Grids & Circles (review)

Tom Otterness, Fallen Dreamer and Installation of Primary Human, 1995 (Plaster and watercolor). Courtesy of Skoto Gallery, NYC. PHOTO Spencer Richards Basquiat would have had to strive mightily to make a boring mark. Basquiat certainly made a dull mark or two; between the lively graffiti of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there appears a gulf in the quality of his output that he didn't cross until sometime around 1984, when his art acquired the edge that would have to satisfy his emerging maturity. It would have to satisfy because he only had four years left. But so what? Brice Marden took a long time to grow up, too. Picasso didn 't figure out how to change the face of modern art until he started hanging out with Braque. The show of Basquiat's "Works in Black and White" (although only about half the pieces really fit that billing) at Robert Miller represented a careful precis of the artist's evolving imagination. John Cheim, the exhibition 's organizer, clearly knows his stuff when it comes to making solid decisions about which works to select and how to hang them. From the astounding "Anatomy" series, which dominated the gallery's first room, to the roughly framed paintings from the early 1980s, and culminating with one of Basquiat's greatest pictures, the astonishing "Untitled (Subject)," (1982) everything,about this show consumed, confronted, delighted, amused, and engaged. I love hanging out in galleries, but it's rare that I don't at some point opt for fight over flight. But walking out of this show made me melancholy beyond measure, a feeling I haven't had since Joan Mitchell's recent summer show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Two paintings, besides "Untitled (Subject)" stood out like beacons: "Pegasus," (1987) an enormous work covered from top to bottom with Basquiat's unique, biocky lettering and a gaggle of small, internally referential images, but with the top seventh or so of the piece obscured a thick fringe of black; and "Calcium 6," (1988) a better painting than Cy Twombly has even toyed with producing since the 1960s. "Calcium 6" shares with Twombly's best work ("Leda and the Swan," for instance) the quality that some paintings have of inhaling their viewers, obliterating in the process any notion of distance or connisseurship. Visible across the painting 's washy, pale surface are such elements as partially and fully obscured text, a cluster of headless figures who appear to be conferring in a huddle, a high-school science book rendering of an atom, and, added with a "touch" that almost defines the creaky formalist definition of "feathery," shoe prints. In a painting that looks, at first, haphazardly organized, it becomes rapidly evident that Basquiat's vast graphic intelligence was operating at a particularly elevated pitch when he composed this little number. Politcal, sensual, richly imagined , and, above all else, filled with the evocations provided by Basquiat's urban riffs, "Calcium 6" stands as a watershed event in his maturation as an artist. And, with affinities to his jazz, boxing, and sports imagery works, the painting summarizes, with swift clarity and fair joy, the ambiguous victimization daily suffered by African Americans. Emphasis on "ambiguous"—Basquiat was no polemicist. Though he could have churned out portraits of black suffering by the yard, he chose instead to develop a more incisive critique , based on skill over protest and difference over polarity. More than any other contemporary artist since Pollock, Basquiat resisted the lure of pat conclusions. Even when he accused, he veered from slick judgment . "Untitled (Subject)," which explicitly evokes El Greco, finds a seated figure swathed in a filmy white smearing of paint, but with a face that borrows from Basquiat's early comix/mask iconography. It's a de Kooning woman without the cheeky misogyny, a masterpiece of severity that says, "Look at me. Fuck you. Look at me. Fuck you," and will not release you from its glare. It's as fine a picture as can be shown in an age when painters are evaluated for the company they keep and not the beauty they reveal. Matthew DeBord BRIGHT BIMPONG AND TOM OTTERNESS GRIDS & CIRCLES...