Maïca Sanconie

Se lever dans la nuit noire. La lumière du jour, plus tard, moirée de bleu, au sortir du tunnel. Une masse d’un rouge violacé tente à l’ouest une percée, vite éteinte dans un monochrome indigo qui absorbe les nuages. L’ouverture se déroule à l’est, opération tenace pour imposer une vibration lumineuse, en fragmenter les rayonnements. Des strates de nuages s’y empilent, froncent un ciel bas. Le train poursuit son inexorable avancée, salué des lumières fixes des réverbères, des clartés clignotantes des voitures sur les routes, des lueurs matinales des habitations. Banlieue. Vastes parkings figés. Maisons alignées. Silhouettes urbaines parfois masquées par une paroi haute bordant les rails comme une protection de chantier. Le fuselage du train, ses sièges agencés le long d’une allée, me donnent l’impression de voyager dans un avion qui atterrirait longuement, ailes repliées sur une piste étroite, pour nous déposer au cœur de la ville. Sous l’élégante verrière de la gare, le flot de voyageurs se déverse à gros bouillons. Londres autour, serré. Dehors, le ciel est d’un blanc souillé, et il faudra attendre le crépuscule pour qu’une nuée turquoise poudre l’horizon s’offrant à nous du dernier étage de la Tate Modern. Le soleil y mêle d’épaisses volutes jaunes qui vont scintiller sur les vitres des bâtiments de part et d’autre du fleuve. A l’intérieur, dans les salles sans fenêtre, les tableaux de Rothko absorbent l’infini tels des êtres vivants. S’en nourrissent. Bruns clos sur une obscurité d’étable, de grange, de grenier – là où les souffles sont indicibles et d’autant plus puissants, relégués, confondus – accotés à des gris terreux, des grèves qu’aucune eau ne vient plus désaltérer. Leurs rencontres ouvrent des puits de silence. Dans la salle des Seagram Murals, les tableaux semblent disposés en miroirs, chacun reflétant l’ombre des autres. La pupille, face à ce soleil caché, se contracte. Même sensation lorsque le train qui m’emporte à Avignon roule sous un ciel pressé d’en finir avec la nuit, descellant à des aplats de nuages noircis des rouges sanguins, fluidifiés par un délicat étalement d’aigue-marine. Ma mémoire enregistre toutes les variations des paysages traversés dans mes voyages vers le sud de la France. Cet hiver, les prés sont vert amande, ourlés de bruns sourds. Les fossés sont moussus, couverts de buissons pâles, fanés ; les coteaux offrent une peau rase et pailletée, le ciel se ferre de gris, les maisons dressent des murs de grès ocre. Il y a eu des jours de neige où le sol uniformément blanc se décorait de taillis presque noirs, de ramures rosies ; les arbres réduits à leurs contours délimitaient une rotondité apprivoisée, contenue. J’ai aussi rencontré des épanchements de brouillard épais, sirupeux, nourris des reflux d’étangs solidifiés, de ruisseaux figés par des sidérations de glace. J’ai vécu des départs à potron-minet, soulevés à des atmosphères bleutées, humides, laissant des chaussées miroitantes dégorger la nuit pour entrer dans un paysage coupé en biseau par les rails gelés, craquant sous le poids de notre course.
Ici, dans l’exposition de Rothko, la couleur s’absente, devient mentale. Souvenir. Voile carmin suspendu au sommet de pêchers transis. Champs labourés, alourdis de pluie. Champs grèges, puis éteints. J’ai tout vu dans la vitesse ; déroulement continu, repris au voyage suivant. Mon corps, camera obscura, poste d’observation, guetteur. Les tableaux de Rothko sont autant de paysages recueillis dans leur essence d’hiver, leur capacité lumineuse à l’orée d’aubes ou de crépuscules encore entiers, découpés aux fenêtres de trains élargis. Pupilles en mouvement. Reconstruire le regard à chaque instant, fermer les paupières et l’image défile en soi. Disponible au fond de la paroi rétinienne, aussi mobile que dans sa capture. J’avance jusqu’aux grands tableaux noirs, où l’œil cherche la fine ligne transversale qui déclenche une vision totale, éphémère. Quelque chose en moi refuse l’invasion de cet absolu, panique. Il me faut la reconstruction du site, l’aboutissement de la sensation. Rothko me contraint à ouvrir les yeux dans les ténèbres, à refluer dans une perception antérieure. Volupté de l’apesanteur, velouté de la pensée que rien ne retient. Parfaite traversée d’une surface plane, bistrée à son entour. J’y entre, j’en sors, à volonté.
Vus du train, mes paysages ne sont pas habités. Ils sont mon labyrinthe, mes circuits vitaux, l’espace de ma marche, sa projection. Je les observe dans l’infini de leurs éclairages. Les nuits ne parviennent jamais à les dissoudre entièrement ; elles les gardent, les dérobent à nos regards pour investir les masses de leurs volumes, annuler toute perspective, rendre le monde à sa stabilité première tandis que nous sombrons dans un sommeil où nous rêvons de l’ailleurs, de l’avant. Livres fermés au hasard. Souffle alenti.
Un cahot s’imprime à mon corps. L’image m’entraîne. Il faut ouvrir les yeux encore, cligner des paupières, regagner l’instant de contemplation entre les murs stables du musée, la superposition des étages forés de longs escaliers roulant. Debout le long du fleuve, entre ciel et terre.
Les tableaux condensent le crépuscule à venir, le large écoulement de la Tamise entre ses berges dénudées par la marée basse. Plus tard, dans les ruelles, la nuit se transporte au fond des métros, au fond de la gare ; le train attend, amarré à son quai illuminé. Il pleut doucement autour de nous. Nous entrons dans le wagon-carlingue, de nouveau prêts à effleurer la terre dans ce qu’elle a de plus disponible, confiants dans l’invisibilité qui nous enveloppe dans son cocon.

Maïca Sanconie

Nouvelle paru dans le recueil collectif Voyage dans le voyage, éditions Voix d'Encre, 2009

Displacement and Diaspora in Jean-Michel Basquiat's Art.

(A contribution to "African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches - A Conference in Honor of Michel Fabre and Geneviève Fabre" ,Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, organized by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University and the Cercle d’Etudes Afro-Américaines, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris III, December 2004 )
This paper is in homage to Michel Fabre, who directed my PhD dissertation a very long time ago on contemporary African American Painters, and also to Geneviève Fabre, who welcomed me in her research group on African American Studies.

Basquiat was born in 1960 in New York City and died prematurely in 1988.A major part of the art scene in the eighties, he was first noticed for his involvement in the graffiti movement of the late seventies, where he went by the graffiti tag SAMO. He was included in his first group exhibition in 1980, a show sponsored by COLAB (Collaborative Projects Incorporated), and one year later was included n the Whitney Biennal exhibition. In 1982, he was featured in the group show “Transavantguardia: Italia/America”. His career developed most rapidly from then on.
Jean-Michel Basquiat's art embodies a diasporic identity that reflects his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage. As an internationally known artist, his career was built upon a constant displacement between Europe and the United States. My purpose here is to examine the use of language in the work of this African-American painter who used language to represent the Black diaspora as well as to write a narrative that would reflect the whole historical process of that diaspora.

In his work, Basquiat assembled visual elements that constitute a language articulated in words or parts of words in different languages (English, Spanish, French, German and Italian) , written first on walls as a graffiti artist, then on any kind of surface (doors, boxes,etc.) and, when he could afford it , on canvas, paper or boards.
Basquiat's art cannot be isolated from his constant use of writing in his paintings and drawings. He made clear on several occasions that his use of letters and sounds had a literary dimension and was to be interpreted in the context of a broad literary heritage. Apart from representations of himself, such as this 1988 photograph of him holding a paperback edition of The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, Basquiat inscribed this affiliation in works such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict (a 1982 painting), in which he obviously refers to James Joyce' s book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published in 1914-1915). Rather than being a "composer of oral/visual incantations that chant out the joys and tribulations of the invention of his self and his art and of that art's identification with the joys and tribulations of the dis/enfranchised," as Klaus Kertess describes him in a 1998 Paris catalog, I think that in this title Basquiat clearly worded his own approach to narration. By “invention of the self”, Kertess suggests that Basquiat starts from scratch and distances himself from “ the dis/enfranchised”, which has been translated into French by “ceux qui ont été destitués de leurs droits”, but seems to me an euphemism for “African American people”.
Basquiat does not celebrate a culture. Rather, he points out the losses and dismembering of this culture. He attempts to reveal the African-American presence in America in its historical dimensioin. He goes backward in time, in a process of “self-creolization”, a process defined by Robert Farris Thompson to express Basquiat’s ability to fuse into effect his fluency in several languages. Or we could also say that he created his own language of self-emergence.
Long after slave narratives that transfered oral culture into writing, long after the signs left by homeless hobos on fences, walls or doors, Basquiat felt the need to ècho what happened into the language of his time. He plundges right into history to embody it, to splutter words from these different layers of time and space.

The plurality of languages in Joyce's work may be compared to the linguistic complexity in Basquiat's art and life. Breaking into the art world by writing social texts on the walls of Soho and the East Village. Basquiat self-definition of a young derelict seems both an admission of abandonment and a search for approval. He asserts himself as an artist with Joyce's literay support. As a young artist who not so long ago was a street artist, he presents himself as the reincarnation of Stephen Dedalus, whose body parts are scattered all over the triptych presented both as a tomb and as the urban scene of this rising from the dead. The young artist, however, can only live through this deadly mask painted on the right section, meaning that his identity has been crossed out and mocked. The words NICE ST REX are scratched out because they can only be validated as a fantasy, a literary reference. They are iconoclast and threatening. The painting is a reckless attempt by a 22 year old graffitero suddenly transformed into an art world star to appropriate life over death, to strive for glory over anonymity. In fact, in 1982, the year of this painting, Basquiat had( already )held his first once-man show at the Nosei Gallery in New York. During this year he had six one-man shows in the United States and Europe, and his work was shown in thirteen group exhibitions.

To come back to the painting, we can see that the words "THE ANKLE" over the coarse representation of severed feet, are repeated three times lower on the panel and are partially covered by paint, so that the word ANK appears, a reference to the Egyptian symbol of life. The repeated sound seems to ècho the failed walking attempt of the severed legs, and also echoes the rumbling of some of Joyce's complex and disparate sentences. The christian cross at the bottom of the skyscraper emphasizes the general downward movement of the triptych, for these crosses are supposed to be on top of roofs, tombs or steeples. The word MORTE - meaning death in Italian - appears as the actual signature of the painting, folding over Basquiat's symbolic signature on the left, the three-peak crown, and the word SALT referring to salt as a bygone currency and exchange commodity. The painting is both an Afro-Caribbean offering to the world of creation to bring in luck, and a prayer to become a heroic figure of 20th century art. But Basquiat also expresses that he is aware of the punishment that awaits a commoner for wanting to be a king.

In December 1981, René Ricard declared in an article written for Art Forum entitled "The Radiant Child",. that Basquiat could have been the abandoned child of a fictional union of Cy Twomby and Jean Dubuffet. This sense of dereliction attributed to Basquiat, also considered as a child, not yet an adult, emphasizes Basquiat's determination to assert himself within an artistic tradition, both in the patriarchal /theological/narcissistic sense of the son asserting his legitimacy to the father, and in a psychological sense suggested in Sarah Kofman's L'Enfance de l'art. The title of the painting also defines the starting point of a young man engaging in a life-long career as an artist.

To give a broader definition of Basquiat’s language, I will refer to Richard Marshall, in Basquiat's 1992 Whitney Museum catalog. According to Marshall, the thematics of the commentary that Basquiat incorporates into these fragmented texts include "Race, human rights, creation of power and wealth, control and valuation of natural elements, animals, and produce.... all this in addition to references to his ethnic heritage, popular culture, and respected or infamous figures from history and the entertainment world" According to Robert Farris Thompson in the same catalog, Basquiat "crafted aesthetic stratagems in poetry and music, only to transfer them into painting". Thompson speaks of "painted texts", "syncopated words", "rhyming discordancies" written in oilstick. Basquiat himself qualified the words he injected into his works as "brushstrokes", which shows the strong relation in his mind between language and representation. For that matter, we can say that Basquiat's use of linguistic elements serves the double goal of asserting both his presence and its legitimacy.
I would like to elaborate on this concept of legitimacy by showing how a French art historian, Michel Enrici, view Basquiat in relation to literature and art. In his 1989 book, Michel Enrici compares Basquiat's work to two French writers who also suffered from their distinctive singularity : Arthur Rimbaud and Antonin Artaud. Like Rimbaud, Basquiat rejected social order, felt persecuted by his father, looked for other paternities and met with an elder artistic figure - Warhol -, and explored the hellish world of drugs. Rimbaud and Basquiat, these two "enfants terribles" , also focused on the primitivism of drawing and writing. Enrici quotes from Rimbaud's ... "Illuminations" a text that Basquiat resonates with a century later: "J'aimais les peintures idiotes, dessus de porte, décors, toiles de saltimbanques, enseignes, enluminures populaires ; la littérature démodée, latin d'église, livres érotiques sans orthographe, romans de nos aïeules, contes de fées, petits livres de l'enfance, opéras vieux, refrains niais, rythmes naïfs » ( which could be translated into : "I loved silly pictures, over-door paintings, décors, pictures of acrobats, shop signs, popular illuminated prints, old-fashioned novels, Church Latin, erotic books with no words, stories about our ancestors, fairy tales, children's books, old operas, funny refrains, and naive poetry.) Also, that both artists died young links them in the same heroic mythology.

Michel Enrici also sees in Basquiat's cryptic writing combined with painting, a strong similarity with Antonin Artaud's drawings. Both artists also focus on representation of the mutilated male body, and both use frenzied writing in their visual compositions. This is why I think that the "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict" reinforces Basquiat's association with the European literary world and organizes a displacement within the very structure of his work of his urban and African American identity.
When we examine Basquiat’s relation with African art, we can see that he also creates within an ethnically dispersive model. He adopts the African aesthetic with ageless faces and bodies, where the marks of times are excluded, and presents a fragmented self and a mask-like face, with words always playing a significant role.

On June 17, 1986, in an inverview with critic Démosthènes Davvetas for Libération, the French daily, Basquiat declared " I never went to Africa. I am an artist who has been influenced by New York enviro/ment. But I do have a cultural memory. I do not need to look for it, it exists. It is over there, in Africa. It does not mean that I have to live over there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever we are". Basquiat did go to Africa at the end of his brief life, but the important element of this quotation is his acknowledgement of his diasporic identity. He switched from "I" to " We" as if to include himself in this realization. Basquiat's success as a graffiti artist, then as a young protege, led him to develop his art within the double heritage of American painting and of African-American cultural history. For that matter, he found his legitimacy in this collective memory that we often call "négritude" in French, as a reference to black cultures in the world.

In his 1983 painting "Untitled or History of Black People", Basquiat gathers the elements of the dispersive narrative he is trying to unravel. Basquiat's writing is as dismembered as his figures; it always dissolves into the background of the painting. He forces the viOUer's eyes to wander over the piece to pick up meaning on the surface. In this work, he obviously refers to his African heritage, going back to ancient Egypt. On the left panel, African masks are associated with the word NUBA, probably for NUBIA. The partially obliterated word SALT, refers to the slaves' exchange value. Next to human outlines on a black background, he wrote MUJER, Spanish for "woman." A boat and Egyptian symbols link the left panel to the central panel, which is marked by a title in Spanish " EL GRAN SPECTACOLO", "the big show." The whole representation is thus shown as a performance, as if the grand ship and female figure in the centre were going to collapse into the sickle at the bottom of the painting. The word SICKLE is also represented three times and evoke to me the word CYCLE. On the right panel, the figure of a black man wearing the word SLAVE on his chest stands over the names of places that evoke both Egypt and the Southern States of America: MEMPHIS, THEBES, TENNESSEE. The animals on the right (the spider and the dog) are blended into the legend: A DOG IS GUARDING THE PHARAOH. On the lower right side, the word HEMLOCK suggests poison, death and betrayal. The history of black people has been erased in the legacy of the colonial enterprise. Basquiat presents a contraction of the various history cycles within a single image, and makes sure that the viewer relates this condensation to to the Eyptian conception of the realm of the dead. In this piece, there is almost no difference between body outlines and lettering. Basquiat's use of both literary and pictorial discourse proceed from the same desire to produce a distinct narrative about the diaspora, and to include this narrative within the history of Western painting.
As Michel Enrici insists, Basquiat built mythograms, using the historian André Leroi-Gourhan's definition of primitive images. Different from pictograms, mythograms present " characters who are not structured in a linear way but are the protagonists of a mythological operation". There is no linearity in Basquiat's narrative, and his insertion of language signals many lost episodes. The juxtaposition of masks with barred teeth and words signals the impossibililty of speech. Basquiat is revealing parts of a heritage whose elements are lost in time and space, lost into the very long silence of history. He adamently tries to link the reality of the diasporic loss and the transatlantic passage to a mythology that goes back to ancient Egypt and biblical times.

Basquiat's desire to bridge the gap between the past and the present is also a search for legitimacy. The neglect and abuse he describes in this painting (History of Black People) is to be recognized for him to proceed as a painter, as an American, and as a member of the Black people whose oral history could not be written and whose origin has becomes part of a myth. Like the creator of a palimpsest, Basquiat wanted to bring out on the surface of his canvas the missing narrative that would complete the memory of diaspora. We are left with a sense of unfulfillment and irreparable loss, but this confrontation questions our own sense of reality. What are our own perceptions of the representation of the black diaspora, in Europe, America and Africa, and which discursive reasoning will ever unite the different aspects of negritude ?