.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
‘Man can go to the moon
with brains and hand
Man can split the atom
with brains and hand
Man can see the stars
with brains and hand’
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
‘Everything about his work is knowing, and much is about knowing’
ROBERT STORR
Following his success in New York, Both Poles (1982) was included in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles, at Larry Gagosian’s first gallery there, in 1982. It was acquired from the 1982 Gagosian Gallery exhibition and has been remained in the same collection ever since. The work clearly and elegantly reveals Basquiat’s wide-ranging command of symbol and significance. Twine-bound wooden stretchers – complete with traces of green paint from a previous life – protrude from each corner, a hallmark of the celebrated large-scale 1982 canvases assembled by Basquiat’s assistant and one-time club bouncer Stephen Torton. The sandy-beige ground is overlaid with broad abstract strokes of pale pink, dripping with calligraphic vigour. A jagged, seismic line of black oilstick intimates a rocky horizon – a skyline perhaps inspired by Basquiat’s trip to the mountains of Switzerland with his Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who had given him a one-man show in Zurich that year. To the left is a large vertical pickaxe; to the right, in visual counterpoint, a tall pylon or satellite aerial. These totems frame a circle centre-stage, which is scattered with the names of lunar features – MARE IMBRIUM, MARE CRISIUM, CAUCASUS MTS. – and bears a grinning red face, as well as a smaller childlike head in smudged black. This smiling moon is drawn on its own sheet of paper as if torn from an atlas, and attended by a table of numbers and percentages. The large N (North) at its forehead answers an S (South) below the mountainous skyline. To the canvas’ upper right is another moon: a waning crescent in solid black, limned with a glowing border of blue. The composition seems simple but is unerringly sophisticated. Basquiat’s pictorial play of opposites – north and south, excavation and transmission, heaven and earth – speaks to the rich synthetic vision of an artist who could conjure wonder from the mundane, poetry from raw data, and beauty from polyphony. His works draw on a vast range of texts and sources, overlaying and remixing myriad registers of image and voice. Both Poles’ pickaxe and TV pylon, held in balance, are apt symbols of the dual poles of Basquiat’s practice: he mines the past and his present for material, which he synthesises and broadcasts in energetic, vital new configurations.
During his days as a musician in 1979-81, Basquiat once improvised as he read from a biology textbook on stage: ‘Man can go to the moon / with brains and hand / Man can split the atom / with brains and hand / Man can see the stars / with brains and hand’ (J-M. Basquiat, quoted in R. F. Thompson, ‘Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean- Michel Basquiat’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 40). The same intellectual lyricism ignites Both Poles. Basquiat quotes names and numbers from a lunar map, but with a puckish grin he plays the fairytale personification of a ‘man in the moon’ off against the scientific schema of cartography. The moon is an object in our galaxy, but it is also an image laden with symbolic and mystical associations. Indeed, Basquiat spotlights the poetry latent in its Latin place names. The Mare Serenitatis is the ‘Sea of Serenity’; the Mare Nubium the ‘Sea of Clouds’; the Mare Crisium the ‘Sea of Crises’. Giovanni Riccioli, who devised most of the moon’s nomenclature in 1651, was both an astronomer and a theologian. He mischievously named craters after rivals such as Galileo, placing them within the Oceanus Procellarum – the ‘Ocean of Storms’. The seemingly objective, diagrammatic impulse of labelling the moonscape is in fact imbued with romanticism and personal feeling. Appropriately, Basquiat’s gestural pink strokes – which recall both Cy Twombly and Franz Kline, two of his favourite artists – flush Both Poles with expressive passion. This duality also runs throughout the discipline of alchemy, another concept which fascinated Basquiat in his own artistic transmuting of raw material. The Tabula smaragdina, the ancient text that tells how to create the Philosopher’s Stone, is the source of the phrase ‘as above, so below’. Many editions bear frontispieces with paired icons of sun and moon not unlike the twin composition of Both Poles. Magic and science come together, and Basquiat fuses both modes of looking into art.
1982 was a breakthrough year of critical and commercial success for Basquiat. The distinctive canvases stretched by Torton, who Basquiat instructed to simply use whatever materials he found in the studio, were emblematic of the artist’s fully-fledged idiom. ‘For a while it looked as if the very early stuff was primo, but no longer’, wrote Rene Ricard that year. ‘He’s finally figured out a way to make a stretcher … that is so consistent with the imagery … they do look like signs, but signs for a product modern civilisation has no use for’ (R. Ricard, quoted P. Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, London 1998, p. 102). Richard Marshall enthused that ‘The effect was raw, askew, handmade – a primitive-looking object that recalled African shields, Polynesian navigation devices, Spanish devotional objects, and bones that have broken through the surface skin’ (R. Marshall, ‘Repelling Ghosts’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 18). Such a vivid, associative response is typical when faced with the open eloquence of Basquiat’s work. He forges a unique and unrestricted voice from diversity and juxtaposition. In his more intricate assemblies, encyclopaedic art-historical references animate limbs from Gray’s Anatomy, jazz giants jostle with heroes of Classical myth, and glimpses of da Vinci meet urban scrawls from downtown New York. Both Poles, however, expresses Basquiat’s compound eye with potent economy. For all the work’s rough-hewn materiality, its signs are suspended in a limpid, distilled pictorial space. The spare, flat composition of line and shape conjures the macro/microcosmic visions of Joan Miró (and, indeed, the haunting gravity of Basquiat’s iconic late work Riding with Death). Glyphs of rich meaning are set in strong visual and semiotic rhythm, offset by the outbursts of pink. Words and forms are syncopated, just off-kilter to rational thought. Much like his motif of the grinning skull, Basquiat’s moon unites analysis and expression, image and imagination. ‘Man can go to the moon / with brains and hand’: in Both Poles, Basquiat scales the mountains and takes us there, composing a refined, captivating meditation on the things we see, and the ways we see them.
with brains and hand
Man can split the atom
with brains and hand
Man can see the stars
with brains and hand’
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
‘Everything about his work is knowing, and much is about knowing’
ROBERT STORR
Following his success in New York, Both Poles (1982) was included in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s debut exhibition in Los Angeles, at Larry Gagosian’s first gallery there, in 1982. It was acquired from the 1982 Gagosian Gallery exhibition and has been remained in the same collection ever since. The work clearly and elegantly reveals Basquiat’s wide-ranging command of symbol and significance. Twine-bound wooden stretchers – complete with traces of green paint from a previous life – protrude from each corner, a hallmark of the celebrated large-scale 1982 canvases assembled by Basquiat’s assistant and one-time club bouncer Stephen Torton. The sandy-beige ground is overlaid with broad abstract strokes of pale pink, dripping with calligraphic vigour. A jagged, seismic line of black oilstick intimates a rocky horizon – a skyline perhaps inspired by Basquiat’s trip to the mountains of Switzerland with his Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who had given him a one-man show in Zurich that year. To the left is a large vertical pickaxe; to the right, in visual counterpoint, a tall pylon or satellite aerial. These totems frame a circle centre-stage, which is scattered with the names of lunar features – MARE IMBRIUM, MARE CRISIUM, CAUCASUS MTS. – and bears a grinning red face, as well as a smaller childlike head in smudged black. This smiling moon is drawn on its own sheet of paper as if torn from an atlas, and attended by a table of numbers and percentages. The large N (North) at its forehead answers an S (South) below the mountainous skyline. To the canvas’ upper right is another moon: a waning crescent in solid black, limned with a glowing border of blue. The composition seems simple but is unerringly sophisticated. Basquiat’s pictorial play of opposites – north and south, excavation and transmission, heaven and earth – speaks to the rich synthetic vision of an artist who could conjure wonder from the mundane, poetry from raw data, and beauty from polyphony. His works draw on a vast range of texts and sources, overlaying and remixing myriad registers of image and voice. Both Poles’ pickaxe and TV pylon, held in balance, are apt symbols of the dual poles of Basquiat’s practice: he mines the past and his present for material, which he synthesises and broadcasts in energetic, vital new configurations.
During his days as a musician in 1979-81, Basquiat once improvised as he read from a biology textbook on stage: ‘Man can go to the moon / with brains and hand / Man can split the atom / with brains and hand / Man can see the stars / with brains and hand’ (J-M. Basquiat, quoted in R. F. Thompson, ‘Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean- Michel Basquiat’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 40). The same intellectual lyricism ignites Both Poles. Basquiat quotes names and numbers from a lunar map, but with a puckish grin he plays the fairytale personification of a ‘man in the moon’ off against the scientific schema of cartography. The moon is an object in our galaxy, but it is also an image laden with symbolic and mystical associations. Indeed, Basquiat spotlights the poetry latent in its Latin place names. The Mare Serenitatis is the ‘Sea of Serenity’; the Mare Nubium the ‘Sea of Clouds’; the Mare Crisium the ‘Sea of Crises’. Giovanni Riccioli, who devised most of the moon’s nomenclature in 1651, was both an astronomer and a theologian. He mischievously named craters after rivals such as Galileo, placing them within the Oceanus Procellarum – the ‘Ocean of Storms’. The seemingly objective, diagrammatic impulse of labelling the moonscape is in fact imbued with romanticism and personal feeling. Appropriately, Basquiat’s gestural pink strokes – which recall both Cy Twombly and Franz Kline, two of his favourite artists – flush Both Poles with expressive passion. This duality also runs throughout the discipline of alchemy, another concept which fascinated Basquiat in his own artistic transmuting of raw material. The Tabula smaragdina, the ancient text that tells how to create the Philosopher’s Stone, is the source of the phrase ‘as above, so below’. Many editions bear frontispieces with paired icons of sun and moon not unlike the twin composition of Both Poles. Magic and science come together, and Basquiat fuses both modes of looking into art.
1982 was a breakthrough year of critical and commercial success for Basquiat. The distinctive canvases stretched by Torton, who Basquiat instructed to simply use whatever materials he found in the studio, were emblematic of the artist’s fully-fledged idiom. ‘For a while it looked as if the very early stuff was primo, but no longer’, wrote Rene Ricard that year. ‘He’s finally figured out a way to make a stretcher … that is so consistent with the imagery … they do look like signs, but signs for a product modern civilisation has no use for’ (R. Ricard, quoted P. Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, London 1998, p. 102). Richard Marshall enthused that ‘The effect was raw, askew, handmade – a primitive-looking object that recalled African shields, Polynesian navigation devices, Spanish devotional objects, and bones that have broken through the surface skin’ (R. Marshall, ‘Repelling Ghosts’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1992, p. 18). Such a vivid, associative response is typical when faced with the open eloquence of Basquiat’s work. He forges a unique and unrestricted voice from diversity and juxtaposition. In his more intricate assemblies, encyclopaedic art-historical references animate limbs from Gray’s Anatomy, jazz giants jostle with heroes of Classical myth, and glimpses of da Vinci meet urban scrawls from downtown New York. Both Poles, however, expresses Basquiat’s compound eye with potent economy. For all the work’s rough-hewn materiality, its signs are suspended in a limpid, distilled pictorial space. The spare, flat composition of line and shape conjures the macro/microcosmic visions of Joan Miró (and, indeed, the haunting gravity of Basquiat’s iconic late work Riding with Death). Glyphs of rich meaning are set in strong visual and semiotic rhythm, offset by the outbursts of pink. Words and forms are syncopated, just off-kilter to rational thought. Much like his motif of the grinning skull, Basquiat’s moon unites analysis and expression, image and imagination. ‘Man can go to the moon / with brains and hand’: in Both Poles, Basquiat scales the mountains and takes us there, composing a refined, captivating meditation on the things we see, and the ways we see them.