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Angela Holm
Angela Holm is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and the Director of Productions at Big Sound, Inc., where she is currently working on the definitive restoration of the 1929 silent film, Pandora’s Box.
Jean Michel Basquiat, The Offs LP album cover (front), 1983. copyright 1984 CD Presents Ltd/ Buried Treasure Inc.Not too many people remembered The Offs, the peripheral San Francisco cult punkers who made a few albums in the early 80s, until two of the band’s members died of heroin overdoses. If it were not for the fact that the group hung out with Jean Michel Basquiat–who desperately wanted to join the band in 1983–we wouldn’t care too much about their “First Record,” as it was titled. They didn’t let him join, but they did let him do what he did best–create the art for the album’s cover.
In the Reagan era of the early 80s, when political correctness was still fresh and graffiti art hit the art world’s radar screen, we were in great need of a self-destructive artist, one who at least gave the impression of street cred. Punk rock was one way to fill the emotional void of a generation, with its wailing, vitriolic chaos. On the other end of the spectrum was the pure bliss of consumerist decision-making, represented by the assiduous, focused art of Andy Warhol. By contrast, Basquiat was raised on the unbridled sexual energy of the 70s, and made sloppy and cryptic work that came out of alleys and punk clubs. He provided a balance to and a muse for Andy. The 80s provided one of the last opportunities for a self-educated artist to rise to fame in a lightning flash amongst changing tastes. If that was true then, perhaps now is that last time an “unknown” Basquiat could be “discovered” by the art world. To the rescue in this age of rediscovery came David Ferguson, the catalyst of the early 80s west coast punk rock explosion, and a long time maverick of “unpopular culture,” his term for subversive art that challenges the status quo.
When Ferguson, owner of the record label CD Presents, was sent the design for The Offs album cover in San Francisco, he was aware that the kid from Brooklyn who made it was a recent pal of Warhol, Ferguson’s long-time friend. So, he agreed to the $500 fee requested by the artist, famously rumored to be the amount of Basquiat’s mother’s rent.
It wasn’t until late one night in 1996, while watching the Charlie Rose talk show about the film Basquiat, that Ferguson starting talking to the TV set out loud. Drowning out the voices of Julian Schnabel and David Bowie he yelled, “That was the kid I paid $500 to back in 1983!”
In a panic he ran down the hall to check if he might still have Basquiat’s original artwork. Perhaps because of the incongruity between the music industry and the art world, or perhaps because he did not acquire the piece out of art investment mania, he had failed to realize that the art world might care about a white skeleton scratched onto a black background. Nonetheless, this original image, typical of Basquiat’s work in 1983, had lay hidden just below the surface of the underground for over 15 years–that is, in a dusty closet in his home.
The back story reemerged in Ferguson’s memory as the dust blown off the retrieved image began to settle. Basquiat was the “instinctual” artist known for mingling with the smoky screams and saxophonic shrieks of the New York underground punk scene. The Offs had moved to New York in ‘81. In ‘83 Basquiat met Warhol. Ferguson asked Warhol to lecture at his college in Miami in ‘68. The jock students at his college weren’t too hip to who Warhol was, so Ferguson had time to strike up a friendship. The relationship must have meant something, because some have called Ferguson the Andy Warhol of the west coast. Some have even suggested that Ferguson played a role in introducing Basquiat to Warhol in the first place. This could be a long shot, but as Ferguson puts it: “Andy went to The Offs shows, he was everywhere that was somewhere in New York at that time.”
In reality, the magnet that pulled these people together could have been a slightly more dangerous attraction than Ferguson. If we put the innocuous history book version aside for the moment (officially one of Warhol’s dealers is credited with introducing him to Basquiat,) perhaps it was actually a large does of what was called “inverse asceticism”–the PC term for drug addiction–that actually cemented the social relationships between Basquiat, Warhol, and The Offs.
The art was good, the drugs were good, the scene was cool…. until it wasn’t. But its destructive demise doesn’t mean that the art produced during its heyday wasn’t significant. Even so, Basquiat’s most important and meaningful work was not the work he made for galleries, or even the pieces that gallerists greedily stole out of his studio before he could finish them. Rather, what was most important was the work that he never even intended as an art commodity. Done in the name of punk rock–the anti-commodity–these works represented ideals that the youth culture of the time fought for. Even though today punk seems irredeemably clichéd, its inception and essence will always remain the same: in-your-face anti-commercialism.
In the end, a nice little gem has emerged from the thriving interconnected web of this motley scene, and we all know that what lies underground surfaces soon enough. The gallerists soon caught on. Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts in New York contacted Ferguson and arranged to sell the original the LP jackets that display the now-illustrious image this year in its booth at the Bridge Fair at Art Basel, Miami.
Ferguson kept the original. He feels that his “Basquiat” fits perfectly into his life vision of promoting “unpopular culture,” because like Basquiat’s early graffiti art, this work is among the more anti-institutional of the artist’s oeuvre. When asked if he will be selling the original image, Ferguson says, ”I’ve always been deeply committed to sharing art, music, and culture with the public. I’m not the kind of person to keep this over my fireplace.”
