CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/22/2022

In 'Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox,' the horizontal cloud of information becomes a poetic condition

Today we're thinking about Jean-Michel Basquiat, born on this day in 1960. Featured image, an ode to Louis Armstrong called "King of the Zulus" (1984–85), is reproduced from Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox, collecting the artist's collaged Xerox paintings. "Basquiat's art can be placed in a field of tension between Burroughs's cut-up technique, concrete poetry and the rise of rap in hip-hop," Dieter Burchart writes: "sampling and scratching, just like copy and paste, are part of Basquiat's artistic practice. His works seem like a 'language of rupture' or the concrete poetry of hip hop created using cut and paste; they offer the opportunity to 'experience information simultaneously,' as Laura Hoptman describes in reference to contemporary collage and assemblage. In Basquiat's work, the 'horizontal cloud of information' becomes a poetic condition."