Boom for Real
BOOM FOR REAL: THE LATE TEENAGE YEARS OF JEANMICHEL BASQUIAT, documentary, not rated, Center for Contemporary Arts, 2.5 chiles
Director Sara Driver’s documentary begins in late 1970s, when Jean- Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic street and graffiti artist, was in his late teens and living on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Basquiat first drew public attention with the “Samo” (pronounced “Same- Oh”) tagline he plastered all over the city with fellow artist Al Diaz. Basquiat was a regular at gallery openings and at the Mudd Club, CBGB, and other iconic venues. But even though his work was everywhere, no one knew who Samo was. “His work was a texture, like the crystals in the ground,” one commentator remarks in Driver’s short and ultimately unsatisfying glimpse of the artist as a young man.
Graffiti art in the late ’70s and early ’80s was the scourge of the city, not the celebrated movement in lowbrow art it would soon become. Basquiat’s humble beginnings were not unlike those of his compatriots who worked largely at night, with one eye open for street cops and transit police and the other focused on whatever works of art they were speedily painting on subway cars, tunnels, underpasses and overpasses, buildings, and walls. The city was their canvas; the spray can was their brush. Sometimes Basquiat took it a step further, painting over other people’s work and spraying designs on a friend’s gold lamé coat while she was sleeping. You can’t blame him for trying to rise out of obscurity — in the film’s interviews, friends say he was never really a part of the graffiti-art culture. At least, he avoided identifying himself as such. He was as connected to the city’s punk scene as he was to early hip-hop and street art movements.
At some point in the early ’ 80s, Basquiat came uninvited to a party on Canal Street that was touted as a way to introduce the work of hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy and other members of the Fabulous 5, a much admired group of graffiti artists, to the upper crust of the New York art world. “For forwardthinking people, the Age of the White Male was already over,” says Mudd Club co- founder Diego Cortez. The time was ripe for the advent of a younger generation of artists — most of whom, like Basquiat, were not white — who were making expressive, immediate, and electrifying work. At the party, he started writing on the walls, which was how he outed himself as Samo.
At some point, The Village Voice did a story. People were intrigued by the Samo signature and the mes- sages t hat came with it: short, simple bursts of poetry that could be mystifying, as well as thoughtprovoking observances or not-so-subtle criticisms of New York’s gallery scene. When the Voice’s story on Basquiat broke, he co-opted the signature for himself; a disgruntled Diaz disappeared from the scene.
The film purports to be a look into a chapter of the life of its titular subject, but in this regard, it is content to remain in familiar territory. There isn’t much insight offered on Basquiat’s early years or his drive to create, or any real detail about the struggles he overcame and those that finally ended his life. Why, for instance, was he living on the street to begin with? His indelible part in the New York street art movement feels almost like background texture on an equal footing with the story of other artists like Diaz, Fab Five Freddy, and Lee Quiñones. This film feels like their biography as much as it is Basquiat’s.
Though it boasts a lot of interviews, commentators share mostly anecdotal but positive memories of the young artist, who died at age twenty- seven of a heroin overdose in 1988. Even the unpleasant memories are, somehow, fondly retold. Driver celebrates the era and the artist, but Basquiat is as much of an enigma by the film’s end as he is at the start.