Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat light up the cavernous Gagosian Gallery on far West 25th Street like a carnival. At each turn they offer up big noisy characters and splashes of crayon-box color and snatches of street slang. Basquiat, like Warhol, is a brilliant graphic designer, and paints to charge each square inch of surface with a bristling kinetic energy. It’s as if every figure, phrase and mark we see could burst forward at any moment, but has been pinned in place with scientific precision. These canvases are full but aren’t overwrought. In Italian is packed with all sorts of things (faces, quotes, splotches, scribbles, two quarters, one gorilla) and yet remains remarkably poised, with swatches of primer and raw canvas showing through, giving the scene, below its lush, funky texture, space and depth.

Seeing these paintings expunges Basquiat’s personal mythology of a boy genius dying young. These are substantial works that stir up recollections of Jackson Pollock (in their deep swirling motions) and Willem De Kooning (in their scary, funny monsters). They also, seemingly effortlessly, capture rhythms of cartoon art, graffiti, advertising, and video games. Two paintings here stand out for their brute, experimental simplicity. Each of these was shaped by stretching canvas over a wood pallet, overpainting it in a single color, and embellishing it with a single face and name. One, red, commemorates Jersey Joe Walcott and the other, black, commemorates Sugar Ray Robinson. These two pieces have an unique sculptural charisma that sets them apart from the other canvases. They’re more powerful as talismans than as paintings, and start to chart a different course. It’s hard not to wonder what more Basquiat would have done if he had lived. There is in these canvases an iconography not yet fully developed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983.
Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery

© The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/ADAGP, Paris, ARS, New York 2013.

April 29, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The play Ganesh and the Third Reich is sort of like the Wizard of Oz, with Ganesh (instead of Dorothy) seeking an audience with Hitler (instead of the Wizard) to reclaim the swastika (instead of trying to get back home). It’s a lot of things: a play within a play, a tonal essay, and an exploration of cultural iconography. The Public Theater, where the Back to Back Theatre company is performing it, issued a warning to ticket-buyers that the production "contains coarse language, adult themes and a portrayal of Lord Ganesh which some may find troubling.“ What was far more troubling to me than seeing the Hindu god portrayed by a dour, overweight Australian actor, as well as all the swastikas, was something else. Three of the five actors in the ensemble are mentally disabled, which shocked me.

Why was it shocking? These three actors are, simply, playing characters who are mentally disabled. Mental disability isn’t one of the play’s themes; it’s not explored structurally or poetically here, to discover how a differently-minded individual uses language and imagines the world, as it has been in some of Robert Wilson’s collaborations with autistic poet Christopher Knowles. The play contains dramatic tonal shifts, with lyrical scenes (there’s a train travel sequence that might be the most captivating thing I’ve ever seen on a stage) undercut by brutally naturalistic ones (like a a scrum of the five actors rolling around the bare stage). In one memorable passage, a displaced, mentally disabled, German Jew running from the Nazis remembers that he had been different since he was a child, saying "I heard stories differently." What unsettled me about watching the mentally disabled actors was the fear that they were, somehow, making themselves especially vulnerable to the audience without entirely understanding these vulnerabilities. Yet they performed with such clarity and alacrity that this might not be true.

January 18, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The last time I was in Paris I stopped at Tati to pick up an Eiffel Tower charm to bring back, ironically, as a souvenir. I came back instead with a delicate filigree ornament of an open hand, of which I knew nothing except that it was “eastern” and that it carried some sort of blessing. I wore it on those days when I felt the need to be protected with forces greater than normal, and felt protected.

It wasn’t until I read Dare Me by Megan Abbott, a crime story set in the emotionally-charged world of high school cheerleading, that I learned that it was a hamsa. The amulet is resonant in Islamic, Jewish and Christian traditions. Depending on one’s beliefs, the flat palm depicted is that of Fatima daughter of Mohammed, Miriam sister of Moses, of Mary mother of God. The charm has been secularized and popularized in friendship bracelets exchanged by teenage girls. It’s often paired with a small, round glass bead that represents the evil eye, which the hamsa can ward off. In Dare Me a hamsa friendship bracelet becomes a crucial plot point when it’s gifted by a cheerleader to her coach and then spotted by that girl’s best friend, who acts out. The design of most hamsas – sort of symmetrical but not really, sort of naturalistic but not really, sometimes up and sometimes down – lends itself to inspired graphic design. My own charm is smaller than a penny and astonishingly thin, with equal parts gold and open space so that it feels like a scrap of lace. It’s hard to find an expression of this icon that isn’t lovely. Even the clumsiest ones convey its essential goodness.

November 28, 2012 by Nalina Moses