The Chiostro Del Bramante, a cloister-turned-gallery in the heart of Rome, is currently presenting Jean-Michel Basquiat: New York City a generous selection of work spanning the short, but immensely prolific, career of this extraordinary artist. The extensive exhibition includes nearly one hundred significant works on loan from the Mugrabi Collection, which includes acrylics and oils, as well as drawings, silkscreen prints, and ceramics completed between the years of 1981 and 1987.

Born in Brooklyn, New York to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiats stunning and breathtakingly rapid ascent to fame and stardom was paralleled by few, if any, other artists in the twentieth century. At Sothebys recently, Basquiats painting of a skull, Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5 million a record price for an American painter, placing him in the art history pantheon alongside Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon. We can be pleased that Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese billionaire who bought the painting, intends to share his taste for art with the public. However, if we are to truly approach these works at all, it is necessary to get beyond the din of the market the screeching vultures as the late John Berger puts it and give our attention to the sophistication and wit of this painter, the sincerity and exuberance of his canvases.

Untitled, 1982 (Source: Sothebys New York via artnet News)

From the first early portraits in the exhibit, we see Basquiats confident and energetic line, which he used to tremendous expressive effect throughout his career. We also find Basquiats characteristic use of haloes; and most recognizably, the three-pronged gold crown, which he would use to establish the dignity and worth of something or someone, or simply as an assertion of the artists power.

The crown features prominently in Loin (1982), a painting of a horned bull alongside a bloody knife. On the one hand, we seem to have a sacrificial offering: loin as in a cut of beef, a tenderloin. On the other hand, a symbol of sacred strength and power (the bull was in fact one of Zeus divine manifestations, a form he took when he seduced and abducted Europa). In this case, the loin is the creative, generative potency of the artist himself, in what amounts to a kind of self-portrait. Similarly, Pablo Picasso, who influenced Basquiat greatly, depicted himself as a quadruped in his etching Minotauromachy (1935) and included an image of a bull in Guernica (1937), a painting which Basquiat credited as being among one of his all-time favorites.

Loin, 1982(Source: David Bird / Pinterest)

There is no escaping violence in Basquiat, and while it is sometimes presented upfront with the intention to arrest and confront the viewer there is often an indeterminate sense of menace. In Side View of an Oxens Jaw (1982) Basquiat may be invoking the story of Samson a Biblical figure who slew the masses of Philistines armed with only the jawbone of an ass. Basquiat would explicitly revisit Samson in one of his most successful paintings, Obnoxious Liberals (1982) identifying himself with the black hero/martyr that reappears in so much of his work.

Hand Anatomy (1982) brings our attention to one of the fundamental themes of the show and Basquiats work throughout his career. Basquiats knowledge of art history was apparently encyclopedic: he painted in dialogue with many of the masters who preceded him and his works are full of such references. Leonardo da Vinci looms large in this sense, not only as a painter (Basquiat seems to have regarded Da Vinci as among his favorite artists), but as a student of human anatomy and physiology. Da Vinci is known to have secretly dissected human cadavers (a practice widely condemned at the time) to understand more fully the inner workings and processes of the human body. Basquiat may have been attracted to this readiness to go underground, as it were; and like da Vinci, he had to escape and outmaneuver the conventions of ordinary social morality to bring to light something that we are almost afraid to see; something that by its very nature interrogates our tendency to conform to established modes of understanding and discourse.

The exhibition includes several works that Basquiat and Andy Warhol painted together. The two had a highly-publicized friendship which led to an exhibition of their collaborative works at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Soho in 1985. Warhol and Basquiat: Paintings was panned by the critics, a reception which contributed to the dissolution of their personal and professional relationship. In Thin Lips (c. 1984-1985) (which is to say, false promises) the two artists satirize Reaganomics. Basquiats work was political throughout, and sometimes his works are most-effectively political when the content is not explicitly so.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Source: WideWalls)

At his best, Basquiat can be viewed as an American shaman: an artist who brought meaning to a fragmented society by acting as a conduit to another realm of consciousness. In his appropriation of so-called primitive art and renaissance iconography especially the halo (which sometimes becomes a crown of thorns) he created a unique vocabulary that he developed as a way of exploring a broken world. Much like the writer William Burroughs, who was a profound influence on the painter, Basquiat is charting a kind of guide to the underworld employing Ancient Egyptian glyphs and petroglyphs, as well as hobo signs, in his mapping of the in-visible.

Basquiats art is inseparable from language that is, from the power and sometimes the impotency of names, lists and phrases: and even among his earliest pieces we find him charting words and letters in semi-incantatory ways. He saw the disintegration and brutality of everyday life in America: for Basquiat, the world is in tatters, and because of this, his work tends to lack a center as well as a privileged point of reference. If we could talk about the metaphysics of Basquiats world, then it was one of violent explosiveness he taps into the dehiscence of being to create something altogether unsettling, evocative, and distinct.

Basquiat does not abandon, but transforms, the project of high modernism inasmuch as his paintings are indeed an autobiographical search for wholeness. There is, we might say, a therapeutic intention underlying his work: he seemed to want (at least at times) to heal the self to repel ghosts (as one of his late works states).

Some of the later paintings seem to suggest that he saw the end was near: for example, the extraordinary painting Riding with Death (1988), or the final piece included in this show Gravestone (1987), a work which consists of three doors joined together and the word perishable partially blotted out at the top center. This was, on the one hand, a tribute to Andy Warhol (who died that year), and it evokes the painted panel altars of medieval and renaissance art. Like so much of his work, it represents Basquiats pattern of salvaging and resurrecting the rejected and discarded. But one must wonder if this piece could also be seen as a requiem for the artist himself, as he was coming to terms with his own self-destruction (he died in 1988 from a heroin overdose).

Gravestone, 1987 (Source:Cie Cefeg / Pinterest)

Much of this exhibition concerns, we might say, the anatomy of suffering, and at the same time the strength, resilience and protest that comes from the stripping down, the peeling away of the outer layers to reveal the blood vessels, the muscles and tendons, and the skeleton itself. In Rusting Red Car in Kuau (1984) with its engine (that is, its anatomy) visible, we are witness to another form of Basquiats self-portraiture.

Basquiats work remains immensely provocative, often disconcerting, barbed and defiant scathing in his critique of the racism, greed and moral apathy of American society. He takes a wrecking ball not only to false barriers between conceptualism and expressionism, painting and writing, improvisation, and composition; but to the various social, political, and artistic edifices we have built atop lies. As Berger observed, if Basquiat is an artist whose work is about seeing through lies, then we cannot deny his timeliness and the claim his work ultimately makes on us.

Sam Ben-Meir, PhD is an adjunct professor at Mercy College. His current research focuses on environmental ethics and animal studies.[emailprotected] Web: http://www.alonben-meir.com

Featured image: basquiat.com

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Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Anatomy of Suffering - Center for Research on Globalization

What the hell just happened? The Guardians Richard Adams attempts to make sense of the shock UK election outcome.

The UK election result is the biggest upset of conventional wisdom since, well, last November. After Trump, the Brexit referendum, Leicester City winning the premier league and the 2015 UK general election result youd think wed be getting used to this. But no.

The Conservative partys decision to call a snap election has backfired: rather than winning the comfortable-to-huge majority predicted, the Tories have instead gone backwards. The party has held enough seats to govern in coalition with Northern Irelands Democratic Unionist party but it was a miserable effort in almost every other respect.

Nervous and ill-advised, Theresa May achieved the unthinkable: winning more than 42% of the popular vote but losing a swathe of seats in England. (In 2005 Tony Blair won 35% of the vote but a solid majority of MPs.) Labour under Jeremy Corbyn got around 40% and gained more than 30 seats. The Tories piled up wasted votes in safe seats and failed to go beyond their comfort zone to win votes in London and the east of England. And that in a nutshell is why May lost as she did.

Why did the Tories do so badly in its England heartland? Brexit the referendum to leave the European Union hung over this election like an embarrassing smell. The UK Independent Party (UKIP) collapsed as predicted, having won the EU exit it sought, but its voters didnt obediently file back to the Tories as the pundits expected. Enough perhaps 40% returned to Labour to make a difference.

And then there was the 18-30 youth vote. Largely pro-Labour but with a poor record of actually voting, this time the youth turned out in higher proportions, with the exact amount as yet unconfirmed. This is a major reason why so many polls got it so wrong: they assumed that voting behaviour wouldnt change much. But young people appeared more exercised by Brexit and Labours policies including the scrapping of student tuition fees that currently stand at 9000 a year.

The pollsters performance brings to mind the football pundit Alan Hansen, who once rubbished Manchester Uniteds chances of winning the English league: You cant win anything with kids. One of those kids was David Beckham, and we know what happened next.

But Labour under Jeremy Corbyn also did better than expected with older voters, thanks in part to returning UKIP voters and perhaps as a result of Theresa Mays overconfident campaign that offered its key base of supporters a dementia tax and downgraded pension protection.

The Conservative campaign overall was nightmarish, revolving around Mays strong and stable leadership backed by lurid excesses by the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Sun. As tactics go thats fine but May herself couldnt carry its weight. She refused to debate with Corbyn, was generally lacklustre and failed to offer any detail about how the Tories planned to negotiate Brexit. The single biggest political issue on the table and May ignored it to concentrate on domestic policies. This played into Labours hands, disastrously, by moving debate to Labours strengths: spending on health, education and social services.

Then the campaign was twice derailed by two terrorist attacks. The attack in Manchester came just as almost every newspaper was printing front pages deriding Mays dementia tax U-turn. They all changed overnight to describe the Manchester carnage.

But the later London Bridge attack may have eroded Mays image of competence. As Home Secretary for five years she had been responsible for policing and domestic security. After London a string of complaints appeared about how the attackers had been allowed to enter and remain in the UK, along with steep cuts in police numbers that also happened on Mays watch.

Although election campaigns rarely have a major effect on final results, the closeness of the UK result suggests too many voters were unimpressed by May and her team. Perhaps convinced by those polls predicting huge Conservative majorities, the Tory strategists played it safe. No hostages to fortune on Brexit, giving themselves plenty of room of taxes, and a readoption of some ancient Tory policies like bringing back fox hunting and grammar schools, when the result indicates that UKIP and potential Labour voters dont give a damn about either.

The other caveat about election campaigns is that they do help the profile of under-exposed leaders. In that sense the snap election was a relief for Jeremy Corbyn: it halted Labours infighting and allowed him to approach the public directly. He was helped, it seems, by the growth of left-wing activism on the web a Buzzfeed survey of Facebook found that aggressively pro-Corbyn and Labour news was shared far more widely than similar efforts for the Conservatives.

By avoiding Brexit discussion during the campaign, May gave Corbyn an opening that he rushed to fill with populist policies. The Conservatives offered nothing in response apart from slogans about stability and Brexit meaning Brexit. In her one major speech May even claimed that Brexit required a return to grammar schools (that is, schools reserved for the most able children as selected by an exam sat by 11-year-olds). It was, incredibly, perhaps her most concrete policy statement of the election.

Outside of England and Wales where Labour continued to dominate despite the nations huge pro-Brexit vote the Conservatives did much better. In Scotland the independence issue rivalled Brexit as a vote driver. In 2015 the pro-independence vote flocked to the SNP. This time it seems that the pro-Unionist vote coaleased in response around the Tories, hence their success. The SNPs meltdown will be one of the elections major political aftermaths.

But what happens next? Conventional wisdom would go like this: the Tories form a coalition with the DUP of Northern Ireland; May eventually steps down as PM to be replaced by Boris Johnson; the Tories present a populist Budget with tax cuts and NHS funding galore which gets voted down, followed by another snap election in, lets see, November? February?

But who knows? New Zealanders will recognise that governments can be sustained with slim majorities. The UK did just have five years of coalition government so its not so unlikely. Well all be finding out a lot more about the DUP, its policies and the foibles of Belfast and Ulster politics. Foxes are probably safe for the time being.

Meanwhile the clock ticks towards Brexit whatever Brexit means now.

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Anatomy of a clusterfuck: How 'strong and stable' Theresa May messed up so entirely - The Spinoff