AS IF is proud to present an exhibition of 25 pages from a never-before-exhibited sketchbook of drawings by the late artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, made for musician Arto Lindsay in 1981 in an East Village apartment where Lindsay was staying. The notebook illustrates Basquiat's hand at absurdist and concrete poetry with equally fragmented drawings incorporating his sputters of speech.
BALSA INSTABILITY
first showed up leaping off towers
in el toro crashing debut
like a preacher's voice
nothing plummy here
pinned pining for pleasure
I was staying at JL's apartment while he was out of town.
The last thing JL said before he left was "Don't let J-M stay over."
Of course the minute he left J-M showed up and stayed the weekend with me.
When J-M left, he left these notebook pages for me on top of my stuff.
Grey, J-M's band, opened for DNA several times.
I can't remember what they sounded like but I remember what he sounded like.
Intense and alone.
Grey were all frantically posing except J-M posed as a schizophrenic, sweating onstage in an overcoat.
J-M often played recorded music for me, asking me if I knew El Gran Combo or about Jorge Ben.
There was one rehearsal of Famous Negro Athletes, the band he wanted to start with David Byrne and myself.
Didn't they call graffiti artists writers?
J-M was a writer.
In this sketchbook fragments and lists are finished pieces.
He casts some of the same phrases into different pieces, trying them out in different combinations.
There are observations of social fact, concerns of his own, words chosen for their iconic, concrete or sonic qualities.
The writing is trenchant and prescient like the rest of his work.
For him, poetry was first among the arts.
In asking SS and I to join him on his MTV Breaks, he offered exposure to some of his friends whom he felt were underexposed, underrated.
Hilariously and characteristically he asked me to enter the frame playing guitar and then kick a stack of painted boxes.
And when I did, he rushed on camera to complain that I kicked them too hard.
Afterwards, we went into the studio to mix the vignette's soundtrack and he convinced the sound engineer to use the mixing board like a distortion pedal.
Arto Lindsay, 2011
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AS IF Gallery is a collaboration between Nicole Rauscher, Seth Tillett and Diego Cortez.
The gallery is dedicated to their friend Sylvère Lotringer, Editor of Semiotext(e) and the
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series.
The gallery is dedicated to their friend Sylvère Lotringer, Editor of Semiotext(e) and the
Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series.
For further information please contact Nicole Rauscher
Gallery Hours by appointment only: Wednesday - Saturday, 12 noon to 6 pm
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