Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation

by J. Faith Almiron, Dakota DeVos, Hua Hsu

How hip-hop culture and graffiti electrified the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and his contemporaries in 1980s New York In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat’s works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries―and sometimes collaborators―A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture.

Writing the Future , published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat’s work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat’s extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Hip Hop

199 pages, Hardcover

Published May 5, 2020

Reviews

[Paul Secor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of my favorite artists. For that reason, I'd thought about buying a copy of this, unseen/unread. Fortunately I checked our library system's website and there was one copy on order at the Woodstock Library. I put a hold on it and received it a week later.
Some of the visuals are fine, but the other artists aren't up to Basquiat's level. And the essays are pretty generic, though I did learn a few things.
This is a museum catalog and my sense is that they used Basquiat's work to draw people to the exhibition. Unfortunately, his work overshadows the rest. It might have worked better if the other artists' work was allowed to stand alone.
Anyway, I'm glad that I didn't buy the book. My local library will receive a donation of the money I saved.

[William West · Rating 5 out of 5]

Basquiat is popularly, and revealingly, associated with white establishment downtown NYC artists such as Warhol, Schnabel, and Clemente. The art-world narrative has often cast Basquiat as a solitary Black genius whose radiance propelled him into the company of the white cannonicals. This exhibit shatters that myth, contextualizing Basquiat’s work within the larger movement of the street art scene in New York in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. This was a movement dominated by Black and Latinx artists with a confrontational, though by no means defining, sense of identity.

Street art/ graffiti was as much a political assertion as an artistic movement. The artists interpolated private and government property as the people’s canvas. But if it was revolutionary, the work of the leading graffiti painters, or writers, as they referred to themselves as, was in no way primitivist. The public works, denigrated as criminal vandalism by the authorities, made myriad illusions to the artistic cannon, referencing other “rebellious”, white-led movements, such as Data and Pop, that quickly became embraced by the establishment.

Graffiti did, indeed, find acceptance from the art world, but aside from Basquiat and (white) Keith Haring, this was predominantly only in Europe. To this day, Basquiat’s contemporaries of color, such as Rammellzee, Lady Pink, Toxic, Lee Qui?ones, Futura, A-One, Fab 5 Freddy, Kool Kor and ERO are not even close to being house-hold names in the American art world. Hopefully, this exhibit will start to change that.

For me, the two artists whose works were the biggest revelations were those of Lady Pink and Rammellzee. Pink’s oeuvre is perhaps the darkest of any of the artists’ work on display in the exhibit. An Ecuadorian-American, her work seems to bleed with vulnerability to white supremacy, patriarchy and American imperialism. Her collaborations with text-artist Jenny Holzer reference Yankee atrocities in Latin America. Holzer’s collaboration with A-One, “When Someone Beats You With a Flashlight You Make Light Shine in All Directions” might have been my single favorite painting in the show.

The Basquiat pieces on display are characteristically impressive, but the most famous artist does not emerge as an ideological leader in the graffiti scene. That role seems to have belonged primarily to Rammellzee, who articulated the ethos of the movement in his manifesto, “Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism”. Graffiti has always been in no small part textual in nature. By “writing” on the system’s property, these “writers” performed a double reappropriation. The language of the oppressor becomes the expression by which the oppressed reappropriate the physical structures that they populate as the system’s subjects.

Having articulated a self-liberation in the present, it seems fitting that Rammellzee, after finding recognition in Europe, turned to imagining a liberated future. His studio paintings envision post-capitalist sci-fi cityscapes that suggest a world populated by fluid identities. The exhibit’s final gallery revolves around Rammellzee’s electronically acoutramated samurai suit, an assertion of self-reinvention. The last object one encounters is a pyramid Rammellzee constructed to contain his own ashes which he demanded in his will would accompany any public display of his work.

[Brian Hutzell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I lived in Boston during most of the 1980s, and during that time, I made several trips to New York. I remember shopping at Unique Clothing Warehouse, going to Aria and Limelight nightclubs (and even getting into the VIP rooms!), and in general hanging out in some of the very places that have since become legendary as the once-upon-a-time hangouts of Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, Warhol, etc. I wasn’t tuned in to the art world at all at the time, and while I’m pretty sure I would have recognized Andy Warhol if I’d seen him, I didn’t have a clue who Basquiat or Haring et al were. Now I often wonder who I might have been unknowingly sharing space with in those VIP rooms, and who painted the clothes I bought at those artsy boutiques.

All of which is to say that the 1980s were a formative and special time for me. It is interesting to see the way that time period has come to occupy such an important space in the world of art & music. This book takes a look at one slice of that world, the slice dominated by the up and coming hip-hop movement. BTW: When most people, this book included, say “The 1980s,” what they really mean is the decade 1975-1985, give or take a year or two. Another book worth looking into for fans of this time is The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984, ed. Martin J. Taylor. (For a related examination focusing on music in the latter half of the 1970s, check out Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever by Will Hermes.)

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly I have no idea how this book ended up on my radar. I love street art and it’s a pretty recent release. I loved how much history was given about the movement. I feel like there could have been a bit more art included.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Makes me want to read more about and see more of the work of these artists.