The Keith Haring retrospective at the Walker Art Center is an unalloyed delight. The show is vivid, thought-provoking and the art has a gorgeous, timeless quality. You should see this show.
Haring, born in 1958, is, more or less, my contemporary. Tragically, he died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31 and so, of course, we don't know what he would have accomplished had he lived to be an old man. His gifts were remarkable. I never paid much attention to his work when he was alive. In the eighties, Haring seemed to me to be an obnoxious and superficial excrescence on the Manhattan night club circuit, a kind of Pop Art mavin like Andy Warhol but more callow, more purely optical, making work without philosophical significance -- in my ignorance, I didn't understand that Haring, unlike Warhol, could possibly be anything except an epiphenomenon of a homosexual and hedonist big city party-scene. The Walker show proves that I was wrong in this assessment. Warhol is more important than Haring from an art-historical perspective -- but Haring (no doubt in my mind) is more fun, vibrant, and memorable. Warhol is like Picasso to Haring's Matisse. And, indeed, Haring even cites Matisse in one of his ambitious later paintings. There is something to be said for sheer pleasure, for hedonism; Andy Warhol makes partying in New York discos and jet-setting with celebs look like tedious hard-work -- there's something borderline Teutonic, or, at least, Mitteleuropaische about Warhol's vast output; Haring's equally huge ouevre expresses a joie de vivre that is infectious (no pun intended) and life-affirming.
Keith Haring started out as a puckish graffiti artist working the Manhattan subway tunnels. He was about 20 when his signature imagery began to appear on hoardings under New York (Haring wasn't a vandal; he seems to have made his murals on unused advertising spaces near subterranean train stops). His early work is massively documented -- there's a video that shows him being arrested for making unlawful graffiti deploying the same imagery that, later, made him famous: eloquent outlines of radiant crawling babies, dancing figures, barking dogs with big jaws open and exclamation-point dashes showing the noise that they are making, pyramids, cheerful dolphins with their yaps open to speak, flying sauces irradiating people having sex or orgiastic dancers. These images have a primordial power and they can be deployed in almost endless combinations -- Haring's work is instantly recognizable and distinctive and, despite, what may seem a limited repertoire of signs, in fact, highly complex. His pictographs have an intuitively expressive quality. They lunge at your eyes. (Segregated from the main pathway through the show is a narrow corridor lined with erotic canvases -- mostly blow-jobs and figures buggering one another; these are cheerful, completely antiseptic diagrams.)
Of course, talent of this kind could not go unrecognized and Haring became very famous. However, notwithstanding his fame, and pressures to simply repeat himself, the show at the Walker, arranged in chronological order, demonstrates a marked progression from his early works to later, darker imagery culminating in heroically sized paintings that he made in the last half of the eighties. In fact, Haring was groping his way toward something akin to 19th century "history painting" in the images that he made near the end of his life documenting his response to AIDS plague that killed him. And, even, in his first museum-style paintings, Haring shows an interesting development from the graffiti work on which his celebrity was initially based. There are three museum compositions after the galleries documenting Haring's subway work -- viewed from twenty feet, the pictures don't seem to have any figurative subject; they are merely tangles of maze-like ribbons of paint, punctuated at intervals with dashes of dark color. But this is an exhibition that you have to see coming and going -- I recommend that you walk through the show in the direction established by the chronological "hang" and, then, go back the opposite way. Retracing my path back through the paintings, I noticed that the three big official Haring canvases, seen from a distance, resolve into very clear figures -- for instance, someone tied to a chair -- that I didn't see on my ascent up the galleries to the end of the show. The effect is magical; somehow, Haring has embedded figures in what seem to be very broadly painted abstractions. This shows that Haring has a rigor and cunning that is not immediately apparent in his jovial and radiant pictures that, on first glance, seem to be merely primitive pictographs.
By his mid-twenties, Haring was working on ambitious compositions. One big painting shows a Boho girl lounging in a room decorated by a Jasper Johns canvas and a Frank Stella picture; at the lower left hand corner of the twenty foot long image, there's a citation of Matisse's gold fish bowl in the famous 1912 painting.. Another big canvas shows Moses with the burning bush. In these pictures, Haring puts a camouflage surface of winding labyrinthine ribbons over the image ,concealed in the picture and complicating it with a maze of dashed marks on yellow or red ticker tape on the surface of the canvas. Haring's invention never flags -- at least in this show (I assume that his vast body of work is, in fact, probably rife with repetitive variations on his pictorial themes.) In a homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Haring adjusts his pyramid-form to make a pile of crowns (Basquiat's personal pictogram was the crown). Some politically motivated late paintings have some of the ferocity of Philip Guston -- we see a huge pig vomiting out a green sludge of computer screens, keyboards, TVs and other noxious consumer goods. The pig has a vertical phallic appendage that is equipped with teats to which little sucking homunculi are attached. The painting depicts something that is hideous and disturbing. But Haring makes the image strangely comical and, even, endearing -- he can't produce an ugly painting notwithstanding his best intentions. (Another picture in this room shows the earth pierced by a blade and bleeding. Apparently, a bare foot has stepped on the knife impaling the earth and a green glacier-like bile filled again with consumer goods is spilling out of the wounded foot. To describe the picture is to identify horrific subject matter. But the canvas itself has a blithe, graceful insouciance. In the last gallery, several monumental works are on show, a sculpture densely engraved with an intaglio of Haring's dogs, dolphins, and dancers and a huge phallus about 20 feet high also entirely covered with enigmatic marks, at once primitive and enormously expressive -- this is called "The Great White Way." A huge canvas with foot-wide swaths of black paint delineating its forms shows a hunched, piteous figure laboring up a flight of stairs with a great egg (the world-egg) on his shoulders. The egg is cracked and semen is flowing out of it in the form of a vast spectral spermatazoa bearing pointed horns. This seems to be a response to the AIDS epidemic. A smaller canvas, only partly painted in purplish bruise-colored marks was Haring's last -- he died before he could complete the image.
There's a lot of stuff in the show about Haring's celebrity status. We see him posed with Warhol, Dolly Parton, and Madonna. He made a painted leather suede outfit for a Madonna tour -- we see the singer rolling around on stage in the sheath of this painted garment. Haring was the artist in residence at the Walker in 1984 and made a large mural for the museum. He also made voluminous posters, stickers, and all sorts of other ephemeral things -- all of these things bearing the imprint of his unique sensibility.
Haring's style was forged in response to the conditions of making subway graffiti in the late seventies. He uses a very broad, assured line -- he paints with bold gestures so that the lines can be readily applied; that is, the image has to be completed before the cops arrive. The broad lines outlining his images are not leaden however, but have a vibrant energy -- they are coiled, tense forms full of kinetic energy. Furthermore, the clarity of his imagery is a response to creating pictures made to be seen through the window of a speeding subway train. Later, Haring has to complicate his original pictorial impulse which is to communicate at a great distance and with viewers expected to behold the image for only a second or so. This complication results in Haring nesting his icons very close to one another, creating jigsaws full of disparate pictograms, and, then, marking the surface with ribbon mazes. God only knows what Haring would have accomplished had he survived the AIDS epidemic.
Haring said in an interview a couple years before his untimely death: "Amazing how many things one can produce if you live long enough. I mean I've barely created ten years of serious work. Imagine 50 years. I would love to live to be 50 years old. Imagine, hardly seems possible...." Haring proclaimed; "The public has a right to Art. Art is for everybody."
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