Jawbone of an Ass, from Portfolio II by Jean-Michel Basquiat is built around a vertical column of names running from ancient Egypt to the American Civil War — pharaohs, Greek philosophers, Roman generals, Cleopatra, Hypatia, Hannibal, Alexander the Great, the Punic Wars, the Louisiana Purchase, the Emancipation Proclamation, Transcendentalism — the entire column sitting at the centre of the image like a compressed curriculum, a record of who history has chosen to remember and in what order. At the base, Roman numerals run the full width of the image. At the top, the title.

The jawbone of an ass is the weapon Samson uses in the Book of Judges to kill a thousand Philistines — improvised, unlikely, devastating. Basquiat was drawn to that image for reasons that are legible throughout his work: the idea that the tools available to someone outside the structures of official power could be turned into instruments of force, that the marginalised object could become the decisive one. The list of names at the centre of this screenprint operates by the same logic. History is a weapon. The question is who gets to hold it and who gets written into it — and the column makes the answer visible by the order in which the names appear and by who is circled, crossed out, or annotated as the list descends from antiquity toward the present.

Basquiat was twenty-one when he made the original work, and had been educating himself since childhood through whatever sources were available — libraries, hospitals, the streets of Brooklyn, the downtown New York scene that was absorbing everything from jazz to post-punk simultaneously. The self-education shows in Jawbone of an Ass not as display but as argument: this is what the record looks like, and this is what it leaves out.

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