do not revenge
ankita sadarjoshi

You are nineteen years old. You have been sexually assaulted during your sophomore fall at college in a country that criminalizes premarital sex and so discourages certain truth-telling. You walk past this painting and everything screaming inside you self-mutes in awe of a physical form that holds what appears to be equivalent rage. It is now on a canvas, and so, no longer in you, and so, a paused chokehold. Temporary relief, as galleries do have hours at which they close. But the 52 x 84 inches of a scream and the brief eternity of attention paid to it. What is this | how is it allowed | is this dignified | I’ve never seen such red | angry soup on a gallery wall | those bones are familiar from some ancient roar. 

The happening, the container, was Abu Dhabi Art at Manarat Al Saadiyat, November 2016. An annual art fair. We are nearing the seven-year anniversary of my awakening. The literature had been doing it for some time, the Sarah Kanes, the Sylvia Plaths, the trash-screams of projects, assigned by professors as well as self-appointed, calling for dewy dripping meat scented heavy with honey and Doris Day’s “Que Sera, Sera” (I was a theater major). I snuck into art classrooms at midnight and pinched together candle wax heart lumps only to gouge their cores and fill the hollows with hot sauce or tomato pulp or the scooped foam of Starbucks Caramel Macchiatos, all before photographing the private massacre of materials to document the attempt to say a thing that wouldn’t come out and be said because febrile and gooey, it did not know what it was and could not, therefore, orchestrate its own inception. And so, Basquiat.      

Febrile, not gooey.

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I was disturbed to be known in this way. Intimately by a dead painter. Stunned that I had been seen in a semester of so much self-effacement. Bullshit. I didn’t efface. Also, newly learned – there is no self and so, no effacement. What is that awful phrase: “Bear witness to one’s soul”? Someone had scrapbooked every contour of the season’s nightmares and rendered them cool in 1982. Jean-Michel took my assailant, the odd ramen he ate before hurting me, and splashed it across in colours the misdemeanour did not deserve. The hurt was so pale, so boring, when faced with this chorus of a thing that had all the energy of a first interaction with primary colours, displaying two of them generously and one with vertical caution. Imagine – a kid who scribbles, but the scribble is divine, like candy. Imagine – the poem turns out good, turns out remarkable for a thing built of shards.

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I saw the painting and saw cuts and scratches and rippage and fissure and suture, and I will not credit myself with, at the time, having what would later be the epiphany that this “chaos” was stylized, that the cacophony had been curated. That discovery would evolve on a separate, more humble timeline. I simply couldn’t believe that the noise had been honoured in this way, that it had made it out of the preteen headphones and onto a gallery wall. So much mediocre white pop punk high-volume viscera obliterated into irrelevance, relatively speaking, by a palette new to me, but plumed like me. A painting, a document. Landscape and loud. Millions of dollars for a premium look at my guts. Was the artist aware of the écriture féminine spinning mad wild gold-like out of his brushes? The biographies suggest he was otherwise occupied.

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The biographies I try to locate and name as I am shipped off to New York City by the university because the assailant has returned to campus for the spring semester, and I, accordingly, take time off.  “Leave of Absence”, they called it. Bureaucracy is beautiful. They configured it so that I would have to go to New York and take Shakespearean acting classes mandatory for the completion of my degree. That would be in the fall. First, I went home and elected an obsession with Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love and an amateur look into whether the latter had killed the former, and I discovered Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, and I wanted to become the figure in the movie – the woman applying makeup like warpaint before burning Nazis to death, the woman smoking to the background croon-turned-battle cry of Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”. I was cat people, I had been told, the green eyes, claws at the ready, the feline rage. Un-sublime and feral (or) febrile and gooey. Do you see now? Basquiat’s palimpsest, following my own bones like a map, one that designated X as 14th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenues in New York City. For good measure, I traced outlines of the harboured icons from my leave of absence and headed to where the bureaucracy, I mean, the map, said the rage might mellow.

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The rage did better than mellow; it bloomed in company. My enrollment in the Shakespearean acting class was short-lived. An old white man walked into our classroom, attempted to teach us the Alexander Technique, used my body to map out his examples, and recoiling from his touch, I dropped the class. I did what students who can afford to should do in New York and treated the streets as a syllabus. Newly armed with enrollments in theater and performance art theory classes, I had every excuse to make Strand Bookstore on 12th and Broadway my new sanctuary. Allowing new, burgeoning love for David Wojnarowicz and Karen Finley and what remained of the East Village art freaks, and Maria Irene Fornés, and the Tompkins Square Park skaters, I held onto the red, I held onto that page of heat from the gallery in Abu Dhabi. I liked to fancy myself frolicking around in Basquiat’s old playground. I liked to dream about him and Andy Warhol running around in cabs together, arguing about which of their seven party invites that night would grant them access to the best champagne (I don’t think Warhol even liked drinking that much). I combed through the street art anthologies, looked for and at and into every Basquiat I could glean from the thousands of pages scanned. It was clear that I had witnessed only one of many loudnesses. All his paintings seemed to me variations on my awakening – I reasonably assumed that any one of these text-image scribble/scripture hybrids would have worked their fire ant urgency into shaking me upright. 

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But, as it stands, I went to the Abu Dhabi Art Fair in November of 2016. I went with a friend. We started out at the front of the gallery. A huge creamy space ventilated by clean, rich, Emirati sunlight and air. It should have been a break from the hell of navigating pockets of respite on a small campus that was housing someone I did not want to run into at the same time that it was housing me. At the gallery, we observe and obey the behavioural clustering of our fellow visitors. They are forming a circle around some performative act to be witnessed. It might have been an aerial ribbon dance;  it might have been completely on-ground and closer to call-and-response chantwork. I have an excellent memory, and so the gap in specifics here comes from one crystalline moment that stood for everything else in its wake – I turned, for a second, to look at someone saying something about the performance, and it was him. Standing right there behind me, his girlfriend, beside him. They had come to attend the Abu Dhabi Art Fair in November of 2016. 

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[After the fact, after several of the facts, 

the girlfriend reached out to me. 

To say

she believed me, to say

the same had happened with her.

Mentions choking.

She believes me; she reached out

to say.

I thanked her then, and now, I

believe she bakes cakes for a living.

She is really

good at it, too.]

Perhaps a new mission arose. Perhaps the fugue of what happened after bumping into them was a little by design. If there was a mission at hand, at all, it met its target in red. I was so small and so big. I had so much small and so much big within me , and who had told the truth on these walls? Read the plaque: Jean-Michel Basquiat. That is all I recall retaining at the time, a name, a name, a passport, I am taking this name with me and asking around. Without doubt, I appeared nascent and fumbling and excited before the art world giants I consulted – my professional painter sister, my professors, my friends majoring in Art History. But the fumbling was divine like candy because a fumbling forth, a direction, a map, breeds some gravitational sense that more paint exists, and it did. I found it in New York, and I found it everywhere else, too. Etel Adnan wrote, “to look at the sea is to become what one is.” Because all I had committed to memory at the time was the name of the artist, and not the title of the work, I have spent much time fighting my way back to clarity, what was it called? What was it called? I must find it because to look at that painting, is to remember myself. (And so, Ankita, there IS a self, after all?) I would love a re-acquaintance. Alas, the body of work is such that, Googling “Basquiat red painting” widens the search instead of narrowing it. A forgotten quest. I leave New York when it is time. I try to find other heat. 

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Seven years since the breakthrough, I am teaching for the first time. Writing & Rhetoric I. I have used paintings by Basquiat twice now, as examples. The moment in the syllabus when I did so, we were discussing relationships among text, image, and ethos. I’m certain I also brought him up when we discussed the key concept of arrangement. Our syllabus defines alphabetic text as “the letters and words we use when we’re communicating in writing, ethos as who other people think we are, based on what and how we write and speak, and image as a visual representation of ideas, events, or the material world.”  Surely, I pulled up Basquiat’s Untitled (Fallen Angel) (1981) and Hollywood Africans (1983), and surely I expected it all to simply fall into the sense I intended in front of these freshmen. I think it did. If I deluded myself into reading their silence as awe, then yes, resolutely, it made sense. Text – the discipline with which Basquiat rejects blatant iconography, the staunch belief that the addition of text has the potential to clarify and, equally, to obscure. Image – the crowns. The crowns. The Basquiat face. Teeth, dinosaur, crown, eyes, dinosaur, crown, hair, teeth, face. Bird, horns, banana, fruit. “A child could have made this!” I am yet to see evidence of Basquiat refuting this claim. Ethos. Turn to the class. 

“Well, guys, I... I quite simply don’t believe that these works were made by someone with nothing to say.                                       Do you?”        

Silence/awe.

Back to our syllabus for a moment – arrangement. “The deliberate placement of pieces of a project in time or in space. Arrangement can refer to the organization of the parts of an essay or speech, the placement of elements in a photograph or other visual text, and the layout of a website containing multiple modes.” If ever in the mood for depression, go to a website containing multiple modes; specifically, go to Christie’s website. Christie’s is an auction house in London. Having once acquired the painting – you know the one – they proudly display a 1,244-word essay describing it. I cannot read their description and also revere the work. The perfectly researched analysis dilutes in me the contract of enamour I held then and hold now. I work to maintain liminal lust between myself and the carcass Basquiat painted. How dare you demand to know, how dare you attempt to summarize. The distance is crucial. You can love a knowable thing, but you lust after a thing that won’t talk to you. Note: my private logic here is limited to art and art alone. I advocate for the stalking of an artist’s work and little else. How to contend? How to... found text poetry? Is that what I do with Christie’s offering? How does one undo the website’s knowledge, its essay, that is so generous and so flattening? I cannot read it. I cannot know what the artist did not tell me. 

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I will tell you that I see fishtail bones. Charcoal-dusted spirals and barbs. Crowns. A royalty in acrylic and oil stick. So much yellow, it could cure me. A head with horns. Appropriate. Christie’s online literature uses “vibrant,” “stark,” “bold,” and “frenetic.” Provisional remedy to a creamy white gallery, clean and rich with air and light. Christie’s is not wrong. Christie’s did their homework. I am simply a lover, a brute lover. Arrangement. Deliberate placement. The painting suggests anti-poetry – not a gradual unfolding of image and affect and lyric, but a blend of all monsters at once. Here are your inclinations, Ankita, in 52 x 84 inches. I know, by the way, when an essay clicks. I know when an essay clicks into place and I know when one doesn’t. I am not clicking into place right now, this essay is not it, I can tell. It is a terrifying business, this anti-splatter form that seeks to suggest an argument and arrange it in postures that convince. My offering is the story of hot paint soup – how it is medicinal and stays with one through any attempt at building an argument. Looking now, I feel that he threw in some extra crowns for free, for me. 

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A thing to aspire to is easier striven for when articulated. If one were to essay the aesthetic of Basquiat’s work, whose title remains foreign to my tongue, one might propose an emphasis on rupture. Rapture. Lost misfit toy bits speaking to each other in muddled verse. Are there opportunities for clarity? It would depend entirely on how you define it. A friend tries to get you out of a funk and drags you off-campus to an art show. People richer than you’ll ever be are in attendance. People who eat ramen before committing certain acts are in attendance. If the space is creamy, clean, rich... what are you – barnacled and rowdy and mean – doing here? There is some echo of company; here’s a list of all the artworks and where they’re displayed. Toss/keep. You land up before the scream. The scream clarifies, and from what we know of butter and ghee, clarification can be a process of adding riches. An essay is assigned. You know where to go. 

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I do, indeed, Google “Basquiat red painting."  The results are so close; they’re almost what I’m looking for. I look up news articles from the art exhibition, I flood my search bars with permutations: AbuDhabi2016ArtNovemberAbuDhabiBasquiatRed2016AbuDhabiPleaseHelpMeFindItAbuDhabiArtFair2016NovemberRedItWasRedItwasRedAllIRememberIsThatItWasBasquiat&ItWasRed.

I almost settle for a lie. I could lie. I was at the gallery. No one here, right now, with me, in Chicago, was. I almost use another Basquiat, the betrayal itches like a venom lick. And then someone has it. A WordPress site. “anexpatabroad.com” – my, how charming, thank you, fellow expat, do you have the painting? Yes. The site belongs to someone who has documented the art fair in pictures of, I suppose, what they deemed worthy. Mine was worthy, the piece is here. Perhaps, as Basquiat paints text image almost as an immediate conjoined instance, so I look at my beloved and read the text beneath it, with impossible, exhilarating simultaneity, a text that names the name I have not known for seven years. Do Not Revenge. 

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One must set limits. To what degree does one mimic the fever of a loved painting, to what degree does one embark on fresh crises? If instructional, the title is prophecy – I did not, as it were, revenge. If ornamental, the decoration is its own discourse. Here are telephone bones and slashes of rainbow you thought you had left behind in kindergarten. Infinite iterations of rage but I had found mine at a moment where coffee foam in hollowed out wax hearts wasn’t quite cutting it. One might postulate that the navigation of the gallery on that November day was catalyzed by unexpected attendees, their cake-baking girlfriends. What does a poet know? To halt in the face of her own interiority. To scribble down a name. To welcome the chance to revisit fire seven years later. 

What does a poet know?

A poet knows a portal when she sees one.

Works Cited 

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Adnan, Etel. To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader. Nightboat Books. 2014. 

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Basquiat, Jean-Michel. Do Not Revenge. 1982.

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Christie’s Auction House in London (Website): christies.com

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Fauls, Jennie and McCurrie, Matthew. Key Concepts in Writing and Rhetoric. Columbia College Chicago Department of English and Fountainhead Press. 2018. 

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WordPress site (Abu Dhabi Art Fair): anexpatabroad.com

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