The relationship between the visual arts, painting in particular, and music have more than once been explored by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA). Van Dongen, Warhol, Chagall, to name a few, have benefited from substantial sound coatings, and it is in their wake that this time the reading on the work of the comet Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960- 1988).
Inaugurated this week, the exhibition At full volume. Basquiat and music brings together around a hundred works (paintings, drawings, collages), the vast majority produced in the 1980s. Documents of all kinds, notebooks, vinyl collections and video archives accompany the presentation. Need we remind you that the New York artist had a very short career, interrupted at the tender age of 27 by an overdose? Since then, Basquiat has become something of an icon.
Over the past twelve years, some twenty major exhibitions have been dedicated to him around the world as a perpetual tribute. That of the MMFA, designed in collaboration with the Musée de la musique de la Philharmonie de Paris, where it will land in the spring of 2023, is no exception. Its particularity: the music.
“An exhibition that explores, sometimes anecdotally, the links with music [n’est pas rare]. Except that in the case of Basquiat, it is fundamental, commented Stéphane Aquin, the director of the MMFA, during his speech to representatives of the press. The exhibition explores this truly structuring influence of music. »
Music lover, jazz enthusiast and big fan of Charlie Parker, whom he considered a hero, Jean-Michel Basquiat also practiced music. Within the Gray group, which he joined even before he was 20, he drifted into sound experiments, relying in particular on instruments made from everyday objects, in the manner of John Cage.
“Music is a central theme, all around him, affirms Dieter Buchhart, the great specialist of Basquiat. He grew up with it, he listened to it in his studio. He danced while he painted. Music is represented in his works, like sound poems, but also in the way he constructed his works, like a jazz improvisation. »
Being one of the designers of the expo At full volume — with Mary-Dailey Desmarais, chief curator of the MMFA, and Vincent Bussières, curator invited by the Musée de la musique — Dieter Buchhart is always behind the projects around Basquiat. It is he who has signed the 22 exhibitions on the artist for 12 years. Why did you wait so long before doing an exhibition on such a crucial theme?
“It’s a good question, answers the Austrian art historian, who takes the time to answer it. 12 years ago, we still had to say how important Basquiat was, we had to do the big retrospective. Then the political question arose, as racism and police brutality are important subjects for Basquiat. »
“It’s a good time to talk about music, now that Basquiat is considered among the great artists of the world. Young people are challenged, and we can offer something a little more in-depth, ”continues the fifty-year-old.
Double-edged
Unsurprisingly, music pervades each of the 11 rooms occupied by the exhibition. From early sound explorations to jazz standards, passing through hip-hop to which a room is dedicated or excerpts from the Bolero of Ravel, eclecticism is at the rendezvous. Added to this musical framework are sounds drawn from urban life (planes, voices, engines, etc.). Basquiat’s artistic practice was anything but silent, according to the trio of curators.
This approach is a double-edged sword. If the music and noises resonate in what is presented visually (portraits of musicians, onomatopoeias and other traces of orality transposed in writing, work in fragmentation, like sampling), it also takes a good dose of willpower not to get distracted by anything audible. But with Basquiat, nothing seems uniform, and the exhibition reflects this image.
The presentation is all the same punctuated between very full rooms and other more airy ones, between a (precious) mass of written or visual documents and a (neat) selection of paintings of large dimensions. As you go along a roughly chronological journey, the eye gets used to the wealth of information that is given to see.
The great characters of ERO (1984), Toxic (1984) and Anthony Clarke (1985) offer a first purely pictorial break, where Basquiat’s predilection for tags, photocopying and compositions inspired by street culture stand out. Assembly in vertical wooden stripsAnthony Clarke magnifies the idea that, behind a whole, there are a multitude of elements of equal importance.
Poetry, with Basquiat, is at the same time visual, written and sound. It takes its sources everywhere and is expressed by neighboring paintings, such as reok (1985-1986), brightly colored, or like the darker, and violent, A Panel of Experts (1982), from the MMFA, a rare painting by Basquiat preserved in Canada.
Key works such as Kokosolo (1983), a tribute to Charlie Parker that can be read like a score, or King Zulu (1986), a more refined composition in honor of Louis Armstrong, thus punctuate the visit which ends, as it should, with the work of the artist’s swan song, Eroica I and II (1988). Alone in its room, the diptych is a compendium of words and evocative signs of death.
Like the work of Beethoven to which he refers, Eroica I and II is driven by melancholy. The musical accompaniment brings in this direction nothing more, if not an excess of useless emotion. Sometimes sound exhibits fall into this trap. Fortunately, At full volumeparadoxically, avoids it most of the time.