(Con-)fusion is sex (by which I mean gender)

He grew up misunderstood, beat up every day at school, and quickly nurtured his flamboyant freak credentials (this is the glam era) in the realms of music, shock value, and cross-dressing. She left home at 14, went to Alphabet City, put herself through med school, created performance art that questioned gender roles and the body’s limits, eventually becoming a nurse. They first met when he was crashing at a friend’s dungeon in the East Village.

They fell in love, and were swept up by this thing love does to us sometimes: it makes one want to consume the other, to fuse, to become a mirror to the other. Genesis P-Orridge and Jacqueline Breyer took this to heart. They didn’t want to part, ever. They wore each other’s clothes, got the same haircut and, despite their notable physical differences (his bulldog torso versus her pixie figure, a 20-year age gap), they eventually began their most ambitious project, one involving arduous surgeries, including matching breast implants, to make themselves resemble each other as much as possible. Can you imagine the luck? To find someone who not only shares your taste in fashion and art but also is willing to join you on the long, uncharted route to surgical symbiosis? Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye is a portrait of this singular love story.

Losier’s approach is hermetically sealed, told very much from the inside, in certain ways willfully naïve, and something like the opposite of journalism. There’s no commentary, no talking heads, just P-Orridge’s narration over a montage of home movies, archival footage and fragments of musical performance. I think the approach works very well, prizing intimacy over critical assessment. Why not? There’s a great story there, a forced identification with what is for most an alien lifestyle choice, and Losier crafts a very specific, oddly charming aesthetic experience from her material to boot, blending voice and image into a twinkly memory stream. But I would suggest that the film’s one major flaw is its lack of balance between its two subjects, its overwhelming focus on P-Orridge (who seems to have a knack for making himself the focus in most situations). I can’t help but think the ideal Ballad would be one in which the individual narrative of one its titular characters shifts seamlessly into the other before blurring the two, division leading to fusion. Cinema can splice reality like no other medium, and Losier’s approach, bold and precise as it is, only lacks this one great conceptual push, a way of having her project perfectly align with that of her subjects.

The Radiant Child: Tamra Davis' Basquiat portrait colours within the lines

Among the elements that distinguished the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat was its merging of text and image, or rather its use of text as image, words crossed-out or repeated until meanings shift or dissolve, often hovering between the cryptic and the forthright. Given that the traditional documentary already embraces the incorporation of on-screen text, it wouldn’t seem too great a leap for a film about Basquiat to approach its subject with a like sense of lexicographical adventure. Tamra Davis’ Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child—kind of a condescending title the more you think about it—does in fact use lots of text—it’s a rare documentary that endeavours to give running credits for stills—but does so in a manner that’s neither mimetic nor especially enlightening. The Radiant Child is however a solid introduction to the artist, and for that reason should be widely seen.

The film was prompted by Davis’ re-discovery of video interviews she recorded with Basquiat before grief consigned them to a drawer for 20 years. Davis and Basquiat were friends, and the film was clearly undertaken with tremendous affection, which makes The Radiant Child a very moving experience, yet prompts an approach so cautious as to fall short of offering rigorous insight into Basquiat’s art, celebrity, or private life. Basquiat was prolific, imaginative, wildly ambitious, intelligent, handsome and charismatic, but he died at 27, too young to be expected to comment meaningfully on his own work—not that any artist at any age is required to provide such commentary. So the lost interviews, in which Basquiat seems reticent and a bit self-conscious, are not enough to make The Radiant Child a revelation. An overstocked cast of interview subjects are recruited, but they’re either cut short or generalize. Poet John Giorno rightly attributes Basquiat’s textual innovations to his exposure to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique, yet fails to mention Brion Gysin, who co-founded the technique with Burroughs and was, you know, a painter. Fellow-painter Julian Schnabel, who launched his filmmaking career with a Basquiat bio-pic, seems like he could have contributed much more but has his comments squeezed. No one says much about the implications of Basquiat’s transition from street graffiti to graffiti-infused paintings. Historian Nelson George however does manage to shed some light on the role of racial tensions in Basquiat’s work.

Basquiat by Warhol

I don’t want to get carried away itemizing what The Radiant Child doesn’t do. What it does do is provide a vivid sense of the Lower Manhattan underground art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s, probably the last time New York really mattered as a cultural vanguard—not coincidentally this was also the last time any normal person could afford to live there. Davis makes terrific use of archival tapes of Basquiat’s noise band Gray, of his appearances on TV Party, and of the artist at work. Davis also makes a case for the notion that Basquiat and Andy Warhol were, for a time at least, each other’s closest friends. In some only slightly perverse way, Warhol may have been a father figure to Basquiat, whose real father was a middle-class Haitian-American living just across the river in Brooklyn, and with whom Basquiat endured an uneasy relationship. Davis only hints at this unease, perhaps out of respect for Basquiat Sr., perhaps out of an unwillingness to psychoanalyze her dead friend. All of which is perfectly respectable, yet leaves The Radiant Child fraught with half-measures, a quality quite different from its subject who, for better or worse, threw himself headlong and devotedly into a truncated life of high art and dizzying fame.