Marina D. are particularly fabulous for their dissonance of posing); the paintings (what can I say? When you stand next to any Basquiat painting, you sense the molecules in between you and it, agitating); the journals that were torn apart and each page framed (marvellous: did you know that uppercase “E” by the hand of Basquiat are three horizonal lines one on top of the other, untethered by the vertical line at the letter’s leading edge?), the collaged boxes, the drawings, the posters and album covers, the total proliferation of things and sound — the augmented reality app that claims to offer visitors “enriched content” pushes the stimulus threshold past the bounds of the human ability to metabolize multi-media information all at once (or at least, it surpassed mine). Jean-Michel BasquiatThe band Gray performing at Hurrah, 1979.Photo: © Nicholas Taylor, courtesy ofMontreal Museum of Fine Arts Although music, as the title of the show reveals, is its main impetus, the exhibition has an appealing cartographic order to it. It is an archive made to be travelled, and as one moves through it, there is a feeling that a lot of time and space is being quickly covered, which is not unlike the way Basquiat lived. The spatial/temporal logic of the show is thus: 1) New York/New Waves; 2) Basquiat and Hip-Hop; 3) Seeing Sound: Sonic Images and Visual Noise; 4) Jazz; 5) Area: Art and Amid the Hustle of New York Nights; 6) Basquiat and the Music of the Black Atlantic; 7) Eroica: Heroism, Music and Memory. Most of the rooms are busy with material, with the notable exception of the last room, where visitors are provided benches, open space, and some gentle jazz to contemplate Eroica I and Eroica II, large paintings he made in the year of his death. The musical inferences in these paintings are both direct and metaphorical — Eroica (“heroic” in Italian) was the name of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, which he had originally dedicated to Napoleon but then renamed when Napoleon declared himself the Emperor of France in 1804. Jean-Michel BasquiatEroica I & Eroica II, 1988, collection Nicola Erni.Photo: Reto Pedrini, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Enraged, Beethoven tore off the title page of the composition and retitled it Eroica. There are vestiges of this cleaving in Basquiat’s diptych, which was originally made on one sheet of paper and then torn into two in a gesture of irreversible separation. With the repetition of “man dies” represented in both symbol and word, the paintings’ register shifts along a temporal continuum — what once was premonitory is now elegiac. This last room is made for remorse, for mourning. For want of a different ending. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tracy Valcourt

Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music

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