Left Side of Lower Jaw, from the Anatomy portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat is the most reduced image in the series — the jawbone drawn in a handful of lines in the lower centre of the sheet, the title below it misspelled: LELFT SIDE OF LOWER JAW. The error is not corrected. It stays in the final print, in an edition of 18, signed.

The misspelling is worth dwelling on. Basquiat was not careless with language — he was one of the most linguistically precise artists of his generation, someone who had been using words as marks since his years as SAMO, who understood exactly what crossed-out text and incorrect spelling communicated and deployed both deliberately. LELFT is not a mistake in the way a typographical error is a mistake. It is the trace of a hand moving faster than the conventions of orthography require, or it is a refusal to let the conventions of orthography govern what the hand does, or it is simply what happened and Basquiat decided it was more honest to leave it than to correct it.

Grey's Anatomy, the book that gave him the vocabulary for this portfolio, is a work of complete orthographic precision — every term spelled correctly, every label exact, the authority of the text inseparable from its correctness. LELFT SIDE OF LOWER JAW is the same subject, the same format, the same black ground and white line, and a different relationship to the authority of the label. The jaw is the instrument of speech. The label names it incorrectly. The portfolio holds both facts without resolving them.

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