Keith Haring
This could only be the work of one man, Keith Haring (1958-1990). His style, featuring cartoon-like images of men, dogs, and other figures, all drawn as bold outlines, is instantly recognizable.
Haring, above, starting drawing as a child. He went to art school in Pennsylvania, but dropped out and moved to New York.
There he found inspiration in public art like subway graffiti. He began drawing with chalk in the New York subways on black paper that covered unused ad spaces (photo by Chantal Regnault, 1983). Although this led to him being arrested more than once, his subway drawings, in his unique style, started becoming so famous that people would take them and sell them. In effect, he had transformed graffiti into art, which eventually led to international recognition.
Another favorite medium was body painting, still with his unique style of bold lines and patterns. Here Haring is painting Bill T. Jones in 1983.
Look carefully, and you'll see Haring, naked, who has painted his body and posed against a background against which he is perfectly camouflaged. It reminds me of the "dazzle camouflage" used on ships in World War I and II to fool the eye by breaking up the outline, so an enemy wouldn't see it as a ship. Photo by Annie Leibovitz, 1986.
Haring was gay and did not shy away from sexual images, though they have the same cartoonish quality as the rest of his work. This self-mocking piece is called Self-Portrait with Juan, 1988.
When the LGBT Community Center in New York invited Haring to create a work in May, 1989, he chose to paint a mural in their men's room. Perhaps he was harkening back to his days of creating graffiti in the subway as public art. And, being a men's room, what was more natural than to cover the walls with sexual graffiti (but in his unique style, of course).
Haring called it Once Upon a Time. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and these images looked back to a previous carefree time of free love.
Another wall of the men's room.
And yet another view. Is it obscene? Yes. Is it graffiti? Yes. Is it art? Yes.
Even as he painted the mural, Haring was fighting his own battle with AIDS. Nine months later, he was dead at age 31. "I'm not having trouble facing the reality of death," he said. "It is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do."
4 comments:
These are terrific. Especially the Annie Leibovitz. Thanks!
Beautifully told with just the right selection of images.
marvellous!
I can't help but remember Nickelodeon doing a short piece about Keith Hating in the early to mid-90s. Amazing because
1. Nickelodeon was extremely homophobic at the time. Though I suppose a producer asking for teenage actresses' feet pics is just fine. (Yes, this happened. And he worked for Nickelodeon for over 20 years.)
2. Most of his murals were very frank with their content.
As an adult, I wonder how they got away with it.
That said, I do like Once Upon a Time. Notice also how many sex acts are portrayed, somewhat stylized. There was no defining gay sex act before the 70s. (Academics defined it as anal, largely to exclude themselves and their colleagues. Actual gay men mocked "brownie queens". In minority communities, bottoms and to a lesser extent men who sucked were seen anywhere from "weird" to frankly not men, though any other same-sex act was acceptable.) A certain point of historical accuracy there.
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