At Posterity's Gate
Julian Schnabel talks Basquiat and Schnabel, plus Schnabel and 𝘉𝘢𝘴𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘢𝘵 (1996)...
WHERE TO EVEN BEGIN with this one?
The Christmas after 9/11, my older brother returned to Seattle from his first semester at Cooper Union, bringing with him tales of the painter Basquiat and the 1996 biopic Basquiat. I was fourteen and had not yet been to New York; up to this point my visions of the city came from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Ghostbusters, Home Alone II, Men in Black, Seinfeld and the American Godzilla. Basquiat was my first glimpse of NYC as a place where artists stayed up all night collaborating on records and videos, trading drugs for paintings, endlessly discussing their ideas and passions while chain-smoking in diners and back alleyways; a New York where punks, bohemians, children of the working and elite classes alike could bump shoulders at the same sooty nightclubs. (Shot entirely on location, Basquiat is as much an ode to the good/bad old days of the Lindsay-Koch era as it is, in hindsight, a document of Giuliani-era Manhattan that looks pretty good/bad compared to the version rescaled by the compassionate corporatism of Bloomberg and his successors - but I’m digressing…)
Which artist fed me this fantasy? Not Jean-Michel Basquiat, but instead the filmmaker, Julian Schnabel, who seemed at the time a sensitive witness to the art-world vampirism and bigotry (casual and otherwise) faced by the young Haitian-American painter as he navigated these majority-white spaces. Part of Basquiat’s attraction is its ensemble: in addition to Jeffrey Wright (making his screen debut after a star-making performance in the original Broadway run of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America) as Jean-Michel, the movie features a downtown who’s-who playing a downtown who’s-who: David Bowie as Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper as Swiss art dealer Bruno Bishopfberger, Parker Posey as gallerist Mary Boone, Willem Dafoe as a gallery electrician (“I’m glad I never got any recognition. It’s given me time to develop”), Christopher Walken as a racist journalist with a smile1, Claire Forlani, Benicio del Toro and, most controversially, Gary Oldman as “Albert Milo” - a friend of Basquiat’s, an obvious decoy for Julian Schnabel. Michael Wincott, then known to me as the villain in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, plays legendary art critic Rene Ricard, whose 1981 Artforum essay “The Radiant Child” is quoted at length in the screenplay; Ricard is thanked in the end credits, so it seemed many of Basquiat’s real-life contemporaries were in on the “joke”. But Schnabel’s film is not a joke, rather, a requiem - right?
Last July I decided to try and speak with Schnabel about Basquiat, on the occasion of the movie’s 25th anniversary. Our meetings took place before my pitches to various magazines or online publications had been approved; in the end, none of them were. Schnabel has stayed on top these past few decades, so I was surprised by the lack of interest, given a screening - if I’m not mistaken, the only one - held in semi-private at the MoMA Sculpture Garden. There, Schnabel premiered his “remaster” of Basquiat, which re(or de)-colorized the film, now in black and white. Surely someone would re-release this version, put it out on streaming for a limited time, shoot a new video featurette with Schnabel. So far, no dice. Maybe the lack of interest in Basquiat the film, contrasted with the worldwide explosion of the Basquiat brand in the interceding quarter-century, is its own enduring criticism.
Ahead of the interview, conversations with colleagues and friends tended to portray Schnabel as a chest-thumping narcissist and, often, the face of everything now considered gauche about fine art from the Reagan years, after deregulation surged the Dow and an artist who had been living hand-to-mouth could suddenly find themselves at the center of a blue-chip bidding war. One unnamed downtowner told me Basquiat and Schnabel were “such good friends”. Another skipped the Schnabel question entirely and told me the real Basquiat was responsible for getting their friend’s sister hooked on heroin. An art-world millennial relayed, thirdhand, the story of Basquiat laughing in Schnabel’s face at his own opening, in front of his own paintings. A contemporary of Schnabel’s told me the movie should have been called Schnabel instead of Basquiat, as a kind of postmodern bait-and-switch; this was one of the few people in his cohort I managed to talk to who claimed he liked the movie. Another scene veteran told me he refused to watch it, then and now. Jim Jarmusch said the same thing to IndieWire. And so on. If nothing else, the movie elicited - and elicits - strong reactions from people.
Summer 2021 was the first time I read the late critic and curator Okwui Enwezor’s 1996 review of Basquiat, unsparing as they come, all the moreso being a review of a biopic of a Black man, directed by a white man, reviewed by another Black man:
In every shot Schnabel worked hard to dismantle the Basquiat aura, rubbing it out with each frame of the picture as if to punish his 'friend' for having died young and claimed the trophy of immortality first. I waited excruciatingly for Basquiat to utter one full, intelligible sentence, but was rewarded with only grunts. Basquiat, if we are to believe the film, is either too much of a savant on the prowl for white pussy, or simply stoned out of his eyeballs. Each step is so unnecessarily covered in a confetti of whiteness that key figures in the Basquiat constellation, such as Fab Five Freddy, Futura 2000 and Ramellzee were simply erased. Hence, Basquiat was drawn, in classic Lacanian terms, as an empty signifier, a ventriloquist's dummy encased in the amniotic sac of whiteness. Schnabel, as the ring master of this fantasy of displacement, performs the perfect pantomime in which Basquiat is not only deontologised, but equally desubjectivised.
I also read J. Faith Almiron’s more recent “No One Owns Basquiat, Not Even Peter Brant” in Hyperallergic. Brant is a publishing mogul, a “socialite” and, as a patron of the art world (in the Borgia/Medici sense), one of the main pushers of “Basquiat” over the last three decades and, not coincidentally, one of the producers of Schnabel’s film.
After I moved to New York and enrolled at Hunter College, I was forced to purchase and pretended to read a book called Whose Monet?: An Introduction to the American Legal System. So “whose Basquiat” was this, really? At first glance it was Schnabel’s, of course. But upon rewatch, I wondered if Basquiat had been restructured by its producer-distributor Miramax to make good use of a number of songs - The Pogues, Bowie, Tom Waits, Van Morrison, the Stones, many more - which occasion their own conspicuous set pieces, the goal, I imagine, being to sell more copies of the Basquiat Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. (Reediting movies to make more money was Harvey Weinstein’s earlier “bad reputation”.) Is Basquiat a case of history xeroxing itself in real time?
After I made contact with Schnabel, he invited me to Palazzo Chupi, his mansion/studio/museum at the bleeding west side of 11th Street. Schnabel read aloud to me, a four-minute-long quotation by William Gaddis (“the last thing he ever wrote”) in praise of his paintings. He had me move Napoleonic chairs so that we could sit and look at his plate paintings while we spoke. He was generous in allocating time for what ended up being two long conversations, but also evasive in the face of blunt questioning. He aborted the first talk because he had to leave for Montauk, leaving me alone in his studio with an insanely heavy Taschen coffee table book in praise of his films; he told me to let myself out when I was finished. At the end of the second, he showed me a work-in-progress portrait of his friend Lawrence Weiner2, initiated by Schnabel after he learned about Weiner’s terminal cancer diagnosis. These were exciting moments in Bluebeard’s castle, for sure, but only you can say if they brought me any closer to solving the mystery of Basquiat. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.