Review
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
by Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters Film and TV Editor
I Just Was
“I usually put a lot down, then I take a lot away, then I put some more down and I take some more away, so it’s like a constant editing process, usually.” As he describes his painting process for an interviewer in 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat shifts in his chair. He doesn’t look ill at ease, exactly, maybe vaguely impatient. The answer suggests that he’s been asked this question before, and that his simplified response serves a purpose, namely, a celebrity’s usual self-promotion.
A few minutes later, the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child offers a little more of this same interview. This time, Marc H. Miller wonders about a rumor he’s heard, that when he was younger, the artist was locked in a basement in order to paint. Now Basquiat is less accommodating. “I was never locked anywhere,” he says. “If I was white, they’d just say I was an artist in residence.”
With these two moments, Tamra Davis’ film, a loving and respectful meditation on its subject, lays out its limits, the stories it can repeat and the truths it can only guess at. Some of these stories are well known: he was a genius child, ahead of his time, and also “too fragile for this world,” as Madonna described him. He loved women or misread them. He challenged or was foiled by barriers in the art world, he was intuitive and authentic, or he was acclaimed too fast and too easily. In all versions he died too young, at 27, of a heroin overdose, alone, undone by his father’s disapproval or by Andy Warhol’s death, or maybe by his endless frustrations with the “art world.”
The other stories, less familiar but increasingly visible in his work and life, have to do with his blackness. The gallery scene and fine art industry, the judgments by curators and collectors, during the 1980s was overwhelmingly white, even more than today. And even when he was embraced, he was different and observed, unknown and desired. If he used his status as “outsider,” he was self-aware, too, a kid who grew up in New York and made art based on his experience.
Davis conducted her own interview with Basquiat, a longtime friend, in 1986, and has only now brought out the film, 22 years after he died of a heroin overdose. The interview itself is relaxed, a series of questions and answers that suggests both his frankness and perspicacity, his attention to the behaviors and expectations of those who admired, advocated, and exploited him. While Davis films, their mutual friend Becky Johnston asks Basquiat, about responses to his work. He smiles a little and shakes his head, noting that most reviews of his work were “about my ‘personality.’” Johnston repeats the word from offscreen, as he explains: “They’re just racist, most of these people. They have this image of me, wild man, wild monkey man…”
Read the Full Review @ Popmatters
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
by Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters Film and TV Editor
I Just Was
“I usually put a lot down, then I take a lot away, then I put some more down and I take some more away, so it’s like a constant editing process, usually.” As he describes his painting process for an interviewer in 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat shifts in his chair. He doesn’t look ill at ease, exactly, maybe vaguely impatient. The answer suggests that he’s been asked this question before, and that his simplified response serves a purpose, namely, a celebrity’s usual self-promotion.
A few minutes later, the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child offers a little more of this same interview. This time, Marc H. Miller wonders about a rumor he’s heard, that when he was younger, the artist was locked in a basement in order to paint. Now Basquiat is less accommodating. “I was never locked anywhere,” he says. “If I was white, they’d just say I was an artist in residence.”
With these two moments, Tamra Davis’ film, a loving and respectful meditation on its subject, lays out its limits, the stories it can repeat and the truths it can only guess at. Some of these stories are well known: he was a genius child, ahead of his time, and also “too fragile for this world,” as Madonna described him. He loved women or misread them. He challenged or was foiled by barriers in the art world, he was intuitive and authentic, or he was acclaimed too fast and too easily. In all versions he died too young, at 27, of a heroin overdose, alone, undone by his father’s disapproval or by Andy Warhol’s death, or maybe by his endless frustrations with the “art world.”
The other stories, less familiar but increasingly visible in his work and life, have to do with his blackness. The gallery scene and fine art industry, the judgments by curators and collectors, during the 1980s was overwhelmingly white, even more than today. And even when he was embraced, he was different and observed, unknown and desired. If he used his status as “outsider,” he was self-aware, too, a kid who grew up in New York and made art based on his experience.
Davis conducted her own interview with Basquiat, a longtime friend, in 1986, and has only now brought out the film, 22 years after he died of a heroin overdose. The interview itself is relaxed, a series of questions and answers that suggests both his frankness and perspicacity, his attention to the behaviors and expectations of those who admired, advocated, and exploited him. While Davis films, their mutual friend Becky Johnston asks Basquiat, about responses to his work. He smiles a little and shakes his head, noting that most reviews of his work were “about my ‘personality.’” Johnston repeats the word from offscreen, as he explains: “They’re just racist, most of these people. They have this image of me, wild man, wild monkey man…”
Read the Full Review @ Popmatters
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