Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks

artist. It is as if his inability to reconcile the force and power of femaleness with phallocentrism led to the erasure of female presence in his work.
    Conflicted in his own sexuality, Basquiat is nevertheless represented in the Whitney catalogue and elsewhere as the stereotypical black stud randomly fucking white women. No importance is attached by critics to the sexual ambiguity that was so central to the Basquiat diva persona. Even while struggling to come to grips with himself as a subject rather than an object, he consistently relied on old patriarchal notions of male identity despite the fact that he critically associated maleness with imperialism, conquest, greed, endless appetite and, ultimately, death.
    To be in touch with senses and emotions beyond conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious. This is the oppositional location Basquiat longed for yet could not reach. This is the feared location, associated not with meaningful resistance but with madness, loss, and invisibility. Basquiat’s paintings evoke asense of dread. But the terror there is not for the world as it is, the decentered, disintegrating West, that familiar terrain of death. No, the dread is for that unimagined space, that location where one can live without the “same old shit.”
    Confined within a process of naming, of documenting violence against the black male self, Basquiat was not able to chart the journey of escape. Napier asserts that “in naming, we relieve ourselves of the burden of actually considering the implication of how a different way of thinking can completely transform the conditions that make for meaningful social relations.” A master deconstructivist, Basquiat was not then able to imagine a concrete world of collective solidarities that could alter in any way the status quo. McEvilley sees Basquiat’s work as an “iconographic celebration of the idea of the end of the world, or of a certain paradigm of it.” While the work clearly calls out this disintegration, the mood of celebration is never sustained. Although Basquiat graphically portrays the disintegration of the West, he mourns the impact of this collapse when it signals doom in black life. Carnivalesque, humorous, playful representations of death and decay merely mask the tragic, cover it with a thin veneer of celebration. Clinging to this veneer, folks deny that a reality exists beyond and beneath the mask.
    Black gay filmmaker Marlon Riggs recently suggested that many black folks “have striven to maintain secret enclosed spaces within our histories, within our lives, within our psyches about those things which disrupt our sense of self.” Despite an addiction to masking/masquerading in his personal life, Basquiat used painting to disintegrate the public image of himself that he created and helped sustain. It is no wonder then that this work is subjected to an ongoing critique that questions its “authenticity and value.” Failing to represent Basquiat accurately to that white art world that remains confident it “knew” him, critics claim and colonize the work within a theoretical apparatus of appropriation that can diffuse its power by making it always and onlyspectacle. That sense of “horrific” spectacle is advertised by the paintings chosen to don the covers of every publication on his work, including the Whitney catalogue.
    In the conclusion to The Art of the Maasai, Turle asserts: “When a continent has had its people enslaved, its resources removed, and its lands colonized, the perpetrators of these actions can never agree with contemporary criticism or they would have to condemn themselves.” Refusal to confront the necessity of potential self-condemnation makes those who are least moved by Basquiat’s work insist on knowing it best. Understanding this, Braithwaite articulates the hope that Basquiat’s work will be critically reconsidered, that the exhibition at the Whitney will finally compel people to “look at what he did.”
    But