Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

When I think of the films of Tamra Davis, a smile comes to my face. I think of the giggly afternoons spent with my college roommates watching such treasures as Billy Madison and Half Baked while ingesting whatever substance struck our fancy. I was impressed that these offbeat, halfwit, male-centric movies actually came from the mind of a woman, and I found something delightfully subversive about that. These were characters we all knew; they were the terribly lovable yet completely idiotic manboy friends who were aimlessly wondering the world anxiously awaiting the next "nudie magazine day." My friends and I loved these lighthearted films for all their fluff and they've certainly become a part of our pop culture history.

Not long ago I found out that Davis was set to release a documentary. Although it seemed a bit out of character, being a fan, I had faith. Then I found out what the documentary was about: Jean-Michel Basquiat. O.M.G. If you're familiar with Basquiat's work, chances are you're obsessed with it. Basquiat is one of the most iconic and influential artists of the modern art movement. His work is incredibly cerebral and spans the scope of subject matter from poverty to racism to fame, and far beyond. Billy Madison was a movie about a guy who couldn't spell the word couch. I wasn't seeing the correlation.

Needless to say, I was blown away. The film starts off with a musical collage featuring some of Jean-Michel's work, inter-cut with footage of him painting. Rare images and reproductions of his artwork run a steady line throughout the film, providing the foundation for the story that unfolds, and at the center of the film is a very raw, very jagged interview with Jean-Michel taken about a year before his death in 1986.

Heavy hitters such as Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Fab 5 Freddy (yes!), and Rene Ricard all make an appearance. Each one of them gives an incredibly honest and personal account of their relationship with Jean-Michel. However, the most heartfelt, and perhaps honest, interview is that of Suzanne Mallouk, Jean-Michel's long-time lover and most ardent supporter.

While the men interviewed paint an accurate picture of what Basquiat's work represented, and what his presence meant, Suzanne is able to provide the best portrait of who he was, not only as an artist, but as a man. Her anecdotes are the most poignant, and most defining moments in the film. There have been endless books, articles, and news stories written about Basquiat's artistic influence or infamous life, but hearing hearing stories from someone who truly loved him is beautiful.

As I left the theater, I thought about my initial reaction to Tamra Davis' release of this seminal Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary, and realized it made perfect sense. This is a portrait of an man who was lovable, mild mannered, sometimes idiotic, and ultimately brilliant. It's about a man wondering the world, looking for inspiration and the next step toward infamy, and this is the kind of story Tamra Davis tells best.

Cross-posted at LA Femmedia

Written by: Kadi Rodriguez, August 31st 2010

The Hindus: An Alternative History

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:32:00 +0000

By Wendy Doniger

Penguin Press

Wendy Doniger, currently the most outstanding American scholar of Hinduism, serves us a feast of tasty historical events and interpretative myths in this rich curry of a book, covering social and cultural developments in the Indian subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern day. It is an “alternative history” in that it concentrates on the interactions between the religious texts and rituals created mainly by those whom Gurcharan Das calls “Dead Male Brahmins” and the alternative peoples Doniger finds so significant in the evolution of the multiform Hindu tradition, such as lower-castes, women, Buddhists, Muslims.

Doniger’s themes include violence versus nonviolence towards humans and animals, tensions between the worldly “householder life” and ascetic renunciation, the desire to obtain a good rebirth on earth and the desire to avoid rebirth altogether. She emphasizes the Hindu sense of time, the feeling that things that happened in the past are the source of things happening now, that the past comes to fruition in the present, and the value of oral traditions in preserving variant voices in society. She maintains the importance of the history of ideas and the stories that express those ideas: “For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.” Tales of animals are especially vital in Hindu mythology, and she recounts many different stories in which animals such as horses, cows, tigers, monkeys, dogs and an occasional cat play key roles. Gods even become incarnate as animals and are associated with particular animals, such as Shiva with his bull, Nandi.

Another important focus of Doniger’s work is the representation of the female gender, whether in animals or women, goddesses or ogresses. From the ancient myth of the doomsday mare in the depths of the sea, , to the rise of popular worship of the dark goddess Kali, the female in Hindu mythology is dangerous and must be controlled and propitiated. Doniger argues that there is “an inverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and natural women on the ground.” The female divinities of India can be divided into goddesses of the breast, peaceful wives and mothers, and goddesses of the tooth, unmarried, independent of male control, often killers. Doniger finds that the situation in India, in general, destroys “the pious hope of goddess feminists” that the worship of goddesses is a good thing for women. The powers attributed to goddesses have not encouraged men to grant to women, or women to seize from men, greater political and economic powers. Indeed, the shakti or creative power seen as inherent in women leads men to try harder to control women, to silence them, except for those rebel women who defy convention and allow themselves to be possessed by the spirit of the fierce goddesses.

Doniger devotes considerable attention to the development of the custom of suttee, or burning wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands, along with other abuses such as female infanticide and the dowry murders of daughters-in-law still occurring in modern India. She notes that some eyewitnesses give evidence of widows who seemed willing to go to the pyre and others of widows forced to sacrifice themselves, adding that the voice we most want to hear is missing: “the voice of the woman in the fire.” We can never hear the testimony of the women who wanted to die and did, whether for pragmatic or religious reasons. The ritual itself arises from the mythology linking women and fire in the cycle of marriage, death, and rebirth.

The final chapters of this impressive study analyze the political and religious activities of Mahatma Gandhi, the efforts to reform or repeal the caste system, the migration of Hindus and Hinduism to England and America, and the political and religious controversies in present-day India. The Hindu goddesses continue to evolve: in Kerala in 2008 the goddess Bhagavati paid a ceremonial visit to her “twin sister,” the Virgin Mary, at a near-by church. Meanwhile the women painters of Mithila, who traditionally made wall and floor paintings in their homes for marriages and other domestic rituals, have begun to make and sell similar paintings on paper to art collectors in India and around the world. In spite of conflicts, the rich diversity of the Hindu culture is moving forward to a promising future.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 23rd 2009