Abiography of Charlie Parker, inscribed to me in return for a catalogue of a great collection of calligraphy in Chinese painting, was practically the last exchange I had with Jean-Michel Basquiat. On that same occasion, we admired the typographic complexities of Dr. Dee’s mercurial Relation of Some Spirits. . . and the quixotically haunting images of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus subterraneus. Word configurations, figures “speaking in tongues,” meta-scientific images of the unseen (such as the hidden anatomy of the earth’s entrails), the extreme refinements of a four-thousand-yearold tradition of writing, as well as the “hieroglyphs” of the late English Renaissance and their philology of magic-it all seemed to interest Basquiat. This enormous hunger to absorb from the Western and Eastern past (without, however, the least inclination to be himself absorbed) existed alongside Basquiat’s natural immersion in the African American spiritual traditions of Voodoo, Santería, and Candomblé and in the living mythology of American Pop and its music, particularly the blues and its jazz derivations but also rock, for which he wrote lyrics (his collection of records was immense). A dominant trait, though, among these and other passions and "influences,"even the more specifically artistic ones, was Basquiat’s sense of rebelliousness and freedom, with regard to the central as well as marginal forms and components of our culture. He could use and marvel a anything he thought he could learn from. And, rather unexpectedly, under the guise (or should one say protection?)
查理·帕克的传记，作为我回赠给让-米歇尔·巴斯奎特的一本关于中国书法伟大收藏的目录，几乎是我与他的最后一次交流。在同一次场合，我们欣赏了德·迪博士那本变化莫测的《一些灵魂的关系》的排版复杂性……以及阿塔纳修斯·基尔赫的《地下世界》中那些奇幻而萦绕的图像。文字配置、以“说方言”的形式表达的形象、看不见的元科学图像（如地球内部的隐藏解剖）、四千年书写传统的极致精细，以及晚期英国文艺复兴的“象形文字”及其魔法的语言学——这一切似乎都引起了巴斯奎特的兴趣。这种渴望吸收西方和东方的过去（然而，他并没有丝毫被吸收的倾向）与巴斯奎特自然沉浸于非裔美国人灵性传统的伏都教、圣特里亚和坎东布雷，以及美国流行文化及其音乐的活生生的神话并存，特别是布鲁斯及其爵士派生音乐，还有摇滚，他为之创作歌词（他的唱片收藏庞大）。 一种主导特征，在这些以及其他激情和“影响”中，甚至在更具体的艺术激情中，就是巴斯基亚对我们文化的中心和边缘形式及组成部分的叛逆和自由感。他可以使用并惊叹于任何他认为可以从中学习的事物。而且，出乎意料的是，在这种伪装（或者说保护）之下，)
of a “difficult character,” a disposition both shy and singularly proud, there was a raw receptivity, as if all he came into contact with really touched him, often painfully.
“性格复杂”，既害羞又异常自豪的性情中，存在一种原始的感受力，仿佛他所接触的一切都真正触动了他，常常是痛苦的。

It is generally believed that death puts art into perspective, that an artist’s disappearance from the scene of the world allows the world to reach a deeper understanding and a more balanced judgment of his work. Even in this respect the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat may very well prove to be an exception, at least for some time to come. While he was still alive, the conflicting elements of the artist’s persona provided an indispensable, if paradoxical, key to the vital intentions and artistic urgency of his work. But the paintings themselves contain many traces of Basquiat’s deep personal involvement and of his strongest preferences with regard to his elders (Pollock, Rauschenberg, Twombly, and Warhol), providing threads to guide us in exploring and retracing his unique and extraordinary art.
人们普遍认为，死亡使艺术变得更具视角，艺术家从世界舞台的消失使得世界能够更深入地理解和更平衡地评判他的作品。即便在这方面，尚-米歇尔·巴斯奎特的案例在未来一段时间内可能会被视为例外。在他生前，艺术家个性中矛盾的元素为他作品的生命意图和艺术紧迫性提供了不可或缺的、尽管是矛盾的关键。但这些画作本身包含了巴斯奎特深刻的个人参与和他对前辈（波洛克、劳申伯格、汤布利和沃霍尔）的强烈偏好，提供了引导我们探索和追溯他独特而非凡艺术的线索。

It is only in writing these notes that I realize how difficult it is to describe Basquiat’s paintings as representational objects. Just when we think we have seized something essential about them, the essence evaporates. The paintings seem to slip away right and left, despite their remarkable compositional strength—a centripetal tension between all the elements that seems to owe more to a conceptual and poetic toughness than to Basquiat’s obvious gift for formal harmony.
在写下这些笔记时，我才意识到描述巴斯基亚的画作作为具象物体是多么困难。就在我们认为抓住了它们某种本质的时候，这种本质却又蒸发了。这些画作似乎在左右之间滑走，尽管它们具有显著的构图力量——所有元素之间的向心张力似乎更多地源于一种概念性和诗意的坚韧，而不是巴斯基亚显而易见的形式和谐的天赋。

Take the triptych Catharsis. It is dominated by the word “FORTEZZA” (strength) and a big open hand drawn in red in the central panel. A closed left fist on the left panel and the words “LEFT PAW” on the right panel balance each other on a diagonal axis; on the other diagonal, a half-open hand pointing down in the shape of an industrial tool acts as a pendant for two weights labeled “250 LBS” at either end of a bar resting on one of Basquiat’s topical crowns. Three waves of black paint invade “raw” brown canvases on which graphic and word images traced in various colors dance before our eyes so that none of them can hold our attention for long. The
三联画《宣泄》。它以“FORTEZZA”（力量）这个词和中央面板上用红色绘制的大开放手掌为主。左面板上的一个闭合左拳和右面板上的“左爪”字样在对角线上相互平衡；在另一个对角线上，一个半开放的手掌指向下方，呈现出工业工具的形状，作为两端各标有“250 LBS”的重物的吊坠，重物悬挂在巴斯基亚的一个主题王冠上。三波黑色油漆侵袭着“原始”的棕色画布，上面用各种颜色描绘的图形和文字图像在我们眼前舞动，以至于没有一个能长时间吸引我们的注意。
central panel, in a much lighter brown and connected to the right panel by plain, visible hinges, radiates light.
中央面板呈现出更浅的棕色，通过简单可见的铰链与右侧面板相连，散发出光线。

This is one of the many paintings by Basquiat in which verbal and graphic anatomical description is prominent. What is absent, though, is the familiar skull/selfportrait, the severed “mannequin head” (which completely takes over another extraordinary canvas, Untitled (Skull), like a sort of gigantic diorama in an Aztec quartz-crystal calavera). Here, the body is indicated instead by the words “IIVER” and “SPLEEN” at the center, from which vaguely anatomical lines flow down toward a spiral motif (the intestines, perhaps) at the bottom of the panel. Other images figure prominently on the left panel, whose background is predominantly black: an atomic diagram with the word “RADIUM” written beneath it and partly effaced; a picture “window” with a subway-type graffiti-painted square in its center, like a picture on the wall that is also effaced (graffiti on graffiti, or graffiti versus graffiti) by jagged lines overflowing into most of the blank portion of the panel. At the bottom, a mauve inset contains an inscription in capital letters that, except for the letter $A$$A$AA, have been obliterated by blotches of gold paint. On the right panel, the brown canvas rising conspicuously over the intrusion of blackness is largely taken up by the word “ARM” and images relating to it; a narrative element creeps in with the enigmatic inscription “SUICIDE ATTEMPT” over a dotted line marking the wrist.
这是巴斯基亚的众多画作之一，其中语言和图形解剖描述非常突出。然而，缺少的是熟悉的骷髅/自画像，那个被割断的“模特头”（它完全占据了另一幅非凡的画布《无题（骷髅）》，就像一个巨大的阿兹特克水晶骷髅模型）。在这里，身体则通过中心的“ IIVER”和“脾脏”这两个词来表示，从中流出模糊的解剖线条，向下延伸至面板底部的螺旋图案（也许是肠道）。左侧面板上还有其他图像，背景主要是黑色：一个原子图，下面写着“镭”这个词，部分被抹去；一个“窗口”图像，中央有一个地铁风格的涂鸦方块，像是墙上的一幅画，也被锯齿状的线条淹没，溢出到面板的大部分空白区域。在底部，一个淡紫色的插图包含了一个大写字母的铭文，除了字母 $A$$A$AA 外，其他字母都被金色颜料的污点抹去。 在右侧面板上，棕色画布显著地高于黑暗的侵袭，主要被“ARM”这个词和与之相关的图像占据；一个叙事元素悄然出现，神秘的铭文“自杀未遂”出现在标记手腕的虚线之上。

One could go on in greater detail describing the words and images, as well as the placement, colors, and shapes, that make it all work as a unified, synthetic message. There is no way to make sense of the sum of all this, nor can it be reduced to any of its parts, for there is no hierarchy to guide us in distinguishing what is central from what is peripheral. With its narrow central panel-a bleeding hand reaching out in a helpless gesture (“IL MANO” mistakenly in the masculine gender, perhaps as a way of inserting “noise” between the message and its locution) — compressed between two wider and more tormented panels, the entire triptych, as an “aesthetic” object, is a masterpiece of balanced visual expression, no less than certain early Matisses, such as The Red Studio, or the large cut-outs he did later. And yet it is also just a fragment in a complex, half-remembered/half-forgotten cosmology, the image and by-product of a world at once whole and hopelessly dismembered. Afro-Brazilian and other “Latin” ex voto-with their carved-out limbs and body parts offered in exchange for the healing of their “models”-enact a similar kind of dismembering. But here we almost have a reversal of such popular healing imagery: Basquiat’s offerings are actually more like self-immolations, sacrifices of the Self, although more perhaps in the spirit of Lautréamont and Rimbaud than of Kafka. They do not proceed ex voto, from desire, but from the desert hope, ex desolatione.
可以更详细地描述这些词语和图像，以及它们的布局、颜色和形状，使其作为一个统一的综合信息发挥作用。无法理解这一切的总和，也无法将其简化为任何部分，因为没有层次结构来指导我们区分什么是核心，什么是边缘。其狭窄的中央面板——一只无助的手伸出（“IL MANO”错误地使用了阳性，或许是为了在信息和其表达之间插入“噪音”）——被两个更宽、更痛苦的面板压缩在一起，整个三联画作为一种“美学”对象，是平衡视觉表达的杰作，不亚于某些早期的马蒂斯作品，如《红色工作室》或他后来的大型剪纸。然而，它也是一个复杂的、半记得/半遗忘的宇宙论中的片段，既是一个完整又无可救药地支离破碎的世界的图像和副产品。非洲巴西和其他“拉丁”宗教祭品——它们的肢体和身体部位被雕刻出来，以换取对其“模特”的治愈——上演了一种类似的肢解。 但在这里，我们几乎看到了这种流行治愈意象的反转：巴斯基亚的作品实际上更像是自我焚烧，是自我的牺牲，尽管或许更接近于洛特雷阿蒙和兰波的精神，而非卡夫卡。它们不是出于愿望而产生的，而是源于荒漠的希望，出于绝望。

There is a deceptive side to Basquiat’s images. They belong to the honored American tradition of simplification; they are at once pop, minimal, and conceptual. The very early works, rarely seen, attest to these multiple roots.
巴斯奎特的图像有一种欺骗性的一面。它们属于美国简化的光荣传统；它们同时是流行、极简和概念性的。那些很少被看到的早期作品证明了这些多重根源。

Quite dearly, this is fragmented imagery, imagery that is fragmented from the start. After a hundred years of aesthetic perception being dismembered in the West, through the decomposition of light and color, volume and shape, movement and speed, and, finally, through the dissociation of content and referent (as in surrealism), we had arrived at the American abstract image (seldom truly abstract), in which everything was brought back to the "thing"itself. Rauschenberg showed us that this “thing” was also the image in its casual everyday occurrence (the image on the wall); Johns"romantically"pointed to the fact that both"paint"and “image” coincided with "painting."Warhol made the crucial discovery that it was not just the painting of images that had changed, but the image itself: the image had become a ghostly protagonist, not a made object but a shadow with a life of its own.
相当珍贵，这是一种破碎的意象，从一开始就是破碎的意象。在西方，经过一百年的审美感知被肢解，通过光与色、体积与形状、运动与速度的分解，最后通过内容与所指的分离（如超现实主义），我们达到了美国抽象图像（很少真正抽象），在这种图像中，一切都回到了“事物”本身。劳申伯格向我们展示了这个“事物”也是日常生活中随意出现的图像（墙上的图像）；约翰斯“浪漫地”指出“颜料”和“图像”与“绘画”是重合的。沃霍尔做出了关键的发现，不仅是图像的绘画发生了变化，图像本身也发生了变化：图像已成为一个幽灵般的主角，不再是一个制造的物体，而是一个拥有自己生命的影子。
Paradoxically, the “fetish” of old had in some way been resuscitated; the given images (images trouvés) were now like bodies at once dead and alive-life-less and yet capturing a life instant.
矛盾的是，旧时的“迷恋”在某种程度上被复苏了；这些给定的图像（现成图像）现在就像是同时死去和活着的身体——无生命却又捕捉到了一瞬间的生命。

In Basquiat’s figures, this Warholian image of" life back from the dead" (a zombie-like cast transforming the features of the living into instant ancestral commemorations) takes on a distinctly new form, “Feeling,” and content. Like so many ancient and primitive paintings on rock walls, it becomes both a silhouette and an $X$$X$XX ray. The silhouette of a half-spooky, half-humorous Black figure that appeared years ago on many New York walls, particularly a street corners in run-down neighborhoods, was not the work of SAMO, Basquiat’s original street-roaming alter
在巴斯基亚的作品中，这种沃霍尔式的“死而复生”的形象（一种僵尸般的形态将生者的特征转化为瞬间的祖先纪念）呈现出一种截然不同的新形式，“感觉”，以及内容。就像许多古老和原始的岩壁画一样，它既成为轮廓，又成为 $X$$X$XX 光线。多年前出现在许多纽约墙壁上的半阴森、半幽默的黑人形象，尤其是在破旧社区的街角，并不是巴斯基亚的原始街头游荡化身 SAMO 的作品。
ego, but it might easily have been. Like SAMO’s early public markings and images on canvas, paper, and wood, it conveyed a striking sense of isolation (and, of course, loneliness), shamelessly displayed as a defacing so as to append something almost sinister to a vulnerability that became in itself a shield.
自我，但它很容易就变成了。就像 SAMO 早期在画布、纸张和木材上的公共标记和图像，它传达了一种强烈的孤立感（当然，还有孤独感），毫不掩饰地作为一种破坏展示，以便将某种几乎阴险的东西附加到一种脆弱性上，而这种脆弱性本身变成了一种保护。

The blotted silhouettes and transparent “diagrams” of these figures are images by subtraction. One could almost call them images perdues, akin to the cire perdue, or lost wax, of bronze casting. What has been lost here is the body of the image. But what remains is not a mould, as in Duchamp’s late conception. That was an extreme (and “negative”) version of the Platonic notion of the model-idea, in which Duchamp’s nominalism had come full circle, to the formal physicality of form-matter, or form as intrinsically embedded in matter. By reducing both form and matter to signs, Basquiat proceeded not, as Bacon did, to extreme deformation but to a novel kind of de-formalization. And so, these images, in their complex yet utterly simplified fragmentation, form “sets” in which the “values” of the accumulated signs work within the “composition” more by subtraction than by accretion. Along with the twentieth-century idea of neoplastic reduction, there is now a new form of subtraction that is the result of meaning having been materialized even further. The principle is not altogether novel. But what is new is the truly desperate existential rigor with which this frantic adding up so as to take away, 50 as to remove as much as possible from the structured order of meaning - “artistic” as well as “ethical” (and political)—is achieved through the accumulation of images, words, and procedures. Basquiat’s peculiar use of collage, which is quite different from the analytical constructions of the classical avant-garde, reflects this perception-experience of the world that is at once omnivorous and irrevocably distant.
这些人物的模糊轮廓和透明“图示”是通过减法得到的图像。人们几乎可以称它们为失落的图像，类似于青铜铸造中的失蜡法。这里失去的是图像的身体。但剩下的并不是模具，正如杜尚晚期的构思那样。那是柏拉图模型-理念概念的极端（和“负面”）版本，在这个版本中，杜尚的名义主义已经回归到形式-物质的形式的物理性，或形式作为内在嵌入物质中的存在。通过将形式和物质都简化为符号，巴斯基亚并没有像培根那样走向极端的变形，而是走向了一种新型的去形式化。因此，这些图像在其复杂而又完全简化的碎片化中，形成了“集合”，其中累积符号的“价值”在“构成”中更多是通过减法而非增法来运作。与二十世纪的新造型主义简化思想相伴随，现在出现了一种新的减法形式，这是意义进一步物质化的结果。这个原则并不完全新颖。 但新颖之处在于，这种疯狂的加法所带来的真正绝望的存在主义严谨，以便尽可能多地从意义的结构秩序中去除——无论是“艺术的”还是“伦理的”（以及政治的）——都是通过图像、文字和程序的积累来实现的。巴斯基亚独特的拼贴使用，与经典先锋派的分析构造截然不同，反映了这种对世界的感知体验，既是贪婪的，又是不可逆转的遥远。

In this, too, and it is essential, Basquiat had a way of being central in the marginal, both inside and out. To some extent, of course, this is an eminently American condition. De Kooning said he sometimes felt that "an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something-a member of a team writing American history."4 (Both Basquiat and Condo have painted “portraits” of the “great America ball player.”) We are at the antipodes of Broadway Boogie Woogie, which even Dalí grudgingly admired, yet something of that capacity for extremity—-extreme interiority through extreme objectivity-resurfaces in Basquiat’s flat icons, which are far removed from the age-old issue of figuration versus abstraction. It was once again de Kooning who bluntly stated the problem: "It’s really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint today, when you think about it, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it was even more absurd
在这一点上，巴斯奎特有一种在边缘中居于中心的方式，无论是内在还是外在。当然，在某种程度上，这是一种典型的美国现象。德库宁曾说他有时觉得“一个美国艺术家必须像棒球运动员一样，或者说是一个团队的成员，书写美国历史。”（巴斯奎特和康多都画过“伟大的美国棒球运动员”的“肖像”。）我们处于百老汇布吉舞的对立面，甚至达利也勉强欣赏，但那种极端的能力——通过极端的客观性实现极端的内在性——在巴斯奎特的平面图标中重新浮现，这些图标远离了长期以来的具象与抽象的问题。再次是德库宁直言不讳地指出了这个问题：“今天用油漆制作图像，像人类图像一样，真是荒谬，当你考虑到我们是否应该这样做的问题时。但突然之间，这变得更加荒谬。”
not to do it.“5 De Kooning, who never painted a “word,” said that he always"liked the word in painting,” the label, the name of the thing, and he also remarked that “one could spend one’s life having this desire to be in and outside at the same time.” But he still related to body space, the space enclosed, as he said, within his own arms wrapped around himself. A flat silhouette, however, is neither in nor out. Like a hieratic icon, it suggests another plane, a different dimension, in which the comic strip borders on the immateriality of the spirit world. The body, constantly evoked, becomes an idea, a fleeting trace without substance, all light and shadow. Like the maker of the image, it is both inside and out.
不去做它。“德库宁从未画过一个‘词’，他说他总是‘喜欢画中的词’，标签，事物的名称，他还提到‘人可以花一生的时间渴望同时在里面和外面。’但他仍然与身体空间相关，正如他所说，被他自己环绕的手臂包围的空间。然而，一个平面的轮廓既不在里面也不在外面。像一个神秘的图标，它暗示着另一个平面，一个不同的维度，在这个维度中，漫画条接近于精神世界的非物质性。身体不断被唤起，成为一个想法，一个没有实质的短暂痕迹，充满光与影。像图像的创造者，它既在里面又在外面。

The graffiti in public toilets and other hidden or secluded places are a form of writing that says “in secret” things that cannot be said openly. Like the physiological functions that are performed in some of those same places, these graffiti are a form of relief: they are an emptying out of accumulated words from which one wants to be unburdened. Their fabulations on sexual and scatological themes belong only superficially to the realm of cryptic communication. Addressed to an Unknown Reader, they are more a way of giving vent to a form of artistic expression (“talk”), and in this they are closer to the solitary satisfactions of masturbation (of which Oscar Wilde once said that it allowed one to keep better company). The curiosity with which one reads these “messages” is in turn voyeuristic; it is like watching somebody engaged in very private acts.
公共厕所和其他隐秘或偏僻地方的涂鸦是一种“秘密”书写，表达那些无法公开说出的事情。就像在这些地方进行的生理功能一样，这些涂鸦是一种解脱：它们是想要摆脱的积累词语的倾泻。它们在性和排泄主题上的虚构仅在表面上属于隐秘交流的领域。面向一个未知的读者，它们更像是一种艺术表达的宣泄（“谈话”），在这方面，它们更接近于孤独的自慰满足（奥斯卡·王尔德曾说过，这让人能更好地陪伴自己）。人们以好奇的心态阅读这些“信息”，反过来又是一种窥视；就像在观看某人进行非常私密的行为。

Then there are the signs that sprawl over open walls, railroad and subway cars, signs that want to be seen by the greatest possible number of people, signs that aggressively impose themselves on everybody. Yet these too are “hidden” because they are often illegible, cryptic, undecipherable signatures, engrams of a presence without a name, figures only recognizable by “those in the know,” in fact, public gestures stemming from totally suppressed identities, names that cannot be read.
然后是那些蔓延在开放墙壁、火车和地铁车厢上的标志，这些标志希望被尽可能多的人看到，强势地向每个人展示自己。然而，这些标志也“隐藏”起来，因为它们常常难以辨认、晦涩难懂，是没有名字的存在的痕迹，仅能被“知情者”识别，实际上是源于完全被压抑的身份的公共姿态，无法被阅读的名字。

But in this new open/cryptic form of graffiti there is something that goes well beyond the traditional scratching of dates and names on walls, monuments, and historical and natural sites, or the recording of obscenities in recessed places. Graffiti covers the surface. Open graffiti that spreads its signature/signs over any available expanse of plaster, masonry, or metal creates an added surface, a new skin and a new
但在这种新的开放/隐秘形式的涂鸦中，有一些东西远远超出了在墙壁、纪念碑以及历史和自然遗址上刻写日期和名字的传统，或在隐蔽地方记录粗俗之语。涂鸦覆盖了表面。开放的涂鸦将其签名/标志扩展到任何可用的灰泥、砖石或金属表面，创造了一个附加的表面，一个新的皮肤和新的
look for the face of the environment, a sort of mask that hides the identity of the impersonator as it appropriates the urban milieu by wrapping it in its “disguise.” Reality is covered up because reality is perceived as being beyond reach, inaccessible, impossible to control or possess, and governed by rules and principles as remote as those of a distant tribe or empire. The graffiti cover supplants this hard, distant look of things with the rebellious comforts of a radical aesthetic appropriation of a surface one cannot help looking at: the hard surface of (impersonal) things. Graffiti simultaneously takes over, covers up, and hides both the objectual world and the subject himself.
寻找环境的面孔，一种掩盖模仿者身份的面具，通过将城市环境包裹在其“伪装”中来占有它。现实被掩盖，因为现实被视为遥不可及、无法控制或拥有的，并且受到与遥远部落或帝国一样的规则和原则的支配。涂鸦覆盖取代了事物那种坚硬、遥远的外观，以一种叛逆的舒适感，进行对一个无法不去注视的表面的激进美学占有：事物的坚硬表面（非个人化）。涂鸦同时占据、掩盖并隐藏了物质世界和主体自身。

Yet SAMO is something else again. In the intricate, cryptographic, idiosyncratically anonymous, and ubiquitous web of multicolored sprayed “signs,” SAMO not only attests to the existence of a persona, an individual presence (as does the graffiti surreptitiously, beneath its disguise), but affirms the existence of a personality, an incipient expressive, therefore artistic, personality, irrepressible in that it cannot repress itself. SAMO is the affirmation of an identity that manifests itself both as signature (the artist’s imprint, like the “R. Mutt” on Duchamp’s Fountain) and as self-image, or rather as the image of an iconic self (just as SAMO and “R. Mutt” are iconic signatures.)
然而，SAMO 又是另一回事。在这个复杂的、加密的、特立独行的匿名和无处不在的多彩喷涂“标志”网络中，SAMO 不仅证明了一个人格的存在，一个个体的存在（就像涂鸦在其伪装下偷偷进行的那样），而且确认了一个个性，一个初生的表现性，因此也是艺术性的个性，这种个性是不可压抑的，因为它无法自我压抑。SAMO 是身份的确认，它既表现为签名（艺术家的印记，就像杜尚的《泉》上的“R. Mutt”）又表现为自我形象，或者说是一个标志性自我的形象（正如 SAMO 和“R. Mutt”都是标志性签名）。

How different is this ubiquitous image from Duchamp’s disguises, or from the meta-narcissistic “self-portraiture” that haunts so much of the most relevant art of our time (Nauman, Wegman, Clemente, Ontani, Sherman, Galán)? The stern figure, hair raised and hair-raising, that appears again and again at the center of a picture or on the side, looking on, is not a caricature (the image of a “character”) —-despite its often grotesque features, so unlike the almost angelic beauty of their subject-nor is it an image "of character."I is not “realistic,” yet it is very real. It is real in a symbolic way. Its symbolism lies not in what it might stand for but in something intrinsic to the image itself, in its contrasting combination of flat, cartoonlike features and resemblant (as well as humorously self-depreciating) traits. The “self” that appears again and again like a jack-in-the-box in so many of Basquiat’s pictures is a sort of animated puppet or mannequin-the ultimate personalized reincarnation of the “metaphysical” mannequins that populated de Chirico’s “bildscapes”: personalized yet schematic, an expressionist blueprint, the tracing (and trace) of a person.
这种无处不在的形象与杜尚的伪装有何不同，或与困扰我们时代许多相关艺术的元自恋“自画像”有何区别（纳尔曼、韦格曼、克莱门特、昂塔尼、舍曼、加兰）？这个严肃的形象，头发竖起且令人毛骨悚然，反复出现在画面的中心或侧边，注视着，不是一个 caricature（“角色”的形象）——尽管它常常具有怪诞的特征，与其主题几乎天使般的美丽截然不同，也不是一个“角色”的形象。它并不“现实”，但却非常真实。它在象征意义上是真实的。它的象征性不在于它可能代表什么，而在于图像本身内在的东西，在于其平面、卡通般特征与相似（以及幽默自贬）特征的对比组合。出现在巴斯基亚许多画作中的“自我”就像一个弹簧玩具，是一种动画木偶或模特——是德·基里科“图景”中“形而上”模特的终极个性化再生：个性化却又图式化，是一种表现主义蓝图，是一个人的轮廓（和痕迹）。

It is the “leftover” character of the images that once more prevails. There is an appropriation of elements that had been discarded or had lost any organic connection to anything (especially to anything human) -be it an oil well, or food, or the name of a “hero” (ancient or modern, a warrior, a jazz musician, or a ball player). Everything
它是那些曾经占主导地位的图像的“剩余”特征。对那些被丢弃或失去与任何事物（尤其是与任何人类事物）有机联系的元素进行了重新利用——无论是油井、食物，还是“英雄”的名字（古代或现代，战士、爵士音乐家或球员）。一切
seems irredeemably lost, at the very moment when, finally, absolutely everything is being preserved and becomes accessible to everybody, thus losing all meaning, all belonging, in fact, losing its history. It is this colossal sense of loss at the roots, ab principio, that the Rauschenberg-like accumulation of signs and images in Basquiat’s pictures seems to express.
似乎不可挽回地失落，在这一刻，最终，所有的一切都被保存并变得对每个人可获取，从而失去了所有意义，所有归属，实际上，失去了它的历史。正是这种根本上的巨大失落感，正是这种从一开始的失落感，使得巴斯奎特画作中类似于劳申伯格的符号和图像的积累似乎得以表达。

Graffiti needs a “wall,” and the wall is what American art rediscovered.
涂鸦需要一面“墙”，而这面墙是美国艺术重新发现的。
Rauschenberg, with Twombly and Johns, made it possible once again (perhaps for the last time) to build an art of walls, as in Pompeii. This is an art that does not decorate the wall but recreates it. The wall, this support for picture windows (fake windows, pretending to open onto outer or inner worlds, already dismissed by Duchamp’s Fresh Widow), now becomes the picture. In fact, the wall becomes the piece, and the “piece” is a piece of wall. Hence this American wall is not, after all, like a Roman wall with its marble and fresco covers, a wall that acted as a support for a colorful wrap, a decoration. The Rauschenberg wall that Basquiat partially adopted (through Warhol)
劳申伯格与汤布利和约翰斯再次使得（也许是最后一次）能够构建一种墙的艺术，如同在庞贝。这是一种不装饰墙壁而是重塑墙壁的艺术。墙壁，这个为窗户（假窗户，假装通向外部或内部世界，早已被杜尚的《新寡妇》所否定）提供支撑的地方，现在成为了画面。实际上，墙壁成为了作品，而“作品”就是一块墙。因此，这面美国墙毕竟不同于带有大理石和壁画装饰的罗马墙，它并不是作为色彩缤纷的包装的支撑，或是一种装饰。劳申伯格的墙被巴斯奎特部分采纳（通过沃霍尔）。

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and flattened out is “transparent” and structurally totally irrelevant, like the “curtain walls” of American architecture. As such, it is not a wall that one might inscribe or scratch (the word “graffiti” comes from a verb meaning “to scratch”), despite the importance of words in Rauschenberg’s paintings. This wall is only for preexisting imprints, or images of words that have a supporting surface even before they are transposed onto the curtain wall. It is also certainly from Rauschenberg that Basquiat derived his use of “collage,” or rather, one should say, of “pasting on.”
并且平坦化的“透明”在结构上完全无关紧要，就像美国建筑的“幕墙”。因此，这不是一个可以刻写或刮擦的墙（“涂鸦”一词源于一个意思是“刮擦”的动词），尽管在劳申伯格的画作中，文字的重要性不容忽视。这个墙只用于已有的印记，或者说是那些在被转移到幕墙之前就已经有支撑表面的文字图像。毫无疑问，巴斯奎特的“拼贴”用法也来源于劳申伯格，或者更确切地说，应该称之为“粘贴”。

In Pompeii, the paintings seem to make a real, sustaining wall an illusion, a rhythmic surface (as Saint Clair Cemin once said). Rauschenberg, by contrast, made up illusions-complex surfaces that look like walls. We have come full circle, from the falseness of real walls to the reality of false walls. It is to this new wall that the graffiti is grafted, both as image and as word. In the process, the external urban wrapping is brouqht indoors, and the surface of the city is turned inside out.
在庞贝，画作似乎让真实、持久的墙壁成为一种幻觉，一种有节奏的表面（正如圣克莱尔·塞门曾说过的）。相比之下，劳申伯格创造了幻觉——看起来像墙壁的复杂表面。我们已经回到了原点，从真实墙壁的虚假性到虚假墙壁的真实性。涂鸦正是嫁接在这面新墙上，既作为图像又作为文字。在这个过程中，外部城市的包裹被带入室内，城市的表面被翻转。

Rauschenberg made “combines” (as he called them)—object-image constructions in which the object as such invests and rematerializes the image, thus making of the “picture” not a mirror of nature (whether abstract or realistic) but something more like an alternate reality. Basquiat produced unprecedented combinations of words and images (the images themselves, with their schematic quality, are more like language-symbols than pictures) that are actually signconstructions, which, as representational wholes, acquire the disquieting nature of “speaking-objects.” In this sense, these strange sign-maps are “primitive,” like masks that could perform by themselves, without an impersonator, or like the graphic tableaux of those eighteenth-century masques wherein music, pantomime, and words were combined in complex allegorical scenes. The “mask” aspect points, once more, to the evocation of distance, to a view of humans as saints and heroes, as champions and kings, and as ancestors, whereas the “masque” aspect corresponds to the call of the modern, the roots of that other performative distance from ourselves and from what we are, which we are bound to maintain.
劳申伯格创造了“组合”（他称之为）——物体-图像构造，其中物体本身赋予并重新物质化图像，从而使“画面”不再是自然的镜子（无论是抽象的还是现实的），而更像是一种替代现实。巴斯基亚创造了前所未有的文字与图像的组合（这些图像本身，因其示意性特征，更像是语言符号而非图片），实际上是符号构造，作为整体的表现，获得了“会说话的物体”的不安性质。从这个意义上说，这些奇异的符号地图是“原始的”，像是可以独立表演的面具，没有表演者，或像十八世纪面具剧中的图形场景，其中音乐、哑剧和文字结合在复杂的寓言场景中。“面具”的方面再次指向距离的唤起，视人类为圣人和英雄、冠军和国王，以及祖先，而“面具剧”的方面则对应于现代的召唤，根植于那种与我们自己及我们所是的事物之间的其他表演性距离，这种距离是我们必须保持的。

The visible stretchers on Basquiat’s canvases (as in Both Poles) are in a way the opposite of frames; they are a way of de-framing the already unframed pictureobject. Other rough devices, such as the hinges on Catharsis, also stress the work’s character as a receptacle of signs. This is something-by Basquiat’s implicit admission - that would not have been possible without the precedent of Rauschenberg’s vertiginously innovative and wholly American “naïveté” (the word is Jasper Johns’s). It is also something (to echo Georg Simmel) that brought painting a step further away from “fine arts” and perhaps many steps closer to the actual realization of “pure” art-action (or, if one prefers, art-will)—-the ultimate identification of art and life that has been the great aspiration of the West since the Romantic revolution. This may also be the moment at which the making of artobjects reaches its point of dissolution, the very limits of its raison dêtre.
巴斯奎特画布上可见的拉伸器（如《两极》）在某种程度上是框架的对立面；它们是一种去框架化已经不再被框架的图像物体的方式。其他粗糙的装置，如《净化》上的铰链，也强调了作品作为符号容器的特性。这是巴斯奎特隐含承认的一个事实——如果没有劳申伯格那种令人眩晕的创新和完全美国式的“天真”（这个词是贾斯珀·约翰斯的），这一切都不可能实现。这也是某种东西（借用乔治·西美尔的话）使绘画更进一步远离“美术”，并可能更接近“纯”艺术行动的实际实现（或者，如果你愿意，可以称之为艺术意志）——艺术与生活的最终认同，这是自浪漫革命以来西方的伟大追求。这也可能是艺术物体创作达到其解体点的时刻，即其存在理由的极限。

Basquiat’s resolutely “artistic” meta-graffiti, his deliberate and artificial transpositions of “primary,” ostensibly unschooled graphic gestures into an idiosyncratic and strongly defined formal idiom, also represent a further expansion of the boundaries of “art” and, conversely, the bringing to bear on art of the first radically new “aesthetic” gesture since Pollock’s: a sort of action painting whose starting elements are clusters of primary images and word images right off the brush rather than drips of primary color right out of the can. This carefully cultivated spontaneity (as in some of the musical and verbal compositions of John Cage) of a “primitivism” variously orchestrated through recurring but only apparently redundant
巴斯奎特坚决的“艺术”元涂鸦，他故意和人为地将“原始”的、表面上未受过教育的图形手势转化为一种特立独行且强烈定义的形式语言，也代表了对“艺术”边界的进一步扩展，反过来，带来了自波洛克以来首个彻底新颖的“美学”手势：一种行动绘画，其起始元素是直接从画笔上涂抹的原始图像和文字图像，而不是从罐子里滴落的原色。这种精心培养的自发性（如约翰·凯奇的一些音乐和语言作品中所体现的）是一种通过反复出现但仅表面上冗余的方式进行各种编排的“原始主义”。
themes and variations, strongly contributes to keeping most of Basquiat’s paintings on a tensely vibrating key, like the impossibly protracted high note of a jazz trumpet. Looking at them when they were first painted, one might have wondered which would break first, the music or the player. Pollock’s and Basquiat’s “accidental” deaths were, in that sense, not just a coincidence.
主题与变奏，强烈地使巴斯基亚的大多数画作保持在一种紧张振动的基调上，就像爵士小号那不可能延续的高音。回看它们刚完成时，人们可能会想，究竟是音乐还是演奏者会先崩溃。从这个意义上说，波洛克和巴斯基亚的“意外”死亡并非仅仅是巧合。

Basquiat is not the only artist who has made the copyright symbol a significant recurring element in his work. Conceptual artists of various sorts have often used it. This coincidence stems from an “objective” condition by which industrial objects, and hence industrially produced and mechanically reproduced images, have taken over greater and greater areas of the visible, being, as they are, at the same time made by no one and someone’s property, for the most part already owned and already spent. Even Rauschenberg recently lamented that “everything is copyrighted.” One has the impression that for Basquiat the symbol was first of all a ubiquitous hidden feature of the natural/unnatural urban environment that is reflected in his imagery. The obsessive recurrence of certain associations of the copyright sign with certain images, and especially with certain words and verbal expressions (verbal images, as I see them), indicates a specific and pointed “message.” It seems that although the images themselves have lost meaning and the meaning of words must be reinvented (or at least rediscovered), poetic expression has found refuge in the ironic traces of cool nostalgic “appropriations.” There is no picking and choosing, nor is it a question of sentiments. As Rauschenberg testified, "feelings don’t make good art necessarily. In fact, you can make good art totally without feelings quicker than you can make any art based on feelings."9 This nostalgia of the present, a sort of instant nostalgia, is an American invention, and one of America’s contributions to Western consciousness, but Basquiat invested it with the fire of his great capacity for both participation and remoteness: inherent marginality chosen as the only possible starting point-in the end with tragic consequence, as we know-in order to maintain the distance that transforms the object of representation into a poetic object. Basquiat’s copyright sign, removing his images still further from their maker through that same gesture of mock appropriation that is apparently indicated, has all the paradoxical character of a symbol, pointing simultaneously to identification and to its impossibility. “Nothing worth copying,” he seems to be saying, but also, “[My] poetry cannot be copied.”
巴斯奎特并不是唯一一个在作品中将版权符号作为重要反复元素的艺术家。各种概念艺术家常常使用它。这种巧合源于一种“客观”条件，即工业物品，以及因此而产生的工业生产和机械复制的图像，逐渐占据了越来越多的可见领域，因为它们既没有人制造，又是某人的财产，大多数情况下已经被拥有和消费。甚至劳申伯格最近也感叹“所有东西都有版权。”人们有一种印象，对于巴斯奎特来说，这个符号首先是他影像中反映的自然/非自然城市环境的一个无处不在的隐藏特征。版权符号与某些图像，尤其是与某些词语和语言表达（我所理解的语言图像）之间的某些联想的强迫性重复，表明了一种特定而尖锐的“信息。”似乎尽管图像本身已经失去了意义，而词语的意义必须被重新发明（或至少重新发现），诗意的表达在冷酷怀旧的“挪用”的讽刺痕迹中找到了避难所。没有挑选，也不是情感的问题。正如劳申伯格所证实的，“情感并不一定能创造出好的艺术。事实上，你可以在没有情感的情况下更快地创造出好的艺术，而不是基于情感的任何艺术。”这种对现在的怀旧，一种即时的怀旧，是美国的发明，也是美国对西方意识的贡献之一，但巴斯奎特赋予了它他参与和疏离的巨大能力所带来的火焰：固有的边缘性被选择为唯一可能的起点——最终以悲剧的结果收场，正如我们所知——以保持那种将表现对象转化为诗意对象的距离。巴斯奎特的版权标志，通过这种明显的嘲讽性占有的手势，进一步将他的图像与其创作者分离，具有象征的悖论特征，同时指向认同及其不可能性。“没有什么值得复制，”他似乎在说，但同时也在说，“[我的]诗歌无法被复制。””

Actually, one might interpret the words and phrases in Basquiat’s paintings as Yasushi Inoue described his own poetic notes: “They are not so much poetry as small boxes in which poetry is locked up. [. . . ] if some magic spell were cast upon them,
实际上，人们可以将巴斯奎特画作中的词语和短语解读为井上靖所描述的他自己的诗意笔记：“它们与其说是诗，不如说是锁住诗的小盒子。[……] 如果对它们施加某种魔法咒语，
real poems would emerge.” Inoue goes on to say, modestly and rather unjustly, that he is "a poet who has never succeeded in discovering the spell."10 Basquiat’s words on canvas exert a spell on us as if they were poetry pent up inside vibrating boxes, like the tiny, black, eerily buzzing box a burly Asian patron, in Buñuel’s Belle de jour, produces for the heroine as an erotic prop. But they are also like revealed mysteries, or, better yet, “suspicions” of poetry (Rene Ricard wrote that there are no unsolved mysteries, only suspicions), emerging from our ever more chaotic forests of language, images, and history. There is a sort of innocent, joyful perversity that once more is wholly American:"0 God—Only Lucifer could be so mean and I am Lucifer and I’m not that mean, in fact, Lucifer Goes to Heaven.“11
“真正的诗会浮现出来。”井上接着谦虚而不公正地说，他是“一个从未成功发现咒语的诗人。”巴斯奎特在画布上的话语对我们施加了一种魔力，仿佛它们是被压抑在震动盒子里的诗歌，就像布努埃尔的《白日美人》中，一个魁梧的亚洲顾客为女主角提供的那个小黑色、诡异嗡嗡作响的盒子，作为一种情色道具。但它们也像是揭示的谜团，或者更确切地说，是“诗歌的怀疑”（雷内·里卡尔德曾写道，没有未解的谜团，只有怀疑），从我们日益混乱的语言、图像和历史森林中浮现出来。这里有一种天真、快乐的变态，完全是美国式的：“哦，天哪——只有路西法才会如此刻薄，而我就是路西法，我并没有那么刻薄，事实上，路西法上天了。”
“If you can avoid being an artist, do so,” Rauschenberg said, echoing Manet’s famous dictum that art “should be discouraged.” Certainly Basquiat could not avoid being an artist, but the striking “innocence” of his artistic personality was in some way opposite to Rauschenberg’s “innocence you have to nourish every day.” And every day Basquiat worked at” “undoing” and negating his natural innocence, that touch of grace by which he appeared to glide through everything unscathed. But because he failed always to shed its aura, he actually strengthened and reaffirmed that innocence. Black and like a Jack Kerouac of painting, he was a true American artisthero.
“如果你能避免成为艺术家，就这样做，”劳申伯格说，呼应了马奈著名的格言，艺术“应该被劝阻。”当然，巴斯奎特无法避免成为艺术家，但他艺术个性的惊人“天真”在某种程度上与劳申伯格的“你必须每天滋养的天真”相对立。每天巴斯奎特都在努力“撤销”和否定他天生的天真，那种使他看似在一切中轻松自如的优雅。然而，由于他并不总是能够摆脱这种光环，他实际上加强并重申了那种天真。像杰克·凯鲁亚克一样黑暗，他是真正的美国艺术英雄。

Jean-Michel Basquiat is also, in a more general sense, one of the truly original Western artists of the 1980 s. His paintings show, in retrospect, the necessity and the inevitability of all significant contributions to our poetic understanding of the world. What Basquiat did, in such a short time, already belongs to the history of Western art. To underestimate this fact and to fail to recognize that it is in some way independent of his origins and the circumstances of his death would be a grave misrepresentation. Yet in considering Basquiat’s place in our artistic landscape we must also take into account the place whence he came, the roots of his problematic identity and the original configuration of his tormented and tormenting spirit. The question is a delicate one: it is difficult to identify some of these points of origin without somehow implying a “minor mode”—a sort of artistic ghetto — that the artist had proceeded from and belonged to. It will be important, someday, to define in precisely what
让-米歇尔·巴斯奎特在更广泛的意义上也是 1980 年代真正原创的西方艺术家之一。他的画作回顾起来显示了我们对世界的诗意理解中所有重要贡献的必要性和不可避免性。巴斯奎特在如此短的时间内所做的事情，已经属于西方艺术的历史。低估这一事实，并未能认识到这一点在某种程度上独立于他的出身和死亡的环境，将是一个严重的误解。然而，在考虑巴斯奎特在我们艺术景观中的地位时，我们还必须考虑他来自何处、他问题重重的身份的根源以及他那痛苦而折磨人的精神的原始构成。这个问题很微妙：很难在不暗示某种“次要模式”——一种艺术贫民区——的情况下识别这些起源点，而艺术家正是从中走出并归属其中。将来，准确界定这一点将是重要的。
sense a kind of marginality and a “marginal” stance are essential components of Basquiat’s background and his expressive makeup.
感受到一种边缘性和“边缘”立场是巴斯奎特背景和他表现力构成的基本要素。

It was at a Ray Charles concert in the gigantic Houston Astrodome, almost twenty years ago, that I was first struck by the existence of a diffuse and distinctive Black American visual aesthetic, which is not as apparent in the urban settings of the Northeast. Practically all the men there, and many of the women too, were dressed in custom-made clothes. The materials themselves-not to mention the combinations-looked as if they had been woven expressly for each particular outfit. I don’t know that I ever witnessed a more astounding display of the affirmation of individual originality within a common cultural idiom. It had something of the extravagance and modish refinement one imagines to have existed at the court of Versailles in the eighteenth century. Some of that same “Southern” phantasmagoria can also be found in many of Basquiat’s canvases and works on paper. Yet despite the “wildness” of the imagery this aspect is not dominant, partly on account of the extraordinary instinct by which Basquiat’s colors and shapes always seem to balance each other in what invariably becomes a very savant composition. ${}^{13}$${}^{13}$^(13){ }^{13}
在将近二十年前的休斯顿天文馆，雷·查尔斯的音乐会让我第一次意识到一种模糊而独特的黑人美国视觉美学，这在东北的城市环境中并不明显。那里几乎所有的男性，以及许多女性，都是穿着定制的衣服。材料本身——更不用说组合——看起来就像是专门为每一套服装编织的。我不知道我是否见过更令人惊叹的展示，展现了在共同文化语境中个体原创性的肯定。这种风格有点像十八世纪凡尔赛宫廷中想象的奢华和时尚的精致。同样的“南方”幻影也可以在巴斯奎特的许多画布和纸上作品中找到。然而，尽管图像的“狂野”，这一方面并不占主导地位，部分原因在于巴斯奎特的颜色和形状之间总是似乎以一种非常天才的构图相互平衡。

It is not clear how much actual Haitian and Puerto Rican culture Jean-Michel Basquiat was able to absorb in his early youth, but it is apparent from the work, just as it was explicit in the man, that he strongly identified with his Black roots. His successful connection with the “mainstream” of Western art, though it certainly caused him extremely complex and, in an American context, perhaps insurmountable existential and psychological problems, in no way severed him from the primary cultural and ethnic sources of his experiences. I have mentioned the homage to both abstract expressionism and pop art that is implicit in the extraordinary formal mastery Basquiat was able to achieve at a fantastically early age. ${}^{14}\mathrm{His}$${}^{14}\mathrm{His}$^(14)His{ }^{14} \mathrm{His} use of words, however, belongs more to the oral traditions of African American cultures-the ecstatic invocations of Voodoo worshippers; the inflamed and inflaming spiritual rhetoric of Baptist preachers with their rousing, recurring, rhythmic juxtapositions of ethical, cosmological, and practical tenets; and, of course, now, Black rap-than to the sophisticated nominalist games of avant-garde art, from Duchamp to Johns and Warhol, from Broodthaers to Kosuth, and many others. In Basquiat’s paintings words have a “concreteness” that seems immune to trendy semiological games. Russian avant-garde artists had also touched on that quality once, but the concreteness of their painted words was a sort of formal materialism. Basquiat’s concepts and verbal images are presented as poetic but essentially non-written discoveries. Or rather, they are evocations, epiphanies of words whose written form is used as a visual discovery
尚不清楚让-米歇尔·巴斯奎特在早年能够吸收多少海地和波多黎各文化，但从他的作品中可以明显看出，正如他本人所表现的那样，他与自己的黑人根源有着强烈的认同。他与西方艺术“主流”的成功联系，尽管确实给他带来了极其复杂的，在美国背景下或许难以克服的存在主义和心理问题，但并没有使他与其经历的主要文化和民族来源割裂。我提到过巴斯奎特在极早的年龄所能达到的非凡形式掌握中隐含的对抽象表现主义和波普艺术的致敬。 ${}^{14}\mathrm{His}$${}^{14}\mathrm{His}$^(14)His{ }^{14} \mathrm{His} 语言的使用，然而，更属于非裔美国文化的口头传统——巫毒信徒的狂热召唤；浸礼教传教士的激昂和煽动性的精神修辞，他们以激动人心、反复出现、富有节奏的伦理、宇宙论和实用原则的并置；当然，现在还有黑人说唱——而不是从杜尚到约翰斯和沃霍尔，从布鲁特赫斯到科苏斯等许多其他人所涉及的前卫艺术的复杂名义主义游戏。在巴斯奎特的画作中，文字具有一种“具体性”，似乎不受时尚符号学游戏的影响。俄罗斯前卫艺术家曾经触及过这种特质，但他们所绘制的文字的具体性是一种形式主义的物质主义。巴斯奎特的概念和语言图像被呈现为诗意的，但本质上是非书面的发现。或者说，它们是唤起，是文字的显现，其书写形式被用作视觉发现
of an oral content. Instead of the separation between the written and the oral that exists in Duchamp’s puns, in Basquiat’s work there is a sort of newfound conjunction between the word and its concrete or ideal referent; it is a gestural conjunction, not a logical/semantic one, and as such, once more, it owes a debt to Pollock. I see this performative aspect of language in Basquiat’s painting as a strikingly “Black” component of his art, and this is perhaps what allowed African American culture-at a time when American art was finally receptive to it, and even needed it - to make a crucial and indelible contribution to Western painting.
口头内容的。与杜尚的双关语中存在的书面与口头之间的分离不同，巴斯奎特的作品中，词语与其具体或理想的指称之间存在一种新发现的结合；这是一种手势结合，而不是逻辑/语义上的结合，因此，再一次，它向波洛克致敬。我在巴斯奎特的绘画中看到这种语言的表演性特征，作为他艺术中一个显著的“黑人”成分，也许正是这使得非裔美国文化——在美国艺术终于对其开放，甚至需要它的时候——能够对西方绘画做出至关重要且不可磨灭的贡献。

Basquiat knew in his veins, in his blood, in all of his being, that for Black culture to survive at this stage-in America, but ultimately also in the world at large-it had to manage neither to be assimilated by nor to assimilate white culture (as was once considered desirable). The secret was not to resist white culture in order to preserve the purity of its own heritage (as had been first necessary, then
巴斯奎特在他的血液、在他的血脉、在他的整个存在中都知道，黑人文化要在这个阶段生存下去——在美国，但最终也在整个世界——它必须既不能被白人文化同化，也不能同化白人文化（这曾被认为是可取的）。秘密在于不是抵抗白人文化以保持自身遗产的纯洁（这曾是首先必要的，然后……）
fashionable) but to both comprehend and transcend white culture by learning and appropriating both its achievements (its crowning, in Basquiat’s imagery) and its disintegration (its dismembered skeletons-in and out of closets).
时尚的) 但要理解并超越白人文化，通过学习和借鉴其成就（在巴斯奎特的意象中是其巅峰）和其解体（在衣柜内外的肢解骷髅）。

Jean-Michel Basquiat was, in that sense, an innovator: he summed up the work of two whole (white) artistic generations while introducing a racially and culturally “marginal” Blackness into the “mainstream” of Western art. It was in the precarious balance between being the latest important representative of a great white tradition and the first to make a significant Black contribution to it, in this tension between an end and a beginning, that Jean-Michel Basquiat conducted his meteoric career. There are indications that he was conscious of the tragic impossibility of his position. And that, together with the love and envy of the gods, may be why he had to leave us so soon.
让-米歇尔·巴斯奎特在这个意义上是一个创新者：他总结了两个完整的（白人）艺术世代的作品，同时将一种种族和文化上“边缘”的黑人身份引入了西方艺术的“主流”。在作为伟大白人传统最新重要代表与作为第一个对其做出重大黑人贡献的人之间的微妙平衡中，在这一结束与开始的紧张关系中，巴斯奎特展开了他辉煌的职业生涯。有迹象表明，他意识到自己处境的悲剧性不可能性。而这，连同众神的爱与嫉妒，可能就是他不得不如此早离开我们的原因。