It’s the most revealing glimpse of Jean-Michel Basquiat I know of – he, the product of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage who all-too-briefly stalked this earth, crashing the white world of the white cube, only to be toasted with champagne like an over-performing circus animal.Īn idiosyncratic collaboration between the poet Jennifer Clement and Mallouk, a Palestinian-Canadian ingenue and Basquiat’s first great love, Widow reads and feels like a prose poem. Widow Basquiat (2000) is an irreverent animal, a hybrid text, at once a collage and an opera. They’re two wounded souls moving through the gentrifying streets of downtown New York in the company of hobos and bohemians and hungry art dealers named Anina, Mary, Larry. So is her sinewy, coke-addled lover, Jean-Michel. Even before her father threw her down the stairs, she was bathing in it. ‘If you’d never hit me, I wouldn’t know my skeleton.’ Suzanne Mallouk knows that the other side of eros is pathos.
Jean-Michel Basquiat with Suzanne Mallouk, 1981. Part of frieze magazine’s 200th issue.
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