Loving SA(y)MO Print

"Some days I can't get an idea, and I think, 'Man, I'm just washed up,' but it's just a mood." "I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is." "Believe it or not, I can actually draw." "I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people." "I had very few friends. There was nobody I could trust. I left home when I was fifteen. I lived in Washington Square Park." "I am not a black artist, I am an artist." "Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous." "I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman." "If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind." "Every single line means something.” -Jean-Michel Basquiat SAMO is a graffiti tag used on the streets of New York City from 1977 to early 1980. It accompanied short phrases, in turns poetic and sarcastic, mainly painted on the streets of downtown Manhattan. The tag, written with a copyright symbol as "SAMO©", and pronounced Same-Oh has been primarily associated with the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, but was developed mainly as a collaboration between Basquiat and Al Diaz, with help from a few friends. Diaz had previously been part of the New York graffiti scene (he knew the first writer of sayings, [[FLINT...]] when they both attended the High School of Art and Design) using the tag "Bomb I". Later Basquiat took on the tag himself, creating some non-graffiti work on paper and canvas using that tag, just before and after killing off the SAMO graffiti by painting "SAMO© IS DEAD" around the streets of downtown in early 1980. Basquiat says the name was first developed in a stoned conversation with high school friend Al Diaz, calling the marijuana they smoked "the same old crap," then shortening the phrase to "Same Old", then "SAMO". The character of SAMO was first developed by Basquiat and Diaz, while they were fellow students at City As School high school. Basquiat took the lead in creating a character called SAMO, selling a false religion, in comics made in high school. The concept was further developed in a theatre-as-therapy course in Upper Manhattan (called "Family Life") that was used by the trio as part of the City As School program. "Jean started elaborating on the idea and I began putting my thoughts into it," remembered Diaz. Basquiat, Diaz, Shannon Dawson and Matt Kelly worked on a comic style endorsement of the false religion, photocopied as a pamphlet "Based on an original concept by Jean Basquiat and Al Diaz." The City As School 1977/78 Yearbook includes a photo of the SAMO graffiti: SAMO@ AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO PLASTIC FOOD STANDS. "It started ... as a private joke and then grew" Diaz and Basquiat would later tell The Village Voice in an interview. They took the joke out of the school, giving out small stickers with SAMO aphorisms or the SAMO pamphlet on paper on the subway, and writing down the phrases with marker pens as graffiti, often with an ironic copyright symbol attached. In 1977, while they were still students, Basquiat and Diaz started to put up the first SAMO© Graffiti in Manhattan. According to Henry Flynt, Shannon Dawson (later of the band Konk) played a major part in the trio of writers in the first wave SAMO graffiti writers, but most accounts, including those of Basquiat, say the writing was done by the duo of Basquiat and Diaz. When asked about other people, Basquiat said "No, No, it was me and Al Diaz." Basquiat remembers writing the tag with marker on the subway on the way back from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where he lived as a high school student, but unlike most of the graffiti taggers of the time, SAMO was primarily written on walls, not subway trains. Al Diaz graduated from City As School in 1978, and Basquiat dropped out of school and left his father's home in Brooklyn to spend time homeless and living with friends in Manhattan in June of that year. From that point the SAMO graffiti took off in Lower Manhattan. SoHo, parts of East Village, and the area immediately around the School of Visual Arts were prime targets for the graffiti. The SoHo News noticed the graffiti, and published a few pictures of the idiomatic phrases with a query about who had done them. According to Henry Flynt, who photographed much of the graffiti, "The collective graffiti employed anonymity to seem corporate and engulfing. The tone was utterly different from the morose and abject tone of Basquiat's solo work. The implication was that SAMO© was a drug that could solve all problems. SOHO, the art world, and Yuppies were satirized with Olympian wit." Diaz had been a young and early member of the New York graffiti scene of the 1970s, and his tag "Bomb I" was included in Norman Mailer's famous book The Faith of Graffiti in 1974. By late 1978 the two were using spray paint to quickly get up larger phrases. "We would take turns coming up with the sayings" said Al Diaz. Many of these retained the same ideas as the comic strip SAMO of high school: SAMO© SAVES IDIOTS AND GONZOIDS... SAMO©...4 MASS MEDIA MINDWASH But they also used it to make critical comments towards the art scene in SoHo and college students comfortably studying in art schools: SAMO©...4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic' sect on Daddy's$funds Some of the comments seemed to look critically at consumer society as a whole: MICROWAVE & VIDEO X-SISTANCE "BIG-MAC" CERTIFICATE" FOR X-MASS... SAMO© One biographer noted that "while some of the phrases might seem political, none of them were simple propaganda slogans. Some were outright surrealist, or looked like fragments of poetry." Jean-Michel Basquiat (French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent. Basquiat first achieved fame as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel. At 22, he was the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992. Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. Basquiat's visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. Since his death at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose in 1988, his work has steadily increased in value. At a Sotheby's auction in May 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting by Basquiat depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased. It also set a new record high for an American artist at auction. Source: Wikipedia