Postscriptum

Abstract

Taking a cue from Cy Twombly, perhaps his truest source of inspiration, Jean-Michel Basquiat left the relative street-comfort of the graffiti-parade to embark on an even more daring personal journey. But what could the link be between Basquiat’s early practice of a street-bound theatricality and Twombly’s immersion into, and transposition of, classical echoes as content within his pictures—his citing not of visual icons, prevalently, but of verbal ones? Twombly’s words themselves, or his sentences, or the fragments thereof (his verbal ruins) are extracted from their original context and quasi-sacrificially offered either in isolation or in new company, so that their reappearing could elicit the sense of something paradoxically unprecedented. The citation is meant to counter the wear of language, of history, through the ravages of time, but also, emphatically, to draw (poetic, and on occasion perhaps even polemical) attention to this fatal crumbling of images and words, embedded in what may be left of the memory, and the records, of (Western, literate) “civilization.” The early insertion of xeroxes of his own sketches through collage allowed Basquiat to juxtapose iconic appropriation and transposition—à la Andy Warhol, but also with a touch of Old World objet-trouvé sensibility (once more, not unrelated to Twombly’s own)—with a sort of dramatic in-your-face display of language-asicon. Warhol, on the other hand, for all his “philosophy,” had affected—like John Cage, despite his meta-musical ramblings—an insistent predilection for silence. It is as if language itself became for Basquiat a spectacle of the imaginary, each word, each fragment of a sentence, a scene in a kaleidoscopic display of rhetorical content that would pile up as word-images in a discourse