Warhol and Basquiat's collaborations were 'physical conversations'

The Museum of Modern Art ARKEN, (Denmark), presents a large special exhibition of two American art legends, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). For Dieter Buchhart, curator of the exhibition, Warhol and Basquiat's collaborations were ‘physical conversations’.

Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of The Warhol & Basquiat exhibition?
 
I started the project with the Danish museum already five years ago but it took us a while to finalize it. After the opening of my comprehendsive Basquiat retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and at the Musée d'art modern della ville de Paris we intensified our work on the project. It was very interesting for me to deepen my studies about Basquiat and his time with this show. I will continue with a Keith Haring show in Paris in 2013.

How would you account for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s star appeal?

Since Warhol's death in 1987, a differentiated view has taken hold. The image of Warhol as a star artist is understood more as a mask, which, comparable to his silk screens, reflects the mechanisms of modern capitalist consumer society. All the same, a certain conscious ambivalence remains in Warhol's work, leaving open the question of whether the artist wanted to explicitly engage in critique of the system, or wanted to sharpen the view of the beholder in approaching the world of consumption and media that dominates our society.

On the other hand Basquiat born in Brooklyn, New York, he was the son of a Haitian immigrant and his wife, who originated from Puerto Rico. His career began in the New York underground, as a graffiti artist, musician and actor, before he turned to painting at age nineteen. His works are suffused with the same intensity and energy that marked his short life. In the course of only eight years, when he collaborated, among others, with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente and Debby Harry, he produced an oeuvre of approximately 1000 paintings and more than 2000 drawings. Against the background of the then-dominant Conceptual and Minimal Art, Basquiat succeeded in setting new figurative and expressive accents in art and very fast became a star.

His works, populated by comic-like, skeletal figures, curious everyday objects, and poetic slogans, are colourful and powerful. They blend elements from pop culture and cultural history, including music and sports, with political and economic themes to produce critical and ironic commentaries on consumer society and social injustice -especially as regards racism. So his work is very serious and he was working very hard and intense. I think it was not easy for him being star and it has led to a more heavy use of drugs which finally killed him at the age of 27.
 
Warhol and Basquiat had artistic temperaments that were opposites in many ways. How different were their artistic personalities?  How did those differences help in the creation of their collaborative works?

Yes indeed they were very different personalities and also at very different stages of theirs career and age. Despite the contrasts between these artists, their mutual influence on one another is legible. While Warhol, inspired by Basquiat, returned to his beginnings as a painter, Basquiat began to sample his earlier visual collages by way of the silkscreen technique introduced by Warhol.

Warhol and Basquiat's collaborations were 'physical conversations' in the sense of dialogues and physical confrontations that demanded a great deal of mutual respect and acceptance. They always embodied a conflict between two very different views of art and worldviews. That these antagonists could together create such brilliant, diverse works in such fertile artistic collaboration can be explained by the great productive tension that resulted from this encounter.

Yet this web of relations was very fragile, as is shown by Basquiat's terminating the collaboration with Warhol after the generally critical reception of the exhibition of sixteen collaborative works at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in September 1985. Vivien Raynor, for example, even called Basquiat Warhol's 'mascot' in a review that appeared in the New York Times on September 20. The poster designed by Tony Shafrazi points clearly to this physical act of this unique artistic collaboration: he portrayed the two artists as two boxers.

The exhibition offers a rare window into an unusual collaboration between Warhol and Basquiat. Can you describe the main highlights of this artistic collaboration?
 
Basquiat accentuated or obliterated Warhol's hand-painted creations as well as his silkscreens with his own visual elements, placing them on top of them or alongside them, as in his own work allowing what can be found beneath to be noticed and seen. He constantly lent these works the anatomy of his own works, with an interplay between inside and out, top and bottom. With his engagement with everyday racism, the encounter of various cultures, and his reflection of our capitalist consumer society, the 'anatomy of the street' always remained his issue.

Keith Haring describes the collaboration as 'a physical conversation happening in paint instead of words'. Basquiat accentuated and obliterated Warhol's visual creations with his own visual elements, 'Andy loved the energy with which Jean-Michel would totally eradicate one image and enhance another... They worked on many [canvases] at the same time, each idea inspiring the next. Layers and layers of images and ideas would build towards a concise climax.' The highlight of this collaboration is how to so different artist can find together and create something even more fascinating.

What do you hope visitors to the exhibition will take away with them?

See the fascinating interplay of two genius artists and see how contemporary both of them still are. And see what a challenge an artistic collaboration can be and how it can challenge our perception and art history. How inspiring they were can be seen in the collaborations of Jake Chapman, George Condo, Paul McCarthy and Dinos Chapman that Mark Sanders, who was then co-director of RS&A Ltd. 2006, initiated in 2006.

Similar to Bischofberger, Sanders, who himself referrred to the three-way collaboration, suggested that they also transport the works from one studio to the next. Towards that end, even the Chapman Brothers erected a temporary separating wall in their studio to keep one from seeing what the other was doing. History continues against the backdrop that artistic collaborations, artist couples, and collectives had become a matter of course by the 1980s at the latest.