by Hooks, Bell
Significantly, there are few references in Basquiat’s work that connect him with a world of blackness that is female or to a world of influences and inspirations that are female. That Basquiat, for the most part, disavows a connection to the female in his work is a profound and revealing gap that illuminates and expands our vision of him and his work. Simplistic pseudo-psychoanalytic readings of his life and work lead critics to suggest that Basquiat was a perpetual boy always in search of the father. In his essay for the Whitney catalogue, critic René Ricard insists: “Andy represented to Jean the ‘Good White Father’ Jean had been searching for since his teenage years. Jean’s mother has always been a mystery to me. I never met her. She lives in a hospital, emerging infrequently, to my knowledge. Andy did her portrait. She and Andy were the most important people in Jean’s life.”
Since Basquiat was attached to his natural father, Gerard, as well as surrounded by other male mentor figures, it seems unlikely that the significant “lack” in his life was an absent father. Perhaps it was the presence of too many fathers—paternalistic cannibals who overshadowed and demanded repression of attention for and memory of the mother or any feminine/female principle—that led Basquiat to be seduced by the metaphoric ritual sacrifice of his fathers, a sort of phallic murder that led to a death of the soul.
The loss of his mother, a shadowy figure trapped in a world of madness that caused her to be shut away, symbolically abandoned and abandoning, may have been the psychic trauma that shaped Basquiat’s work. Andy Warhol’s portrait of Matilde Basquiat shows us the smiling image of a black Puerto Rican woman. It was this individual, playfully identified by her son as “bruja” (witch), who first saw in Jean-Michel the workings of artistic genius and possibility. His father remembers, “His mother got him started and she pushed him. She was actually a very good artist.” Jean-Michel also gave testimony, “I’d say my mother gave me all the primary things. The art came from her.” Yet this individual who gave him the lived texts of ancestral knowledge as well as that of the white West is an absent figure in the personal scrapbook of Basquiat as successful artist. It is as if his inability to reconcile the force and power of femaleness with phallocentrism led to the erasure of female presence in his work.
Conflicted in his own sexuality, Basquiat is nevertheless represented in the Whitney catalogue and elsewhere as the stereotypical black stud randomly fucking white women. No importance is attached by critics to the sexual ambiguity that was so central to the Basquiat diva persona. Even while struggling to come to grips with himself as a subject rather than an object, he consistently relied on old patriarchal notions of male identity despite the fact that he critically associated maleness with imperialism, conquest, greed, endless appetite and, ultimately, death.
To be in touch with senses and emotions beyond conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious. This is the oppositional location Basquiat longed for yet could not reach. This is the feared location, associated not with meaningful resistance but with madness, loss, and invisibility. Basquiat’s paintings evoke a sense of dread. But the terror there is not for the world as it is, the decentered, disintegrating West, that familiar terrain of death. No, the dread is for that unimagined space, that location where one can live without the “same old shit.”
Confined within a process of naming, of documenting violence against the black male self, Basquiat was not able to chart the journey of escape. Napier asserts that “in naming, we relieve ourselves of the burden of actually considering the implication of how a different way of thinking can completely transform the conditions that make for meaningful social relations.” A master deconstructivist, Basquiat was not then able to imagine a concrete world of collective solidarities that could alter in any way the status quo. McEvilley sees Basquiat’s work as an “iconographic celebration of the idea of the end of the world, or of a certain paradigm of it.” While the work clearly calls out this disintegration, the mood of celebration is never sustained. Although Basquiat graphically portrays the disintegration of the West, he mourns the impact of this collapse when it signals doom in black life. Carnivalesque, humorous, playful representations of death and decay merely mask the tragic, cover it with a thin veneer of celebration. Clinging to this veneer, folks deny that a reality exists beyond and beneath the mask.
Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs recently suggested that many black folks “have striven to maintain secret enclosed spaces within our histories, within our lives, within our psyches about those things which disrupt our sense of self.” Despite an addiction to masking/masquerading in his personal life, Basquiat used painting to disintegrate the public image of himself that he created and helped sustain. It is no wonder then that this work is subjected to an ongoing critique that questions its “authenticity and value.” Failing to represent Basquiat accurately to that white art world that remains confident it “knew” him, critics claim and colonize the work within a theoretical apparatus of appropriation that can diffuse its power by making it always and only spectacle. That sense of “horrific” spectacle is advertised by the paintings chosen to don the covers of every publication on his work, including the Whitney catalogue.
In the conclusion to The Art of the Maasai, Turle asserts: “When a continent has had its people enslaved, its resources removed, and its lands colonized, the perpetrators of these actions can never agree with contemporary criticism or they would have to condemn themselves.” Refusal to confront the necessity of potential self-condemnation makes those who are least moved by Basquiat’s work insist on knowing it best. Understanding this, Braithwaite articulates the hope that Basquiat’s work will be critically reconsidered, that the exhibition at the Whitney will finally compel people to “look at what he did.”
But before this can happen, Braithwaite cautions, the established white art world (and I would add the Eurocentric, multi-ethnic viewing public) must first “look at themselves.” With insight he insists: “They have to try to erase, if possible, all the racism from their hearts and minds. And then when they look at the paintings they can see the art.” Calling for a process of decolonization that is certainly not happening (judging from the growing mass of negative responses to the show), Braithwaite articulates the only possible cultural shift in perspective that can lay the groundwork for a comprehensive critical appreciation of Basquiat’s work.
The work by Basquiat that haunts my imagination, that lingers in my memory, is “Riding with Death” (1988). Evoking images of possession, of riding and being ridden in the Haitian voudoun sense—as a process of exorcism, one that makes revelation, renewal and transformation possible—I feel the subversion of the sense of dread provoked by so much of Basquiat’s work. In its place is the possibility that the black-and-brown figure riding the skeletal white bones is indeed “possessed.” Napier invites us to consider possession as “truly an avant-garde activity, in that those in trance are empowered to go to the periphery of what is and can be known, to explore the boundaries, and to return unharmed.” No such spirit of possession guarded Jean-Michel Basquiat in his life. Napier reports that “people in trance do not—as performance artists in the West sometimes do—leave wounded bodies in the human world.” Basquiat must go down in history as one of the wounded. Yet his art will stand as the testimony that declares with a vengeance: we are more than our pain. That is why I am most moved by the one Basquiat painting that juxtaposes the paradigm of ritual sacrifice with that of ritual recovery and return.
3
WHAT’S PASSION GOT TO DO WITH IT?
An interview with Marie-France Alderman
All of bell hooks’s essays include an unforgettable testimony, a personal story told with trust. Why people tend to remember hooks’s words has to do with that trust—which is a leap of faith and which, in the face of what she chooses to talk about, remember and imagine, makes her much more than “one of the foremost black intellectuals in America today.” bell hooks has a way of offering herself up on the sacrificial altar of critical inquiry that
involves my heart and mind: I am always left with the exhilarating insights only seasoned raconteurs can inspire, hooks is the personal is political thirty years later, flagrant proof that feminism engenders pleasure and hope and the renewed lives that come with them.
bell hooks’s Black Looks established her reputation as an important film critic. Relentless in her conviction that “many audiences in the United States resist the idea that images have an ideological content,” hooks goes about piercing “the wall of denial” with some of the fiercest and sexiest film analyses ever published. An essay hooks wrote for Visions about The Crying Game and The Bodyguard and an interview that took place in New York in September give us a glimpse into a mind for which intellectual pleasure, art, and political intervention are one and the same.
—Marie-France Alderman
bell hooks: A friend from Ireland once said to me, “You know, you’ll never make it in the United States because there’s no place for passion”—not to mention for being a passionate woman. That’s probably what feminism was initially about: How do we make room for self-determining, passionate women who will be able to just be? I am passionate about everything in my life—first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. I don’t think we can act like it’s so great for men to be critical thinkers either. This society doesn’t want anybody to be a critical thinker. What we as women need to ask ourselves is: “In what context within patriarchy do women create space where we can protect our genius?” It’s a very, very difficult question. I think I most cultivated myself in the home space, yet that’s the space that is most threatening: it is much harder to resist a mother who loves you and then shames you than it is an outside world that does the same. It’s easier to say “no” to the outside world. When a lover tells you—as I’ve been told—“My next girlfriend will be dumb,” I think, “What is that message about?” Female creativity will have difficulty making itself seen. And when you add to that being a black female or a colored female, it becomes even more difficult.
Marie-France Alderman: What about the representation of black female creativity in recent films?
bh: What’s Love Got to Do With It, The Bodyguard, and Poetic Justice involve passionate black women characters, but they all rely on this packaging of black women musical icons— Janet Jackson, Tina Turner, and Whitney Houston. No one says you have to see The Bodyguard because Whitney Houston is such a great actress, because we know she’s not a great actress at all. We’re going to see what this musical icon does in this movie. Is this Hollywood saying we still can’t take black women seriously as actresses?
MFA: Perhaps only as entertainers—
bh: Why does the real Tina Turner have to come in at the end of What’s Love Got to Do With It? It’s like saying that Angela Bassett isn’t a good enough actress—which I didn’t think she was—by the way, and that’s part of why, in a sense, it becomes Larry Fishburne’s narrative of Ike, more so than the narrative of Tina Turner. It’s a very tragic film, because you sit in the theater and you see people really identify with the character of Ike, not with the character of Tina Turner. In my essay “Selling Hot Pussy,” in Black Looks, I talked about how Ike constructed the whole idea of Tina Turner’s character from those television movies of Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.
MFA: And you talk about how she was, in fact, anything but a wild woman.
bh: I, Tina, Tina Turner’s autobiography, is so much about her tragedy—the tragedy of being this incredibly talented woman in a family that didn’t care for you. Then you meet this man who appears to really care for you, who exploits you, but at the same time, you’re deeply tied to him. One of the things in the film that was so upsetting was when Tina Turner lost her hair. The filmmakers make that a funny moment. But can we really say that any woman losing her hair in this culture could be a funny moment? No one ever speculates that maybe Tina stayed with Ike because as a woman with no hair in this culture, she had no real value. That no amount of wigs …
MFA: or great legs …
bh: … no amount of being this incredible star could make up for the fact that she had bald spots. I mean, think about the whole relationship—not only of women in general in this culture to hair, but of black women to hair. What’s Love takes that incredibly tragic moment in a young female’s life and turns it into laughter, into farce. What I kept thinking about was why this culture can’t see a serious film that’s not just about a black female tragedy, but about a black female triumph. It’s so interesting how the film stops with Ike’s brutality, as though it is Tina Turner’s life ending. Why is it that her success is less interesting than the period of her life when she’s a victim?
MFA: Tina Turner lost control of her own story somewhere along the line.
bh: Part of what remains tragic about a figure like Tina Turner is that she’s still a person who has to work through that image of her that Ike created. I don’t know if this is true but I heard that she sold her story to Hollywood but didn’t ask to go over the script or for rights of approval. Obviously, she didn’t. Otherwise how could it have become cinematically Ike’s story? And why do we have to hear about Larry Fishburne not wanting to do this film unless there can be changes in Ike’s character; unless that character can be softened, made to feel more human? I mean, Fuck Ike! That’s how I feel. You know, all these black people—particularly black men—have been saying to me, “Ike couldn’t have treated her that bad.” Why don’t they say, “Isn’t it tragic that he did treat her so bad?” This just goes to show you how we, as black people in this country, remain sexist in our thinking of men and women. The farcical element of this film has to do not just with the producers thinking that white people won’t take seriously a film about a black woman who’s battered and abused but that black people won’t either. So you have to make it funny. I was very frightened by the extent to which laughter circulated in that theater over stuff that wasn’t funny. That scene with her hair is so utterly farcical. The fact is that no fucking woman—including Tina Turner—is beautiful in her body when she’s being battered. The real Tina Turner was sick a lot. She had all kinds of health problems during her life with Ike. Yet the film shows us this person who is so incredibly beautiful and incredibly sexual. We don’t see the kind of contrast Tina Turner actually sets up in her autobiography between, “I looked like a wreck one minute, and then, I went on that stage and projected all this energy.” The film should have given us the pathos of that, but it did not at all because farce can’t give you the pathos of that.
MFA: When you talk about Tina Turner going from a victimized, overworked woman, who is always sick, to an entertainer who jumps to the stage—that’s consistent with a conception of black life that goes from the cotton field to tap dancing.
bh: Absolutely.
MFA: Maybe we can’t imagine anything about black lives beyond that.
bh: We can’t imagine anything else as long as Hollywood and the structures of filmmaking keep these very “either/or” categories. The Bodyguard makes a significant break with Hollywood construction of black female characters—not because Whitney Houston has sex with this white man, but because the white man, Frank Farmer, says that her life is valuable, that her life is worth saving. Traditionally, Hollywood has said, “Black women are backdrops; they’re dixie cups. You can use them and dispense them.” Now, here’s a whole film that’s saying just the opposite. Whether it’s a bad film is beside the point. The fact is, millions and millions of people around the world are looking at this film which, at its core, challenges all our perceptions of the value of not only black life but of black female life. To say that a black, single mother’s life is valuable, is really a very revolutionary thing in a society where black women who are single parents are always constructed in the public imagination as unbeautiful, unsexy, unintelligent, deranged, what have you. At the same tim
e, the film’s overall message is paternalistic. I found it fascinating that we see Kevin Costner’s character related to God, Nation, and country.
MFA: The same thing happened in Dances with Wolves.
bh: And in The Crying Game, where you have white men struggling with their identity. In The Bodyguard, we’re dealing with a white boy who is the right, for God, for country but who somehow finds himself at a moment of crisis in his life—having sex, falling in love with this black woman. That’s what he needs to get himself together but once he’s together, he has to go back. So, we have the final shots in the film where he’s back with God and Nation. It’s all white. It’s all male, and of course, the film makes us feel that he’s made the right choice. He didn’t allow himself to be swept away by otherness and difference, yet the very reason this film can gross $138 million is that people are fascinated right now with questions of otherness and difference. Both Kevin Costner and Neil Jordan repeatedly said that their films had nothing to do with race. Kevin Costner said that “it would be a pity if people went to see The Bodyguard and thought it was about race.” Well, why the fuck does he think millions of people want to see it? Nobody cares about white men fucking black women. People care about the idea of a rich white man—the fictional man, Frank Farmer, but also the real Kevin Costner—being fascinated by Whitney Houston. They went to see a film about love, not about fucking, because we can see any number of porno films where white men are fucking black women. The Bodyguard is about a love so powerful that it makes people transgress certain values. Think again about how it compares with The Crying Game, where once again, we have this theme of desire and love so powerful that it allows one to transcend national identity, racial identity, and finally, sexual identity. I find that to be the ultimate reactionary message in both of these films: We don’t need politics. We don’t need struggle. All we need is desire. It is desire that becomes the place of connection. This is a very postmodern vision of desire, as the new place of transgression that eliminates the need for radical politics.