Fred Hoffman looks back on the creation of JeanMichel Basquiat’s Tuxedo (1983), examining the work’s significance in relation to identity and the hip-hop culture of the 1980s. What up? No, what up? My name is Jamie Foxx. Give it up, give it up… New York City; Saturday Night Live, Make some noise. And I'm dressed in all black. It's good to be black. Black is the new white. I'm telling you. How black is this right here? How do I know that black is in right now? Cuz the Nets moved to Brooklyn! How black is that? They have black jerseys, and a black court. I mean, how black is that? And Jay Z is the owner. A rapper! How black is that? and Jay Z only owns about this much of the team. But he acts like he owns all of New York! How black is that? Speaking of blackness, my President, President Obama is back up in the White House four more years. How black is that? And not only that, he's so black, he was playing basketball on election day! How black is that? But he was also late for his acceptance speech. Ok, all the white folks out in the audience, How black is that? –Jamie Foxx, 2012 1 Shortly after Jean-Michel Basquiat settled into a new studio in the gallery of Larry Gagosian’s Venice residence, in 1982, he and I started the production of the first of his large-scale silkscreen works. Composed from fifteen individual drawings and one collage on paper, this work, which upon completion would be titled Tuxedo, required a fair amount of technical know-how and some interesting choices by the artist. Basquiat wanted to reverse his original artwork from black images and text on a white background to white images and text on a black background. This was achieved photographically, turning the artist’s original artwork into one large silkscreen. During production, I didn’t give much thought to Basquiat’s intention in reversing the original artworks, but from the moment Tuxedo was completed, it became clear that his decision to turn everything black in the work into white and everything white into black was not merely a look he desired to achieve. Basquiat’s aesthetic decisions were his means of questioning certain social and cultural assumptions, with identity most important among them.2 Tuxedo was completed at virtually the same time in early 1983 that Basquiat produced the early rap record Beat Bop. Released on the label of the artist’s own Tartown Record Co., the long-playing album was made in collaboration with Fred Brathwaite, Toxic, A-One, Al Diaz, and Rammellzee. Basquiat’s cover art shared Tuxedo’s reversal of blackand-white imagery, further testifying to his fascination with the aesthetic look he had explored in that work. We timed the production of Tuxedo so that the completed artwork could be included in Basquiat’s exhibition at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood (March 8–April 2, 1983). It became a striking counterpart to the rich, colorful paintings, laden with multilayered images, that formed most of the exhibition. The reaction to Tuxedo was complicated. One of the artist’s biggest collectors at the time immediately committed to acquire the example on exhibit, only to change his mind on learning 34
SPOTLIGHT
JEANMICHEL IN BLACK AND WHITE
