Mika's Downtown 81 Response
March 22, 2018, by Mika
A couple of weeks ago I went to the Brooklyn Museum to see the new Bowie exhibit. Of course the throng of coated patrons waiting inline informed me quickly that the special exhibit was sold out but I still wanted to check out the museum. There was an exhibit called “One Basquiat.” It featured one large portrait from the iconic artist alone in a large blank white room. It felt like an unholy temple overflowing with worshipers behind viewing the easel through their cell phones. I don’t know much about Jean-Michael Basquiat but I imagine he’d had this. Not just the pedestal they put him on, but the fact that he’s separated from his peers. In New York it’s impossible to make art in a vacuum, you can’t do anything alone, and I felt that Basquiat’s work felt so lonely without anyone else to share the space with.
In a hallway adjacent to the exhibit there was a projection of Jean-Michael graffiting a wall in ‘80s New York. I hated it. He felt like a monkey stuck in a forever-looping cage who was smearing his pleas for release on the wall for looker-ons to gawk over. I recognized this footage later when I watched Downtown 81 and felt that I was correct in assuming Basquiat would hate his exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum too.
Shot as New York Beat in 1980-81 but completed for release in 2000 Downtown 81 is a nostalgic portrait of pre-Giuliani Manhattan, an unruly place full of garbage, graffiti, lots vacant of anything but rubble, dope dealers and highly idealistic kids eager to make their mark as avant-garde artists and musicians. The film’s central figure is Jean, a young bohemian engagingly played by a not yet famous Jean-Michel Basquiat. The fictional character’s life bears a powerful resemblance to Basquiat’s own at the time: he is a struggling musician (Basquiat’s band, Gray, is heard on the soundtrack) and graffiti artist living on the Lower East Side, trying to patch a life together from cadged meals and drink tickets and the occasional sale of a painting.
Jean survives mainly by relying on the worldwide network of hip: there will always be another bar to go to, another gig to crash, another wealthy European to write a check, another gorgeous model in a Cadillac convertible to give him a ride home. Protected by their talent, the characters seem utterly unaffected by the desperate poverty of their neighbors, who, unlike themselves, do not have a choice of addresses. Yet they are just kids after all, infected by the unique naiveté of youth that’s expressed as confidence.
Because many of the film’s original sound elements were lost during the 20 years it spent in limbo, much of the dialogue has been dubbed, giving the picture the slightly disembodied feel of an Italian western or a Japanese monster movie. Though most of the original performers were available to recreate their dialogue, Basquiat, who died in 1988, had his lines re-recorded by the actor Saul Williams that makes the film that much more eeire.
It’s as a documentary that Downtown 81 is most engaging, particularly at those moments when the somewhat unfocused filmmaking allows the audience to look past the foreground characters and catch glimpses of a vanished cityscape: the pornography shops and grind houses of West 42nd Street, the greasy spoons and outlet stores of East 14th Street, the labyrinthine interior of the Mudd Club in what was then the largely uncharted territory south of Canal Street. I’ve never seen Astor place look so bare!
The New York of nearly 40 years later may be a far more snug and secure environment, but it has also eliminated a good deal of the opportunity for chance encounters and creative uproar that Downtown 81 effectively depicts and haphazardly celebrates. It’s in that way that I believe that life of an artist has changed most in New York. This film illuminated the shadowed profile of Basquait in my mind and showed him as an important member of a larger artistic community. Artists today still struggle, still have to hustle and constantly negotiate their own work and its artistic merit.
In todays world we try to celebrate artists as monoliths, but the Brooklyn Museum has it all wrong.Artists can’t exist in solitude and the fact that to make money today you need to sell yourself as a “brand” stifles these communities from growing. Downtown 81 harkens to maybe the last time that the artistic community in New York had free reign to get into mischief and develop their skills before reaching the scrutiny of the limelight. Maybe these communities are thriving in some corner of the city unknown to that judgmental gaze– and that’s exactly as it should be.