VIFF Review: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Vancity Theatre
Sunday, October 3 2010 11:00am

In the universe it is the biggest stars that shine the brightest, but also the briefest. In the New York art world of the 1980's Jean-Michel Basquiat was that star. From runaway teenager graffiti artist on the streets of New York to collaborating with Andy Warhol, his career spanned less than a decade before his untimely death at age 27 from drug overdose.

His notoriety as graffiti artist SAMO© gave him breaks with art dealers who saw something in his subversive texts and they gave him the opportunity to paint in studio rather than on the streets. Over time, he would produce thousands of paintings and drawings. His style was deceptively simple and child-like in appearance, but incorporated a wide ranging knowledge and understanding of art and the world around him. Basquiat voraciously absorbed media from television, music, art, books and magazines and he channelled that onto the canvas.

A boyishly handsome black man, he lived the high life with contemporaries of the New York scene, like Madonna, Keith Haring, Debbie Harry, and Andy Warhol, but was still subject to racial indignities like being unable to hail a cab. While he could tap his inner child to produce his art, his inner child was unprepared for the pressures of the art world. Tragically he would emulate his musical (Charlie Parker) and literary (William S. Burroughs) heroes before him, and take to heroin to enhance his experience and output.

Friend and director Tamra Davis weaves together an extensive interview recorded two years before his death, along with recent interviews with the significant people in his life, all underscored with a fantastic bebop heavy soundtrack. Film recordings of Basquiat in his studio almost suggest a kind of improvisation as he paints in a rapid real-time style constantly being influenced by the media surrounding him. In our media saturated and fragmented world, his work is more relevant and comprehensible than when he produced it a quarter century ago.