The 12 rooms’ retrospective devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat by the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (15 october 2010 – 30 january 2011) showed the artist’s development, since 1978 until his death in 1988. It was the first time I sought an exhibition of graffitis under a roof and I was really excited. My first contact with graffiti happened when I worked in the National University Art’s Department (2002-2003) in Bogota. I’ve met a group of hip-hop with breakdancers, rap singers, graffiti writers/painters and dj’s, four practices that made part of a cultural movement. The members of the group were from a shanty town in Bogotá, Ciudad Bolívar, and the project with university was orientated to explore how this kind of expression could be integrated into an education system.
The history of Basquiat is really different. He was not from a shanty town, and graffiti was not for him articulated into a cultural movement. Basquiat was a self-taught artist, but we know that Basquiat’s mother regularly bringing him into museums and encouraged him to draw in the everyday life. The way I see it, museum’s visits with mom were strong bases to develop an artist. So, his recognition into art’s market and history was not fortuitous. It’s amazing the mistrust he can inspire among people who thinks that something borned in streets is destinated to remain in streets, people who express a strong “naturalized” scope of the art world. Basquiat made graffiti, but he doesn’t borns in street: he borns in museums.
The room 2 of the exhibition had some works coming from the exhibition “New York/ New Wave” realized in february 1981 at P.S.1.. I don’t know why organizers of Mamvp’s exhibition (Hergott, Buchhart, Carron de la Carrière) highlighted the fact that Basquiat used a personal signature for the first time into the piece Cadillac Moon and that he has crossed out the “Samo” pseudonym. They consider that it was “a move away from graffiti and an assertion of his new identity as a painter”. The problem is that the “Same Old Shit” or “Samo” pseudonym, a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Díaz was already an artistic affirmation. To illustrate that, some statements featured by Samo could be persuasive : “Samo for the so-called avant-garde” or “Samo as an alternative to playing art with the ‘radical? chic sect on daddy$ funds”. Who’s avant-garde? Who is playing art?
The only thing that I can accept by the moment is that this event marked a step between outdoors and indoors practice, and that’s certainly a meaningful step. What’s the meening?
