Basquiat Exhibition: Art Gallery of Ontario
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time
In April of 2015, as part of the concluding classes in the Heroes course, a field trip was taken to the seminal exhibition at the AGO, titled Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's the Time. With the famous slogan from the celebrated speech of Martin Luther King, to which Basquiat paid homage through his artwork, it couldn't have been a more poignant conclusion to our world of heroes course. At the wake of renewed racial tensions that plagued North America, the exhibition spoke volumes about the values of heroism in today's society.
The tragic, youthful death of this celebrated artist resonated deeply with the ancient notion of the hero: that death (figural or literal) is one of the key components that is essential for the hero. Whether it is Herakles' death and apotheosis, or Achilles knowing decision to die in battle, only through stepping beyond the ultimate boundary of death, can a true hero be born and be endowed with a cult and rites that accompany their worship.
It so also happens that Basquiat as an individual was primarily obsessed with the notion of the hero, and in particularly in the context of African American culture, and produced a number of artworks explicit with this theme. Many of these portrayed athletes, include works such as The Ring (1981, image), Untitled (Boxer, 1982), Famous Negro Athletes (1980-1). In Dark Race Horse - Jesse Owens (1983), Basquiat portrays Owen's foot as a stand-in for his physical prowess at the Berlin 1936 Olympics. The arrows that fly and punctures his heel seems to be an explicit reference to the Greek hero Achilles, and a potent symbol of the irony that the racial politics of the time posed to this great American hero. The physiological essentialism that black athletes experience may also be the most devastating achilles' heel. The students prepared in advance short presentations of their analyses of selected artworks that included some of the athletic subject matters but also other oeuvres such as Irony of a Negro Policeman (1981), and Exu (1988), which express very strongly the idea of the hero in different ways.
