General Electric

Bold and lurid, the iconic logo of the General Electric company is at the eye of a psychotic and psychedelic storm. General Electric is a collaboration work by Jean-Michel Basquiat and his friend and mentor, Andy Warhol. The contribution of the legendary Pop artist is a simple scavenge from the world of images that we, as members of a modern capitalistic society, navigate. General Electric is endemic in the United States, its logo too; but here, its monolithic power is disrupted by the frenzied visions of Basquiat. Packed with energy, his scrawled writings and images are both threatening and humorous, filled with a manic life, strange cartoonish images bouncing around amidst scraps of advertising. The sense of mania is most evident in the wide grins of the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter, characters from Lewis Carroll's irrational literary masterpiece The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. But the original illustrations by Tenniel have been reincarnated with a rawness and anger that is wholly Basquiat's and which speaks of the art of the streets that he had earlier, as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, espoused.

The fantastical, illogical presence of the characters from Lewis Carroll are at odds with the science and cool reason implied by the solid and proven physics of electricity. In General Electric, Basquiat is questioning our modern faith in electricity, challenging its centrality to our society and our needs, denouncing it as another fad, another arbitrary placebo for the modern world. He presents it instead in a context of fantasy, juxtaposing the logo with the insane Hatter and a hand advertising palmistry. In this way, General Electric, part of the establishment and history of the modern United States, is presented as yet another piece of bunkum. Basquiat is a god-killer, deposing and deflating the mighty company, and this is nowhere more evident than in the scrawled and erased inclusion of the words 'GENERAL ELECTRIC' at the top of the picture.