Heir to the racist configuration of the American art exchange and the delimiting appraisals of blackness in the American mainstream media, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the late 1970s New York City street art scene a young, angry, ironically satiric black American graffiti writer – he called himself “SAMO.” This nom de plume represents a concurrent critique of and abbreviation for “same old shit,” as well as a play on the racial slur “Sambo.” Even during this embryonic stage of his painterly career, Basquiat demonstrated a sensitivity toward issues of racism in American art and media. With witty, portentous aphorisms scrawled across New York City's Lower East Side and SoHo, Basquiat's SAMO persona was a mouthpiece for those disillusioned by the wellspring of affluence – seemingly reserved for so few – found in New York's socialite-driven high-art scene: “SAMO as an escape clause.” “SAMO as a neo art form.” “SAMO as an end to playing art.”

While Basquiat would go on to describe the overt appraisals of this proto-phase of his career as “immature” and “unambitious,” the critiques presented by the SAMO graffiti speak to the artist's alertness to high art's disingenuousness and the racist, unfair practices of the American mainstream media. Although he would shrug off this nascent graffiti association, echoes of the SAMO work's consciousness reverberate in Basquiat's later work, as I will show, with startling clarity. Indeed, one might perceive SAMO's maxims as prophetic advertisement slogans for Basquiat's high art of the 1980s: famous critiques of America's cultural representations of race that form defiant articulations of a mobile and fluid African American identity.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most influential artists of an international movement that began around 1980, marked by the postmodern return to figurative painting. After a long phase of Minimalist domination in the world of high art, an assimilated Abstract Expressionism featuring more personalized and subjective figurative imagery came to the fore, characterized by its psychological and conceptual undertones.Footnote ¹ The art world seemed to offer a sympathetic environment for Basquiat's art brut sensibility, as contemporary artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger made harsh, sociopolitical expressions of racism, sexism and inequality the subjects of their own work.Footnote ² Of course, given its rough, seemingly untrained and extreme, conceptual nature, Basquiat's high-art oeuvre might not look so sophisticated to the uninformed viewer. However, as certain critics have pointed out, Basquiat's work reveals a powerful poetic and visual gift, “heady enough to confound academics and hip enough to capture the attention span of the hip hop nation,” as Greg Tate has remarked.Footnote ³ As noted by Richard Marshall, Basquiat's aesthetic strength actually comes from his striving “to achieve a balance between the visual and intellectual attributes” of his artwork.Footnote ⁴ Speaking to the works' purposeful, symbological ambiguity and seeming untrained look, Marshall's articles on Basquiat unveil the artist's sensitivity and complexity as merely passing themselves off as “brute.”

However, as Marshall, Tate and others point out, it is in fact Basquiat's aesthetic that stands as the greatest stumbling block for many others of Basquiat's critics. Despite his classical training and profound formal and technical acumen, Jean-Michel Basquiat was injected into this art world alongside the growing popularity of marginal, untrained art during the early 1980s. Further, many critics and reviewers of his day cited his apparent drug addictions and “street origins” as license to handle him and his oeuvre in a decidedly exoticized, sensationalist manner.Footnote ⁵ He was widely and wrongly aligned with traditional, “ethnic” Haitian art. Of this point, Robert Farris Thompson incisively notes that

Similarly, Dick Hebdige points out that

Basquiat's singularity in the predominantly white world of high art led to his being dubbed the “messiah” of his race's art, redeeming the reputation and heritage of his “people.” Of course, one cannot help but wonder whether these critics were at all aware of Basquiat's mixed-race background; and if so, did they mean to insinuate that he was salvaging the “African,” African American, Puerto Rican, Afro-Spanish, Haitian or the French Creole artistic heritage? As Dick Hebdige comically remarks, criticizing such reductive hypotheses, “maybe he was redeeming the culture of the tribe of educated, upper-middle-class Brooklyn” who bought so many of his paintings.Footnote ⁸

Indeed, these ill-informed and incorrect contemporaneous categorizations of Basquiat and his work reverberate today, as Greg Tate points out. Tate censures “major museums” that have refused to carry the Whitney Museum's Basquiat retrospective, as well as critics who continue to name the artist a fraud. For Tate, Basquiat's “intellectual obsessions: ancestry and modernity, originality and the origins of knowledge, personhood and property … and slavery” are elided by such critics, whom he perceives as willfully refusing acknowledgment of the perceptive, cerebral aspects of the prolific artist's oeuvre.Footnote ⁹

Why is this the case? Tate incisively names Basquiat's race as the cause of such critics' ignorance of the works' philosophical sustainability and refusal of their legitimacy; Hebdige expounds upon this point, naming similar concerns. Referencing Basquiat's vacillating favor and disfavor within the art world, despite “regressive myths of origin that insisted on sending him ‘back home’ to Puerto Rico, Haiti, Boerum Hill in Brooklyn, ‘africa,’ the Mudd Club … cave painting [etc.],” Hebdige points out that the austerity and elegance of Basquiat's project lies in one's perception of the artist's creation of “a permanent state of self-alienation into concrete visual terms.”Footnote ¹⁰ According to critics like Hebdige, Tate and Marshall, many of Basquiat's contemporaries simply did not understand his work's aesthetic and therefore overlooked the art's intellectualism and the artist's willful self-alienation through his art – for many, he was merely a black, Warhol-esque celebrity/artist who incessantly needed to be put “in his place.”

Like Marshall, Tate and Hebdige, I will connect with Basquiat's unique, self-reflexively experimental visual practices of signifying and examine anew Basquiat's active contribution to his works' misreadings – his self-alienation, as Hebdige has called it. Basquiat's aesthetic makes of his paintings economies of accumulation, building a productive play of contingency concerning the mainstream's constructions of race, which are commonly simplified and packaged for the audience's consumption. Thus he amasses words, symbols and figures that are commonly associated with the American mainstream's conceptions of blackness. This aesthetic move speaks to a need for escape from the perceived epistemic necessities of blackness. It is through these economies of accumulation that we see, as Tate has pointed out, Basquiat's “intellectual obsession” with issues such as ancestry/modernity, personhood/property and originality/origins of knowledge, driven by his tireless need to problematize mainstream media's discourses surrounding race – in other words, a commodified American Africanism.

Foremost, I uphold that Basquiat's art is not reactionary. While intellectual and self-reflexive, his work does not imagine a liberation strategy for himself, or African Americans at large, from the racism of the American mainstream media or the American art exchange's configuration; rather, Basquiat's work posits an escape from these institutions' “packaged blackness” through his works' economies of accumulation. His paintings are imbued with many of the characteristics of fully formed systems (e.g. racial stereotypes), but only as traits (or differences that commonly pass themselves off as definitions of blackness, or epistemic necessities). These accumulated traits actively explore new creative potentials – or Deleuzian “becomings” – imagining escape in ways that fully formed closed systems cannot.

Basquiat's economies of accumulation appear most prominently in the work from the middle phase of his career, dating from about 1983 until 1985. Established within the American art world, internationally [in]famous and opulently wealthy, in this period Basquiat experienced new suspicions regarding his fame, his wealth and his favor within the art milieu – as well as the fame, wealth and favor of black artistic figures who came before him. Thus, for my exploration, I will engage with two of his most famous works from this era: Zydeco (c.1984) and Hollywood Africans (c.1985). As Marshall has pointed out, the works from the median of Basquiat's career reveal a confluence of his many interests and energies, and their contents – imagistically and textually – hold charged references and meanings that engage with deep-seated concerns about race, human rights and the creation of power and wealth.Footnote ¹¹ In the works of his middle career especially, we see references to popular culture and respected figures from the entertainment world – figures with whom Basquiat likely aligned himself – which are of intense importance to the escape that Basquiat works to convey. Through the accumulation of signs, symbols, myth and text in these paintings, Basquiat offers us a distinction between the requirements of social identity and the equally important, deterritorialized, externally linked constructions of desire. In these pieces, the artist reveals for us the machinery at work behind the construction of the celebrity black American figure – a commodified Africanist presence, distilled and packaged for consumption by the mainstream masses.

Zydeco and Hollywood Africans grapple with organized, transcendent notions of the artist's own black American identity (and the identities of his audience) and access points to larger movements of immanence. By simultaneously engaging and problematizing popular, commodified constructions of American blackness, Basquiat demonstrates an escape rather than a reaction against these constructions. He does this by pushing the art of painting to its limit, making Zydeco and Hollywood Africans expressions of a fluid black identity – again, that which is becoming rather than that which definitively is – which bespeaks Basquiat's intriguing, productive play of contingency. This distinction between that which “definitively is” and that which is “becoming” is one that I have adopted from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.Footnote ¹² In the context of this article, this is the essential contrast between reductive and deterministic conceptions of blackness (as constructed in the mainstream media, for example) and machinic (fluid), positive means of reading difference, wherein difference need not be read in terms of opposition or as subordinate to identity. In this way, Basquiat's conception of art – the aesthetic of his mid-career work – is based on productive, fluid, machinic connections between seemingly disparate visual images and text.

This “machinery” within Basquiat's art offers ontological mobility, catching the surplus of dogmatic, reductive determinisms. To think machinically, as Basquiat does, is also to recognize that the given identities of our dominant thought are more fluid and changeable than we have been led to believe. However, as Basquiat shows us, despite ontological fluidity, there are still dangers that may be encountered, such as the implantation of machinic racism within the media/arts/social strata (e.g. a commodified American Africanism).

Thus Basquiat's median work invokes Deleuze and Guattari's attendant concept of “deterritorialization,” which is the movement by which something escapes from a given territory. In the context of Jean-Michel Basquiat's oeuvre, I am interested in exploring the deterritorialization of a commodified American blackness from the mainstream through an examination of his aesthetic practices. In much of Basquiat's mid-career work, we see the black artistic figure – in several incarnations – appearing in his/her prescribed roles. But, interestingly, as we will explore, Basquiat's figures are always attended by symbological and textual annotations, of sorts, functioning so as to engage with what the artist perceives as the contingency of what otherwise appear to be epistemic necessities.

In Hollywood Africans and Zydeco, Basquiat teaches us that “marginal” cultures are appropriated and disseminated for consumption by mainstream media much in the same way that the 1980s mainstream avant-garde appropriated marginal art for its own consumption and profit. However, Basquiat is concerned by the fact that this practice goes widely unrecognized by the masses; surface-level conceptions and idyllic, mythic associations hold precedence in the mainstream while the inner workings of the mainstream are never self-reflexively interrogated. This, Basquiat argues, is likely why the mainstream's racist structure has enjoyed such an enduring history in the arts and other media. In Zydeco and Hollywood Africans, we can see Basquiat working to expose these inner workings through several means.

For example, in Hollywood Africans, Basquiat reflects upon the depiction of black actors/rappers/artists in mainstream media. The painting's background is a broad expanse of sunshine-reminiscent yellow and cool turquoise, perhaps recalling Hollywood, California's positive, first-glance environmental aspects; however, Basquiat punctuates his canvas, here and there, with brushy swatches of solid black, catching the viewer's eye and marring the otherwise optimistic color tone of the painting. In several places on the canvas, Basquiat has written “HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS FROM THE NINETEEN FORTIES” as well as “SUGAR CANE,” “TOBACCO,” “GANGSTERISM” and “WHAT IS BWANA?,” all referencing, along with the painting's title, the types of role and dialogue to which black actors have historically been limited.Footnote ¹³ According to Basquiat, in spite of any “modern,” quasi-heroic media recognition, or any wealth that they may attain, black celebrity figures are implicitly linked to a repressive, shameful past – they are cast as dim-witted laborers or gangsters, or they are treated as such by white Hollywood producers, directors and/or film companies. In this painting, Basquiat incorporates a portrait of himself (labeled “SELF PORTRAIT AS A HEEL #3”) as well as his friends, rappers Toxic and Rammellzee; these are cited by the artist, perhaps, as examples of current “Hollywood Africans” – the inevitable heirs to the delimiting narrow-mindedness of American mainstream media.

Similarly, Zydeco problematizes past associations of blackness/black American culture and the mainstream media's present representations of African Americans. During the 1980s, zydeco music became a popular element in the New York night scene with which Basquiat was familiar. Zydeco, very broadly, refers to a brand of folk music that finds its roots in late nineteenth-century southern Louisiana; it is generally a hybrid of Cajun melodies, Afro-Caribbean rhythm and African American performance styles. The term “zydeco” at once refers to the musical style, the accompanying dance, and the music's associated dance party; the word itself was born of a patois pronunciation of the French word for green beans, “les haricots verts” – this coincides with the painting's green background. According to Jeff Todd Titon, zydeco is a dynamic musical art form; within a single song, older, traditional styles coexist with newer ones.Footnote ¹⁴ Younger musicians incorporate electric guitar, electric bass and drums into the late twentieth-century zydeco ensemble, and the accordion – depicted in the painting's central panel – remains an integral fixture in creating the zydeco sound.

This coexistence of past and present bears much importance to this painting – not unlike Hollywood Africans – which, at first glance, appears to be a depiction of an accordion player floating on a green sea of words and symbols, some more modern than others. Much like we see in Hollywood Africans, in Zydeco past cultures and racial associations play integral roles in the modern world's consumption of blackness; in Hollywood Africans these associations are negative and reductive, while in Zydeco past associations with blackness seem to be called upon in a positive vein. However, whether superficially positive or intrinsically negative, Basquiat teaches us, the price of mainstream media recognition is the same for the black celebrity figure: in either case, the black artist is stripped of any complexity and packaged for consumption by the masses. Whether he is the folksy musician, the edgy painter, the rapper or the actor, the black celebrity figure is always, first, black – he is always, first, associated with “SUGAR CANE,” “TOBACCO,” manual labor and/or “GANGSTERISM” – he is always a commodity, heir to America's racist, slave-owning past.

Basquiat's work illustrates a concern with the experience of being black in America – both in and before the twentieth century. And as we have seen, his concern is marked by an interrogation of “knowledge,” or, more precisely, popular conceptions and associations, and history – he speaks to a need for new knowledge beyond the mainstream's constructed delusions. Unlike the contentions of his many contemporary critics, his work does not function to elicit an “ethnic” or “exotic” appeal – his work points to a contemporary America, noting the continued problem of racism in the academy, the arts, media and society. Basquiat's work presents an ethical reevaluation of dominant structures of thought; in this way, his work represents an act of escape, and not merely a reaction to stereotypes or mainstream conceptions, as many of his contemporaneous critics maintained.

Rather than “be[ing] respectful,” laboring to show how “good” his race is to his white patrons, Basquiat pushes his craft to an alternate route.Footnote ¹⁵ He accumulates visual cues and textual annotations – inducing disequilibrium among the paintings' elements – and makes references to both past and present, the overt and the covert; thus he creates something of a negative portrait of a commodified American Africanism. Basquiat shows us how the black actor/rapper/musician/artist is constructed in the mainstream, outlining the means by which s/he is cast in the types of role that s/he is meant to play. In this way, Basquiat's work does not merely react to these racist constructions; rather, by problematizing these constructions through his visual multiplicities, or economies of accumulation, Basquiat illustrates them for what they are: contingencies, superficial and arbitrary emblems, upon which black identity is not dependent. Thus the works outline an escape from that which “definitively is,” expressing, instead, black identities as processes, or acts of becoming.

Basquiat raises the issue that black identities are, essentially, not allowed expression within the authoritative, high-art world or within the mainstream media; and by the same token, the manner by which the mainstream distinguishes itself as an “authoritative” entity exists because of this unsettling population of “outsiders” – black American artists.Footnote ¹⁶ The founding characteristics of American – indeed, Western – art and media reproduce their necessity for codes and restriction. Through omissions, contradictions, and even through the way artists, black and white alike, populated their works with black bodies and signs, a black presence was crucial to America's need for a sense of cultural and intellectual superiority.Footnote ¹⁷ The representation of the black subject and the role of the black artist have historically functioned to conceal reality and separate the subjugated group from the dominant culture: the categories and designated “places” in which black artists are meant to remain function to conceal the reality of black subjectivity.

Basquiat, on the other hand, accumulates these very codes, restrictions, contradictions and signs, deploying them as a means of revealing their importance and implication in the construction of mainstream media depictions of blackness. He moves implicit associations with black-alienating “GANGSTERISM” and white guilt-inducing slavery to the foreground in his work – not for the sake of inducing white guilt or alienating black people, but so as to reveal for us the machinery that makes up the distilled, packaged blackness to which we are exposed through the mainstream media. In so doing, he disengages himself, his forebears and contemporary black public figures from the racism inherent in this system.

We can see Basquiat's awareness of this phenomenon clearly in both Hollywood Africans and Zydeco. Zydeco deals with a traditionally black American musical form, but also with the recording (on camera, in a recording studio, and so forth), dissemination and commodification of this cultural form, and its black musicians, within the mainstream media. In Zydeco the black musician is put on display through the media apparatus depicted for the consumption of the predominantly white, mainstream media. Basquiat's musician, though linked to a positive aspect of his cultural past, is still delimited. Like the Hollywood African, the black musician's role is only to entertain, to consensually play in to the mainstream's stereotypes of blackness/black culture if he wishes to excel, become famous or wealthy.

Basquiat brings the reality of black subjectivities to the foreground of representation, barring his viewer from the passive, superficial, mainstream-oriented view of the black figure. In both Hollywood Africans and Zydeco this practice is apparent, achieved through the collaging of words and imagery, associations and symbols of blackness in America's past and present. Symbols of manual labor abound in both paintings (in Zydeco we see corn, railroad tracks, “WOOD,” and the image and word “PICKAX”; similarly, “SUGAR CANE” and “TOBACCO” appear in Hollywood Africans), denoting the realities of a black subject's past. Basquiat then intermingles popular myths of black experience, such as the types of music that black Americans are “supposed” to perform and the roles they are “supposed” to play in Hollywood; further, vehicles for disseminating, or propagating, these myths/stereotypes of black existence are strategically integrated into the paintings as well – mainstream media such as radio, television and film are all present in the paintings.

As Marshall, Hebdige and Tate have taught us, many of Basquiat's contemporary critics – and even critics today – make no meaningful connection with black experiences as they are represented in Basquiat's work and engage in minimal critical thinking about Basquiat's aesthetics or culture. From this point of reference, Basquiat's self-reflexive, purposefully self-alienating artistic practices may begin to come to light. Through our examinations thus far, we have come to see Basquiat's awareness of the high-art world's need to appropriate and to colonize American blackness so as to convince itself of its own authority (i.e. validity or legitimacy); for Basquiat, this is not unlike the construction and commodification of an American Africanism by the mainstream American media. This move indicates not only self-doubt but also the imperialism of the mainstream media and the high-art world; the marginal (black) and the mainstream converge in the mainstream's paranoid determination to control whatever peculiar art/culture exists beyond its pale. Through Basquiat's revealing economies of accumulation, we come to see that white patronage and the superficial aggrandizement of “black culture” is an effort to bolster a collective white, American ego/culture as being more “refined.” Further, the mainstream garners sociopolitical credit for its discovery of this “lesser” art/culture, as if bringing this “alien” talent to light were a brand of civic service.Footnote ¹⁸

For example, in Hollywood Africans, note the term “Hollywood” both in the title and written on the canvas of the painting. The word “Hollywood” evokes concepts of monetary wealth, fame and acceptance in the mass media – where American mainstream media is concerned, “Hollywood” stands as a seemingly timeless concept of success. Basquiat reinforces these associations through textual references to “POPCORN” and “MOVIE STAR FOOTPRINTS,” both of which are attended by correlating images. “Hollywood” also calls to mind the beauty of the coastal California landscape – represented by the golden yellow and bright aquamarine used by the artist in the painting's background. However durable, these are merely the superficial attributes of Hollywood – perhaps justifying their strategic location in the background of the painting – these are the aspects of “Hollywood” that the masses perceive and consume through mainstream media.

However, Basquiat's use of the term “Hollywood” is also a reference to mainstream film, pointing to the way that black actors are “discovered” by white benefactors – this is represented, most strikingly, by the swatches of black that invade the sunshine-yellow background and also frame it on two sides. In this compositional move, Basquiat melds that which is unintelligible to mainstream audiences – the “dark” side of Hollywood – with familiar, superficial conceptions of Hollywood. Hollywood Africans, therefore, presents something of a warning to the American mainstream audience's black members – to those who may wish to “make it big” in Hollywood: while Hollywood may be a beautiful, bountiful place for some, for the black artist it is a destination that also comes with a high price.

In Zydeco, Basquiat points to yet another means by which the mainstream elides the painful, historically dehumanized realities of black experiences. Operating much like the superficial beauty and “fame” of Hollywood, chromatically represented in Hollywood Africans's background as well as by several of the painting's symbols, in Zydeco Basquiat makes liberal reference to the concept of “coolness.” On the far left panel of the triptych, the artist has written “ICEBOX,” “FREEZER” and “WESTINGHOUSE,” along with white rectangles (which reappear on the painting's other two panels). These visual references to ice and cold can be interpreted as “cool,” perhaps a metaphoric term of admiration for zydeco music and its performers.Footnote ¹⁹ This imagery calls to mind early 1980s hip hop culture, which, by 1984, showcased performers with stage names such as “Ice Cube” and “Ice-T” – evidence of hip hop's own take on the transatlantic cool. “Coolness,” like “Hollywood,” can also be read as a timeless concept, translatable through zydeco, jazz and into the hip hop culture of Basquiat's own time.

The transcendent concept of “cool” and zydeco are attended by images and words referring to the modern transmissions of zydeco by way of radio, film and photography. In the center panel, amidst a large patch of white, “MICROPHONE” appears above a simplistic rendering of the device; this may be interpreted as the coolness inherent in the recording of one's music, playing music on the radio, or performing at a live show. The far right panel displays the words “BOX CAMERA,” “EARLY SOUND FILM” and “VITAPHONE,” again calling to mind modern transmissions of traditional, folk musics such as zydeco, jazz and blues – some of America's greatest cultural legacies.Footnote ²⁰

To take this association further, depicted immediately above Basquiat's “WESTINGHOUSE,” located in the far left panel (punctuated by his signature copyright label), we see four outlined, crowned, black heads. Perhaps these crowned heads represent the “kings of cool,” well-known performers of zydeco or other black-associative genres of music.Footnote ²¹ Of course, these crowned heads may not be so simple to interpret, as bell hooks has suggested. Truly, the crown is a prominent and important symbol in almost all of Basquiat's work; however, hooks reads these crowns as referring not only to glory and power but also to dehumanization – to white and nonwhite males' willingness to “commit any unjust act that will lead them to the top.”Footnote ²² Taken in the context of Zydeco, this may speak to the hopeful black performer's willingness to play into racist stereotypes and resign his awareness of the color line in favor of “coolness” – recognition, success and wealth. As Hollywood Africans warns, the black artist's aesthetic is simply consumed with its face-value associations (novelty, “coolness,” “Hollywood” acceptance, and so forth), but never engaged with as anything other than “ethnic” or “exotic.”

In these paintings we may also read a striking, self-referential expression by Basquiat. In both works, he seems to reference the manner by which both he and his art were being handled by critics during his time; further, we might read Basquiat's questioning of the nature and virtue of his own success within the mainstream avant-garde art world: was he a gallery mascot or an intrinsically talented artist? A commodity or an artistic authority in his own right? Such polarized, proposed readings suggest that his experience as a nonwhite, male artist within the white American world of high art must have been distinctly troubled, perhaps alienating. In the 1980s cultural desire to be radically chic, we perceive a troubling separation between the postmodern's “politics of difference” and the politics of racism. Postmodernity's claim to have opened up a discursive space where “Otherness” and “difference” can be considered legitimate issues within the academy becomes questionable here. As bell hooks has pointed out, and as we see expressed in Basquiat's work, “it is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks the most about heterogeneity” – decentered subjectivity and the recognition of difference – “still directs its critical voice to a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to challenge.”Footnote ²³ It cannot be ignored that within the realm of art in the 1980s – and indeed, historically within the American mainstream media – this “difference” was merely an empty commodity.

As we consider Hollywood Africans and Zydeco in light of this complex assemblage of social and artistic machinery, an interesting aspect of both paintings becomes apparent. The titles of both paintings insinuate a central, singular subject; but as we have seen, there is no straightforward, solitary topic of either work. Despite the figurative bent of both paintings, neither Hollywood Africans nor Zydeco is constructed according to a traditionally figurative, reductive economy. In Zydeco, the black, anonymous musician in the triptych's central panel is not the sole – or solo – subject of the painting; likewise, in Hollywood Africans, Basquiat's just-off-center renderings of himself, Toxic and Rammellzee are not the sole subjects of the painting. Basquiat's zydeco musician, Toxic, Rammellzee, and himself are placed at the center of many unspoken understandings which shatter their unitary meanings; this fact we may read as related to black male experience. Instead offering a singular and reductive depiction of the black American's presence in American culture by zooming in on any one of these portraits – the musician, the rappers or his portrait alone – Basquiat widens the frame.

By widening the frame, Basquiat negates the mainstream's myth of blackness and shows us how these different figures of black celebrity have been constructed and considered in American society. He reveals the cogs at work which would construct the musician, the rappers or the artist as a subject if any of these figures were the sole subject of either painting. Both paintings are, again, constructed according to an economy of accumulation – the accretion of history, myth, sign, symbol, connotation, denotation (and so forth) that constructs an otherwise seemingly singular identity. Due to this untraditional figurative convention, tensions within the would-be constructions of the black musician, the artist and/or the rapper become apparent as Basquiat makes his viewer privy to numerous disturbing factors intrinsic in the zydeco-playing figure's, rapper's, actor's, artist's (and so forth) manufacture as commodity.

Interestingly, however, the constructedness of the accordion musician, the black actor, the rapper and/or the artist is not presented in these paintings as a disturbing or tragic realization. Instead, what we are offered are an array of unbalanced factors and networks of turbulence. This diminished pathos, a negation of drama that occurs in both paintings, shifts the images closer to the realm of comedy as they both play with the viewer's normally passive gaze – our eyes are forced to move across all three of Zydeco's panels; we cannot help but note the images and text that surround Basquiat's three portraits in Hollywood Africans. The media's apparatus of drama and myth construction are openly presented and used by the artist in these paintings as a means of opportunity for the art. Taking each painting individually, the figures and words within the total image pass into one another, clearing the painting of weight – in a manner, perhaps, similar to those on a television. Basquiat's paintings, however, slow down this transmission. They depict the complex, machinic coexistence of cultures and encapsulate a longer span of time: the zydeco, its rise to popularity in the early twentieth century, all the way to 1980s hip-hop culture; Hollywood, its introduction of African Americans into its films in the 1940s, up to the 1980s mélange cultures of “Hollywood,” hip-hop and art.

Indeed, Zydeco offers a tremendous wealth of stylistic and image-driven conceptions of hybridity and resonance, as does Hollywood Africans. On the whole, both paintings at once evacuate and engage traditional, essentialized constructions of blackness in America. To consider Zydeco and Hollywood Africans in conjunction with Basquiat himself – a living hybrid of Puerto Rico, Haiti and black/white 1980s urban America – and his precarious, liminal position as a nonwhite man in the white-dominated world of mainstream avant-garde art, is to arrive at a better understanding of how Basquiat engaged with his blackness through his art and worked to rethink America's manufacture of blackness. In Hollywood Africans and Zydeco we are able to perceive Basquiat at once acting out and acting on his own confused conceptualization of identity and what a nonwhite male experience means.

Basquiat's mainstream avant-garde oeuvre depicts the pervasive sense of cultural and historical hybridity. As we have uncovered in our examination of Basquiat's complex aesthetic and critical practices in Hollywood Africans and Zydeco, we see that there is no single point or position from which Basquiat paints. Rather, Basquiat's pieces are assemblages, expressions born of his world outside the canvas. And through the multiplicity of these assemblages his artwork accesses the whole micropolitics of his social field. Speaking to and about 1980s high art and popular culture, historically racist master narratives, and his own experience as a nonwhite American, Basquiat's work builds and connects seemingly unconnected visual multiplicities and assemblages of enunciation, problematizing their tacit discourse and slowly molding his critical expression. Basquiat thereby offers an explanation of how forms and persons are only appearances produced by the displacement of a center on an abstract line, and by the conjunction of these lines on a plane of immanence (or composition).Footnote ²⁴

Basquiat's work is not preoccupied with any one notion, be it slavery, racism or repression; nor are his paintings bound up in representing or advocating a repression/rebellion dichotomy. Moreover, Basquiat does not betray any assumption that there is a definitive, black human nature that has been imprisoned by the mechanistic repression of racism; as we have observed in both Hollywood Africans and Zydeco, racism is not mechanistic, but rather a machine – it is always becoming, always in process; and as a machine, it functions in and through other assemblages of machines: the media, the arts, society and so forth. In this way, we might read Basquiat's oeuvre as encouraging an escape, rather than outlining a process of liberation.

Practices of escape elide interaction or engagement with the dominant – in this case, dominant forms of race representation in mainstream media and dominant conventions and expectations within the realm of high art. Further, contrary to the normative status of liberation as unambiguously positive, “escape” is not concerned with such static essences; escape, unlike a practice of liberation, is not a refuge for Basquiat or his audience. His economies of accumulation purge the machines of media, the arts and society of their power by exposing them; this exposure, or problematization, releases new capacities within those machines. Escape concerns itself with paths of transformation that are advanced by realized connections among the implicit elements of assemblages – in this case, a realization of the mainstream's deterministic elements comprising American Africanism. Therefore escape is never sought in opposition to any dominant structure, as is the case with liberation. As we have seen exemplified through our examination of Basquiat's paintings, the dominant may be exaggerated or deconstructed, but the art's praxis is never aligned in relation to the dominant. In this configuration, action is action – never reaction to any other (prior) structure functioning to assert itself as the dominant. Escape necessitates both an understanding of the connections that sustain assemblages and a shift in desire toward something altogether different. The question that is implicitly posed through Basquiat's oeuvre is not how the “outsider” – the black artist, musician, actor or rapper – is to become liberated in relation to the abstract machinery of racism, but how this audience might find a path there where the dominant models of cultural expression (mainstream commodification) do not find any.

Basquiat's tireless need to problematize commodified American Africanism lies at the heart of his self-reflexive, purposely self-alienating artistic practices; his work is widely misunderstood, but this does not seem to deter Basquiat – he seems to understand that this shift from static determinism to fluid, dynamic connectivity is not for everyone. Yet this is the very reason why escape is not refuge. However, while this escape may not be for him, his contemporaneous critics or audience, Basquiat's oeuvre comprises a hope of escape for a people to come, a future audience with whom his aesthetic will endure. This escape is embodied in his artwork's obsessions with ancestry, modernity, origins of knowledge, personhood and the process by which he adopts these assemblages to deterritorialize the mainstream's constructions of blackness. Through this process, Basquiat reveals that which is hidden in the idea of justice within human rights.