The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works
Fred Hoffman
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten—
That is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
—Kabir
Underlying
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sense of himself as an artist was his innate
capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his
perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn,
projecting them outward through his creative acts. This recognition of
his role first manifested itself in street actions wherein, under the
tag name of SAMO, he transformed his own observations into pithy text
messages inscribed on the edifices of the urban environment. This effort
quickly became the basis for his early artistic output, including a
series of text-image drawings executed in early 1981. Containing a
single word, a short phrase, or a simple image referring to a person,
event, or recent observation, each drawing refined an external
perception down to its core.
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