Brain

Executed in 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Brain is a significant sculptural work that complements and expands upon his celebrated paintings. It is composed of twenty-seven boxes, each covered with sheets depicting some of the artist’s most celebrated motifs: masks, faces, anatomical drawings, and record labels all combine in an encyclopedic display of the artist’s most celebrated motifs. The structure is then topped with a bootblack stand, of the kind used on the street for shining shoes. Brain transforms this functional object into a readymade sculpture like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, Tate Gallery, London), whose scrawled “R. Mutt” mirrors Basquiat’s redacted “BRAIN ©”. The present work is especially important because of its alignment of Basquiat with a history of sculpture. Indeed, “the critics who pigeonholed Basquiat as a Neo-Expressionist painter were not ready for this aspect of his work,” (E. Fretz, Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, New York, 2010, p. 140). Basquiat balked at the tendency to expect the same, safe thing from a successful artist for every exhibition, as can be seen in the present work.

Shown in his historic retrospective that toured the United States after his death, as well as in the more recent survey Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation (2020-2021), Brain represents Basquiat’s engagement not only with sculpture, but also with music and archiving. Glenn O’Brien, a writer and Basquiat’s close friend, wrote of the artist’s notebooks, “Here are lists of fragments and figments, found objects, ready-made memes. Notes but also art and poetry and memos. What does it all mean? Could it be a self-made grimoire, conjured out of thin air and the electromagnetic signals flowing through it?...He was a medium, a magician. His mission was nothing less than the restoration of a powerful spiritual function to art—a channeling of the eternal through the ephemeral” (G. O’Brien, “Books: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Artforum, April 2015, https://www.artforum.com/print/201504/jean-michel-basquiat-50730). The same could be said of the present work, offering up evidence of Basquiat’s peripatetic imagination which constantly mined television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and nearly everything else around him to produce an intoxicating insight into the artist’s world.

Brain was born from the hotbed of creativity that was New York in the 1980s. The era was marked by community and interdisciplinary work, and Brain emerged not only from Basquiat’s engagement with high art, but also of the Downtown club scene, “While they were painting together, Warhol and Basquiat went out together to the newest clubs…one of these clubs was Area…Basquiat later displayed his construction Brain (1985) there, and occasionally served as a guest DJ” (E. Fretz, Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, New York, 2010, p. 142). We could compare this creative hotbed to the Zürich Dadaists’ short lived venue Studio Voltaire (1916). Brain is therefore an art object, but also something of a documentary. It channels the streets and skyline of New York, which, then and now, was in a constant state of construction and renewal. At four feet tall, it is an intimate skyscraper, raw and liminal. It is essential to also recall the art movements that responded to the speed of modernity, like Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism. For example, Brain exhibits the collaged, colorful interconnectedness of Giacomo Balla’s stained glass-like Compenetrazione iridescente – Eucalyptus (1914), or the sculptural juxtapositions of Jean Arp’s Shirt Front and Fork (1922). As always, Basquiat put his own spin on these aesthetic discourses with his complex style and personal flair that defined an era.

Aside from these formal elements, Brain is also so much about the interior, and Basquiat taking stock of his own life, career, and artistic inspirations. Each box is covered by a reproduction of the artist’s earlier drawings and “painted evocations of 78 rpm jazz records,” (D. Murray and G. Lock, eds., The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, Oxford, 2009, p. 279, note 31). Brain thus becomes a self-archive, like the layered rows of a record store. As Basquiat scholar Jordana Moore Saggese observes, “The sculptural work Brain, from 1985, fits this pattern of [revisiting past work]…The process of copying his own drawings became such a large part of Basquiat’s practice that later in his career he purchased a color Xerox machine for his studio” J. M. Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Berkeley, 2014, p. 77). This ‘recycling’ is a Warholian gesture to be sure that Basquiat made his own; he incorporated new, expressive marks rather than adhering to the muteness of the readymade. Some of the references upon the boxes are very specific, such as “color photocopies of Basquiat’s rendition of the label from Charlie Parker’s 1947 recording ‘Now’s the Time’ [1945] on two of the twenty-seven boxes” of Brain (J. M. Saggese, ed., The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses, Berkeley, 2021, p. 235). A leading figure in the development of bebop and a revered jazz saxophonist, Parker’s band also included the pioneering musicians Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Together, they created new sonic combinations, just as Basquiat remixed his own work.

The incorporation of a bootblack is also an important gesture. In fact, the first reliably dated photograph of a person, Boulevard du Temple (1838) by Louis Daguerre, depicts a man getting a shoeshine on a largely deserted Parisian street. In retrospect, Brain becomes an image of a disappearing profession and a way to honor the everyday people who allowed Basquiat’s beloved city to thrive. Shoeshine men, who used to be very visible in major cities, have slowly become few and far between as a result of more casual clothing styles. Brain is therefore a monument to this cultural shift, as well as the transient clubs and exhibition spaces that characterized New York.

Brain expands the discourse on Basquiat’s oeuvre, which has largely focused on his paintings. It shows that the pressing themes he explored throughout his career can be manifest in three dimensions, like the musings of a diary made life-size. From art history to music and nightlife, Brain coalesces the seemingly incommensurate parts of any artist, enabling Basquiat and others to exist as whole people, rather than archetypes. It also shows him at his most innovative as he refused to be limited to just one medium or subject matter. For this reason, Basquiat continues to inspire artists who use multiple media, especially artists of color who work to expand the creative avenues available to them. Brain is just that—a look into the mind of a genius, whose work is rooted in New York of the 1980s, even as it looks forward to the future.