"Why Can't I Be Both?": Jean-Michel Basquiat and Aesthetics of Black Bodies Reconstituted
- Publication date
- Publisher
Abstract
This essay explores the nature and significance of blackness in
relationship
to an aesthetics of meaning, a method that offers insights
into how religion, or the quest for complex subjectivity, is articulated
through the visual arts. The essay sketches particular examples of
blackness in relationship to aesthetics in a way that involves loose
movement through particular periods and locations, ultimately coming
to rest on the work of one particular artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
I explore Basquiat's work in connection to the politics and production
of the aesthetic language of identity formation, examining how
artistic production articulates or chronicles particular attention to
this quest for complex subjectivity. And I offer a sense of this theory
of religionメs applicability within multiple contexts