Boom for Real

Dir: Sara Driver

2018

****

I learned very little that I didn’t already know about Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of my favorite artists of all time, from Sara Driver’s vivid documentary. That’s not to say it isn’t insightful nor comprehensive, I’ve just simply research the artist myself, having gone to art school in the 1990s. I first fell in love with the artist at an exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1996. Many of the reviews of this exhibition have been retrospectively published online and they make for interesting reading. All the main newspapers hated it, with the Independent claiming that is was just meaningless graffiti and that ‘The writing was on the wall’ for contemporary art. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Basquiat had only been dead eight years by that point, he was respected by many but wasn’t quite the household name he is now. I remember a few years ago I was walking along London’s Southbank when a group of older ladies, members of the Women’s Institute, asked me if I knew where the Banksy was that was supposedly around there. I knew where it was, it had been there for many years, but I was shocked that the ladies weren’t there to scrub it off the wall as I’d first feared, but because they all had an interest in contemporary art. It threw me. At first I hated the very idea but now I’m quite glad. I’m glad people are now recognising that art isn’t just oil on canvas painted by men who have been dead for hundreds of years. What I do hate is that great modern artists such as Basquiat have become t-shirts. That said, Basquiat made himself into a t-shirt long before anyone else did. He is responsible in part for the commercialisation of art, Driver doesn’t pick up on this, but for good reason. This film is very specifically Basquiat in his late teenage years, just before he hit the big time. Meeting Andy Warhol is the end of the film. This is the side many people don’t know and it is explored well through interviews with the people who really knew him and the people who can genuinely call themselves friends of his. If you didn’t know him then you weren’t interviewed, and I found that quite refreshing. The bit I struggled with though was that the film was all about the legend, rather than what made the artist tick. Driver doesn’t talk about Basquiat’s Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage for example but I suspect, like Tamra Davis, director of the 2010 film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, she left out this kind of biographical detail in return for co-operation from the artist’s family. It’s fine though, maybe we don’t need to know this sort of thing. We all know he died of drug addiction and the last documentary I saw about him (David Shulman’s Basquiat: Rags to riches) spent an awful lot of time discussing how radical the artist was for once refusing to wear shoes during a photo shoot. None of that matters. In showing us what lawless New York was like in the late 70s, Driver explains perfectly why he created the works that he did. We hear what he was listening to and what he was reading from his friends (I could have guessed he was reading William S. Burroughs but I was surprised he listened to Einstürzende Neubauten). It is no stretch of the imagination to simply deduce that he was an enthusiastic and creative young man with aspirations. Does every great artist have to come from tragedy? No. Does every great artist end in tragedy? A lot of the time, yes, but the work itself I think is far more interesting and that is what is explored here. Boom For Real also enjoyed a physical retrospective at London’s Barbican that collected many influences and examples of early work. I have to say I missed the classics and found the exhibition to contain an awful lot of filler – so strangely I enjoyed the documentary more so. The talking head interviews are great. They include Fab 5 Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Michael Holman, Patricia Field and Glenn O'Brien just before he died in 2017. All the important creative people you want to hear from who where there. Jim Jarmusch also features but I get the impression the two men hung in similar circles, rather than being great friends. It also featured his friends who didn’t become as famous as everyone else, ones who spoke about the real Jean-Michel, with only one of them boasting that she’d slept with him (when it was clear they all had). It all felt pretty honest to be honest and their memories and adoration are genuine. It feels like the enigma and the legend that he is was momentarily made real – he was a man and not a t-shirt for 85 minutes. I loved the history and the art and for the first time in an art documentary I felt that the evolution of the art featured was explained properly. I still want to know more about the artist I admire so much, I want to know more about his Swansong picture and what he really felt in those last few years but for now, his artistic origins are documented as best as I think they ever can be, thanks to Driver and Boom for Real.