WEBVTT 00:00:03.628 --> 00:00:07.507 BASQUIAT AND SPIRALISM 00:00:08.007 --> 00:00:12.971 Basquiat was half Haitian, half Puerto Rican, he was born in the 60s 00:00:12.971 --> 00:00:19.477 I believe, so he didn't live in Haiti, being of Haitian parentage, 00:00:19.561 --> 00:00:22.897 he was still aware of his country's history, he was aware 00:00:22.897 --> 00:00:25.775 of the great political figures in our history like Toussaint Louverture. 00:00:26.067 --> 00:00:32.991 Basquiat had a somewhat nomadic childhood wandering through the city 00:00:32.991 --> 00:00:37.412 but he also developed his talents a lot, he was even interested in medicine 00:00:37.412 --> 00:00:42.667 He was very interested in graphic arts that we find in his work 00:00:42.667 --> 00:00:48.840 through his graffiti, which was considered at first not as art really, 00:00:49.466 --> 00:00:55.221 but rather as a form of protest, and the city walls served 00:00:55.221 --> 00:01:00.310 as a canvas for these young people to express precisely their frustration 00:01:00.310 --> 00:01:01.436 with this modern society. 00:01:01.436 --> 00:01:07.692 At a young age, he was interested in drawing, he was interested in comic books 00:01:08.151 --> 00:01:11.404 and then the Black American world marked him immediately 00:01:11.404 --> 00:01:16.993 At the time, it was the big boxing match between Muhammad Ali and his opponents 00:01:16.993 --> 00:01:21.456 It was also the era of the great African-American demands 00:01:21.456 --> 00:01:25.502 What we now call Black Americans or African Americans 00:01:25.502 --> 00:01:29.464 While he himself was mixed-race, someone who could have been considered at the time 00:01:29.464 --> 00:01:35.011 as Latino, with his Haitian Creole heritage too, he was almost in a trance 00:01:35.011 --> 00:01:36.429 when he worked. 00:01:36.513 --> 00:01:42.268 Michel Basquiat's art is both the art of a blacksmith 00:01:42.268 --> 00:01:46.022 He is someone who forged himself in drawing, in his technique 00:01:46.022 --> 00:01:51.486 who enriched his writing, he is someone who also found the links 00:01:52.195 --> 00:01:56.783 that could exist between his purely pictorial and muralist grammar 00:01:56.783 --> 00:02:03.248 with lexical inventions, words, and it's like a lexicon he invented 00:02:03.331 --> 00:02:08.795 it's as if he was in several languages, in several types of languages, Basquiat 00:02:08.795 --> 00:02:12.507 Basquiat's art is polyform 00:02:12.507 --> 00:02:19.389 That is to say, it took on several forms, he is someone who defied the scale of values 00:02:19.389 --> 00:02:23.476 of his time, he is someone who came like that and emerged 00:02:24.018 --> 00:02:33.444 emerged from the subways, emerged from the subway, emerged from the world of muralists and became an artist 00:02:33.444 --> 00:02:36.322 outside the norm. 00:02:36.573 --> 00:02:40.827 WHAT IS SPIRALISM? 00:02:41.369 --> 00:02:46.958 Spiralism would precisely be that gaze into a fractured mirror of life 00:02:46.958 --> 00:02:52.463 where there are always twists and turns of situations 00:02:52.463 --> 00:03:03.224 twists and turns of interpretation, twists and turns of everything that happens around 00:03:03.224 --> 00:03:08.479 oneself with the influences that it can have on our behavior 00:03:08.479 --> 00:03:16.321 on our reactions too, so spiralism is a way of seeing life 00:03:16.321 --> 00:03:21.826 from multiple facets but at the same time, so one cannot move 00:03:21.826 --> 00:03:26.039 in a straight line in a spiralist work like Franketienne's, for example 00:03:26.039 --> 00:03:29.125 and even in Basquiat's painting, it's like entering a corridor 00:03:29.125 --> 00:03:33.004 or a labyrinth, and each time you have to find your bearings 00:03:33.171 --> 00:03:38.509 to return to the starting point and then even visualize the end, how we will get out 00:03:38.509 --> 00:03:42.847 and in order to actually find oneself again in the center of this labyrinth 00:03:43.097 --> 00:03:50.021 to be able to reconsider one's questions, to ask oneself the same questions again 00:03:50.229 --> 00:03:55.109 in relation to other forms of answers too that we have had through this same journey, 00:03:55.360 --> 00:03:59.739 so it's quite complex but at the same time it's like an adventure 00:03:59.739 --> 00:04:02.951 the adventure of life it's an intellectual adventure, 00:04:03.201 --> 00:04:07.330 it's an emotional adventure, so it's an adventure of creation above all. 00:04:07.330 --> 00:04:11.459 Spiralism is a form of writing first, a form of aesthetics 00:04:11.542 --> 00:04:19.133 and Franketienne made it a literary aesthetic, an artistic aesthetic 00:04:19.133 --> 00:04:27.850 that takes on several forms, but I myself would say that in every creator 00:04:27.850 --> 00:04:32.689 there is somewhere a spiralist movement because it's a whirlwind 00:04:33.523 --> 00:04:39.195 spiralism is a whirlwind, that is to say when you see the wind blowing 00:04:39.195 --> 00:04:43.408 and it swirls with kites 00:04:43.533 --> 00:04:50.039 it swirls with everything there is, dust particles and this form of whirlwind 00:04:50.039 --> 00:04:54.877 is a bit like the unfolding of the spiral. 00:04:55.253 --> 00:04:59.632 WAS BASQUIAT A SPIRALIST? 00:04:59.882 --> 00:05:05.305 When exploring a work by Basquiat, one can read it vertically, 00:05:05.305 --> 00:05:09.934 horizontally, and even in a spiral way to try to find 00:05:09.934 --> 00:05:13.396 an interpretation, but the interpretation is perhaps not in the work 00:05:13.396 --> 00:05:16.566 but in the way of approaching the work. 00:05:17.150 --> 00:05:21.696 Basquiat wants to show us that we live in situations 00:05:22.030 --> 00:05:26.576 we live in an era where everything clashes, culture clashes 00:05:26.784 --> 00:05:32.874 intellectual wealth clashes with perhaps economic situations 00:05:32.874 --> 00:05:38.171 or social ones, living conditions that have many contradictions 00:05:38.171 --> 00:05:46.387 many paradoxes, so now this work introduces us precisely 00:05:46.471 --> 00:05:49.599 into this movement, into this labyrinth. 00:05:49.599 --> 00:05:53.561 For Franketienne, the spiral is not closed, in that sense 00:05:53.686 --> 00:05:59.484 he may be right, in wanting to compare his spiralist approach to that of Basquiat 00:05:59.484 --> 00:06:07.909 who was interested in words, colors, forms, supports 00:06:09.369 --> 00:06:13.748 and who could create art from any object 00:06:14.165 --> 00:06:15.541 from any surface.