One of the 80s most infamous cases of police brutality happened on September 15th 1983 at 2:50
a.m. The victim’s name was Michael Stewart, a 25 year old artist from New York. He was caught doing
graffiti by the New York City Transit Police, a force whose main job was to prevent vandalism in
the subway system. At 3:22 a.m, he was brought to the hospital, badly injured, handcuffed and
unconscious. He would remain in a coma for 13 days and will finally die from his injuries.
Michael Stewart was a black man and his name would be added to a long list of black people
being brutalized and killed by the police. Despite the evidence of the police officers
beating Stewart up and eventually murdering him, they were acquitted of all charges.
On top of the racial motivations behind the attack, the mayor of New York,
Ed Koch, launched a campaign against graffiti which greatly suppressed graffiti-artists.
The word defacement, used by the mayor in this segment,
will be included in a painting made by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Stewart’s murder greatly affected Basquiat as both artists shared many similarities. They
were both black, handsome, skinny, artists and both of them wore dreads. These similarities
were brought up in some conversations and lectures held by Chaedria LaBouvier,
an art historian who focused her research on Basquiat and his painting Defacement. I’ll link
these resources in the description. Because of these similarities and because Basquiat
also wrote illegally on walls, the artist would often say “It could have been me”.
In 1983, he was already famous in the art world but, mainly because he was black,
he was still considered a bum outside of art galleries. Basquiat was right,
the young black artist getting beaten to death by the police could have been him.
Defacement was made a couple of months after the tragedy and the conditions under which he painted
it were unusual. The artwork isn’t made on canvas but on drywall. Jean-Michel Basquiat painted it on
Keith Haring’s wall, who would then cut out the drywall and frame it. Keith Haring also
made illegal public art like, for example, Crack is Wack, a mural which we have dedicated a video
to. Haring also made his own tribute to Michael Stewart in his painting Michael Stewart – USA
for Africa made in 1985 where you see the victim of the abuse, handcuffed and choked.
In Basquiat’s rendition of the events, he paints two pink-skinned policemen
using their batons on a black figure. On top of the figures,
we can see the inscription Defacement accompanied by a copyright sign. We’ll get back to that later.
First, let us focus on the black figure in the middle, the subject of this composition,
Michael Stewart. But is it really Michael Stewart? I mean, yes, of course it is,
but, unlike the policemen, he’s painted very abstractly. This representation of the black body,
contrasting with the pink body of the white cops is compelling. Basquiat might have
wanted to represent Stewart by reducing his physical features to his skin colour because,
ultimately, it’s this process, this reduction to one’s skin colour, that got him killed.
Also, by abstracting the image of Michael Stewart, Basquiat could also be saying that,
this black man being beaten up by cops, could be anyone: “it could have been me”
as he would repeatedly say. He’s showing that this is not an isolated incident,
it didn’t only happen to Stewart. The man being beaten up to death by the police
isn’t the first one and he sadly won’t be last. This could be the representation of
any black man being killed by cops. This is the representation of a systemic problem.
If you’re interested in how the black body has been represented,
we’re currently working on a future video on the art inspired by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and,
more specifically, Kerry James Marshall’s 1980 A Portrait of the
Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self. Make sure to check it out!
Second, let’s take a look at the copyright symbol which was a subject LaBouvier brought
up a couple of times. What does it mean? We see it in many other Basquiat artworks
and some interpretations have ranged from Basquiat’s will to appropriate his paintings
and make them intellectual property, all the way to his claim of ownership over himself,
but I’d like to give my own interpretation.
The copyright could be a challenge to the notion of property, the same way graffiti,
or writing poems on walls, is also challenging the notion of property.
After all, the primary and original role of the police force is to protect private property,
to protect those who own from those who don’t. The same way copyrights
protect intellectual property, the police force protects property.
Michael Stewart, by doing graffiti, was challenging the notion of property and
one could even say that he was challenging the system which maintains and protects
property. Basquiat did the same when writing illegally in public spaces and Defacement,
made on Haring’s wall, is also, by virtue of being on a wall, similar to a graffiti.
The very concept of property disproportionately
affects the black community and is an extremely important factor to
consider when looking at the massive wealth inequality black communities suffer from.
For those unfamiliar with the critique of private property, I will try to explain it very briefly:
For ages, political theorists have critiqued the concept of property,
namely Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and, of course,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who expanded on this topic in his book What is Property.
Land is, of course, limited. When collectively owned, nobody technically finds themselves
without land, but when the land is owned by individuals, profound inequalities
ensue. When you separate people in two classes, the landowner and the landless,
the landless become dependent on the landowners and this dependence rapidly becomes exploitative.
To illustrate this, imagine a desert island. Let’s say you end up on this
island with 19 other people due to a plane crash. In this scenario,
the island has enough land for everybody to farm and sustain themselves. Now, if everybody decided
to collectively farm together and eat the food together, things would be fine, but that’s not
how private property works. Our current scenario, the one in which we live now, would go as follows:
3 people separate the land in three and claim it for themselves. Now, you would think that the 17
other people would find that unfair and that they’d fight this claim. If they didn’t fight
that claim and ended up landless, it would be impossible for them to farm and to feed
themselves. One way to prevent these people to fight, is to create a force that would prevent
them from collectivizing the land: a police force. Now imaging these 3 owners hiring 2
landless and really strong guys. The owners tell them, protect us and our claim to property and
you can benefit from our land. Now You have 15 people, completely landless and starving. They
can’t work to feed themselves as they don’t have access to land. All they have is their
labour. They now have to sell their labour to the landowner. They can work for the landowner,
be his servant, work his land, harvest food for him and get some food in return. Of course,
if they want to sleep somewhere, on the landowners land, they’d have to pay him in food aswell.
In this case, the landowner doesn’t have to work. The landless work for them.
Nowadays, to acquire property, you must have capital; you must have available
money to buy it. If you want to be part of the landowning class,
you need to either inherit property (or inherit capital) or submit yourself to a landowner and
be privileged enough to have a salary which will allow you, someday, to buy property.
Here’s how this system is very harmful to black communities. Slavery has prevented black people
from accumulating enough capital to acquire property. In this case, inheriting capital
and property is rarer, meaning that the only way to buy property is by working for and, de facto,
submitting yourself to a landowner. Even then, the process of working to
buy property is an extremely difficult one, especially if you add to it systemic racism.
In this case, the critique of private property made by both Basquiat and Stewart through their
vandalism could be both motivated by their economic and racial background. The title of
the painting, Defacement, echoes this duality as the term could mean either vandalizing,
the action which Stewart took part in, and disfigure, the action the policemen partook in.
Basquiat’s Defacement is not only a tribute to Michael Stewart, but also a critique of
the racism which lead to the murder, by the police force, of a 25 year old graffiti-artist. But this
social critique, though performed on a wall, like a graffiti, wasn’t meant to be publicly
viewed. It was made on a wall in a studio behind closed doors. This somehow makes the
painting even more powerful as it was something very personal which Basquiat felt the need to
express, it had to be painted somewhere, and it happened to be a simple white piece of drywall.