UNTITLED
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, 1981
Start with the kid in the hospital bed. 1968. Brooklyn. Jean-Michel Basquiat is seven, playing ball in the street, when a car hits him. Broken arm. Internal injuries. His spleen has to come out. His mother Matilde brings him something to read while he recovers. Gray's Anatomy. The medical book. Muscles with the skin off. Bones with their names printed beside them. The book sticks. Thirteen years later, Basquiat is twenty, making this in oilstick on paper. It looks like it arrived all at once. Three figures stare out, weapons at their sides. Halos over two of them. A crown on the third. Around them, stars, waves, a sun, marks that look half prehistoric, half subway. And in the middle, two animals. One feral, teeth out. The other stripped to a skeleton, ribs showing, and somehow still moving. That's the trick with Basquiat. What looks raw is loaded. Anatomy. Black history. Jazz. Egyptian signs. Street language. Crowns. Nothing kept in its proper department. So sure, the skeleton can mean death. Skeletons usually get stuck with that job. But it also looks like Gray's Anatomy got loose. The book from the hospital bed, thirteen years later, running through the middle of the page. The body with the cover pulled off. The frame underneath. And in these same years, Basquiat was playing in a downtown noise band. The Mudd Club. No album. Barely songs. The band had another name first. Basquiat gave it the one that stuck. He called it Gray.