Basquiat and the Catalogue

This paper will examine Jean-Michel Basquiat’s obsession with the act of cataloguing, exposing the omission of marginalized perspectives from the ostensibly objective canon of knowledge. At first glance, the appropriated text in Basquiat’s paintings appear to be straightforward excerpts, indices, and lists from various catalogues he owned: biology and anatomy textbooks, record catalogues, and other disparate materials. I argue that these are not mindless repetitions, but intentional nods to the theoretical notion of the catalogue itself, which organizes and indexes knowledge as a (supposedly) unbiased authority. Basquiat manipulates and disrupts the nature of the catalogue to demonstrate the ways in which certain people exist outside of these systems, re-inscribing them into the archival record in the process.