to begin at the beginning,

in October nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, my saxophone flies with me to New York.“Message in a bottle“ by the Police is on the radio, the Gramercy and Chelsea are fully booked. The first days a wooden floor, near Columbia University, is my bed.  The weather is warm. Californian avocados are offered on street corners, big as honeydew melons and tasteless. We, Erinna König, Beuys Meisterschüler and I landed in the loft of performance artist Arleen Schloss in Downtown in a treasure, a bed. Conveniently, a stage with a bed. Arleen spontaneously invited Beate Bartel, the Mania D bass player, who stayed also at her place, and me to perform. Just the two of us, bass and sax? SAMO©, who showed COLOR XEROX that evening, supported us with a WASP synthesizer, all improvised.

 

 

 

The next day SAMO© and I start inventing music in Arleen`s bathroom with Michael Holman`s WASP synthesizer, the rhythm machine, the Selmer Sax, so we did not disturb our hostess while she was working. After the opening of the Beuys Retrospective in the Guggenheim, Erinna left, Jean and I shared the chamber. Portrait fall 1979 by  ©Gerard Pas, London, Canada.

 

 

 „You are my slumber. Wait for Jean“ he recorded our invented music, disappeared to play it to his friends, came back quickly, sometimes hours later.

 

Leaving NYC with Fredy Laker`s Skytrain, a DC-10, they crashed more often back then, he wrote in my coffer so that he would always be with me. Had to swear to come back soon. I didn’t succeed. For decades, the suitcase had disappeared, rediscovered, I realized that SAMO©, the homeless, who looked like a tenth grader, was Jean Michel Basquiat, long since deceased. In 2011, the art historian Father Elias, a Dominican friar at St. Andrew’s in Düsseldorf, explained to me the Catholic symbolism. Love through pain, pain through love. WALA? Wala! Wala! Awake! From lasting sleep wake I thee, slumberer, up. I call on thee now: arise! arise! From earth’s hidden caves, “Siegfried” 3rd act, scene 1, Richard Wagner. Wala, also known as Völja, a seer in Germanic mythology. However, there are two very interesting WALA in Aboriginal mythology. The female WALA, he called her in his work “The Kangaroo Woman that makes the rain to clean sick souls” has the function of the Egyptian sky goddess Nut. Diptyc 1981, case photo`s Thomas Ruff 2010.

 

Magic Marker & Salvia

 With his salvia he blurred MAN MADE drew lines and dots and connected them with his saliva in a zigzag pattern. SAMO© ESTA EN ALGO? Samo is in something or on something, assuming his saliva is speaking for the latter. It`s an enigma, a love and protection spell, verifiable through his cryptic legacy in my diary, decoded in 2019. He defined the zigzag pattern, he defined SALVIA, he defined ©. To understand this, delve into magical thinking, the mythology of the Yoruba, the West Africans whose ancestors came from the Nile.

 

 

 

The Yoruba believe salvia, like all body fluids contains Àshe, God’s power to create action, writes Dr. Hazzard-Donald, Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.  „….for many Yoruba, red, „supreme presence of color, signals ashe. R. F. Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, Random House p. 6, 1983. `“He believed in the magic of the moment, in a cosmic synergy, the use of matched mind and was able to make it visible. He was a magician, not as a hoax: He followed his supernatural instincts. The Loa, the voodoo gods, were known from Haiti and from Charlie Parker’s music, and he knew that the African gods had adapted to modern times. He believed in talismans and sympathetic magic. Glenn O’Brien, Catalog Basquiat Retrospective, Beyeler Foundation, Hatje Cantz, 2010.

 

© MAGIC POWER ICON?

It would take too long here to prove to you exactly that Jean meant © for áshe in the sense of the  magic divine power of creation. In this sense, his use of the copyright sign also corresponds to Thomas Aquinas‘ proofs of the existence of God. Incidentally, Aquinas‘ also leads an undiscovered existence in Jean’s art.

 

 

His coffer/suitcase, apartment of Alexis Adler 1980.

 

ESTA EN ALGO, Spanish? don’t know that language.

From “Lost in translation” Dr. Kellie Jones, catalog Basquiat retrospective Brooklyn Museum 2005, p.171 . If you follow her argumentation, he had already planned as an 18-year-old how to use Spanish in his work. I wondered why his use of Spanish was in my suitcase? Possibly an answer

 

 

Mothers, which wanted to go to heaven with her kids, united us, I assume. The feeling of being alone with this pain was cancelled for the moment. The mortification that this implies– it remains loyal, as does the pain. Why the change from singular to plural? In his painting “Job Analisis” he wrote “SECRET IDENTITYs” and painted them, turning his canvases into stages. All unrecognized, his iconology eludes academically trained thinking. Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat p.17. How many orphans he knew and what he left them, I can’t know. Was orphaned at 15.

 

The intended accident, painted several times, remained hidden too. In my diary was the key to recognize his iconology and so the accidents a.o..

 

 

 

With Alan Vega from the band „Suicide“ we discussed a „Metropolitan symphony“ according to the principles of „Musique concrète“ with everyday sounds from the streets of NYC.

 

 

My Selmer on which I showed him how to play. He wanted to practise without me telling him not to inflate his cheeks and asked me to lend it to him. I hesitated, it was my only valuable possession, bought in Paris in May 1979. He stuck my initials on it with silver thread. I understood his actions, he practised secretly elsewhere. I was told that he had gone for a walk with the saxophone, very proudly.

 

Halloween Nite before the Beuys Retrospective at A`s. 31
13-31 & SHOT DOT BLOT an incantation with pendulum and Sax. It was the closing event for the COLOR XEROX works.

 

 

test Pattern: Jean`s first band & essence of his art.

 

His paintings and drawings are test Patterns,  they test the viewer. Plenty of art historian`s , more precisely, all failed in recognizing his narrative patterns, saying that he cannot be decoded. This is to be refuted with the irrefutable precision that only numbers can offer. Take a look at his „Selfportrait as a Heel“. Heel? A swindler.  02460 five figures on his T-Shirt,  with which he reveals one of his “SECRET IDENTITYs” irrefutable. Btw, don’t the figures in front of him say mug shot? Only his legacy in my diary enabled not me, but my brother Michael, to detect his art is a steganography, from the Greek: στεγανός ‚hidden‘ and γραφία ‚writing‘, a war tactic. It refers to the art or science of covertly storing information with the aim of not arousing suspicion in a third party when viewing the medium. The recognition protocol (key) is needed.

 

„Style is fraud“,

William de Koonings position executed Jean, made canvases his stage, played  “divine comedy” as a tragicomedy. Also together with Warhol in the Collaborations.

 

SAXAPHONE, SAXAPHOIVE?

Jean communicated in a variety of ways, using misspellings to play into the cliché of the wild, primitive. A camouflage, a classical war tactic, he also called this FACE CRIME, see test Pattern. „Part of Basquiat`s strategy of occlusion was playing the primitive„, Dr. Kellie Jones, Lost in Translation, catalog Retrospective Brooklyn Museum 2005 p.164. How did he come up with the misspelling SAXAPHONE? I have the “mother”, the template for SAXAPHONE, handwritten. Written in green in EROICA, not without intention. Intentionally too, he wrote Beethoven’s Symphony not in English, Heroica. Long gold penis? Penis for conception, gold for the highest divine entity, God. Summarized, an immaterial, immaculate conception.

 

„His paintings are deliberate enigmas“,

Prof. R. F. Thompson, Yale, in „A Radiant Child“ a film by Tamra Davis, 2010. He is author of „Flash of the Spirit“, 1983, Random House, about the Yoruba culture.

 

John Berger, NZZ, March 12, 2011, „Metaphysics from Downtown.
Basquiat chose a different strategy. He felt that hidden truths could not be described with the help of a language that at the same time served to spread lies; in his eyes, every official language was merely a code for conveying distorted messages. His strategy as a painter was to discredit and break such codes, thus creating space for vibrating, invisible, clandestine truths – like a saboteur“.

 

Prof. bell hooks, Art in America, 1993[…] Like a secret chamber  that  can only be opened and entered by those who can decipher hidden codes, Basquiat’s painting challenges folks who think that by merely looking they can „see“, Altars of Sacrifice, Re-membering Basquiat.

 

“… a meticulous analysis of Basquiat’s symbols and signs is a trap that lures us away from the abstract and oneiric intention of these paintings. They do not send us encrypted messages that we are supposed to interpret iconologically, but they confuse and disarm us at the same time with their discursive artifice.” Marc Mayer, Basquiat in History, Catalogue Retrospective, Brooklyn Museum, 2005.

 

Anyone who tries to draw conclusions about the life of this artist from the slogans that appear in Basquiat’s drawings or from the codes contained in his paintings finds themselves in the position of the shepherds who spell out the letters (note: the shepherds of Arcadia, Poussin). The artist’s life followed laws that can no longer be understood a year after his death“. Dr. Carl Haenlein, Archetypography, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kestner-Gesellschaft catalog, Hannover, 1989.

 

Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat– A quick killing in Art, about his wish to buy a saxophone.