Read Keith Haring Journals Online

Authors: Keith Haring

Keith Haring Journals (2 page)

BOOK: Keith Haring Journals
7.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
As the prices of his fine art escalated, Haring sought ways to keep his art accessible. He continued to do public art murals, but as a fan of pop culture he wanted an outlet for consumers to acquire his work. This desire to make and sell products that were an affordable extension of his art yielded Haring’s Pop Shop, opened in New York’s SoHo neighborhood in 1986. Haring explains his rationale for the Pop Shop and his embrace of pop culture by saying, “That was the whole intention of the art: to affect and enter the culture by understanding and reflecting it; to contribute to and broaden the concept of art and the artist as much as possible.” His equal—or possibly greater—respect for the commercial world over the art world is evidenced by a journal entry from January 23, 1988, in which he states:
Sometimes I’d rather not deal with the “art market” at all and just do my own work. There isn’t much difference between the people I have to deal with in the art market and in the commercial world. Once the artwork becomes a “product” or a “commodity,” the compromising position is basically the same in both worlds. Some “artists” think they are “above” this situation because they are “pure” and outside of the “commercialization” of pop culture, because they don’t do advertising or create products specifically for a mass market. But they sell things in galleries and have “dealers” who manipulate them and their work the same way. In fact, I think it is even more deceptive to pretend you are outside of this system instead of admitting it and actually participating in it in a “real” way. There is no more “purity” in the art world than on Madison Avenue. In fact, it is even more corrupt. The Big Lie.
Keith Haring’s journals reveal a plethora of ideas, emotions, and experiences, but permeating almost all of it are his underlying populism and humanity. These qualities manifested themselves in his belief that the public has the right to art, his chosen visual language, his use of public space, his embrace of commercial projects and art products, and his devotion to messages of social justice and change. Through these journals, Haring displays intense energy, focus, and conviction, but also adventure, whimsy, and insecurity. They provide a unique window into his profound intellect, humanity, drive, and complexity that goes beyond any third-party insight into his nature—these journals
are
his nature.
INTRODUCTION
ROBERT FARRIS THOMPSON
 
 
 
 
Nothing is an end because it always can be a basis for something new and different.
—Keith Haring Journals
 
Keith Haring’s diaries open, on April 29, 1977, with a neo-Sinatra manifesto: “. . . live my life my way and only let the other [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point.” He swore, in other words, to live a life of creative independence. Even at a Grateful Dead concert (May 10, 1977) he was cutting through the words in a selective way:
In a bed, in a bed
by the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
to rock my soul.
1
This chorus, from “Brokedown Palace,” a kind of farewell blues by Robert Hunter, challenged Haring. He wrote the words down, slightly changed, into his diary.
Ten years later—when Haring realized that he had AIDS—he went down Houston Street, in Manhattan, until he reached the East River. There, before the water, and its own sweet song, he let himself weep for the longest time. Purified by this, he went on to complete a life to the last full moment.
Cut to the last entries of his diaries, mid-September 1989. Five months left to live. Keith did not know this—he was far too busy. He was swept up in the myriad commissions of a major world artist.
For by 1989 he was as famous as a rock star, with friends and admirers everywhere: in the back streets of Shinjuku in Tokyo; in the Casino and the “Dragon” at Knokke, Belgium; in the hip-hop epicenters of early-eighties New York City; at the Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne; at SOB’s in SoHo; in a suite at the Ritz; in the subways of New York; in the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam; in the galleries of New York; and, continually, at his own gleamingly neat studio on Broadway near Great Jones.
Sometimes he got impatient, when overworked. But most of the time the leitmotif was generosity: all over the world there are persons with Haring buttons, Haring-decorated T-shirts, Haring-illuminated pages torn from notebooks—spontaneous gifts of the artist.
Many remember him as did a youth in Chicago named Joe Asencios, summer 1989: “the nicest person he ever met in his life.”
2
Five years later, on the other side of the planet, at the Breidenbacher Hof Hotel in Düsseldorf, Erwin Gruber, the concierge, remembers him above all guests. Keith caused a sensation when he checked out of this hotel in December 1989, making drawings for bellboys, staff members, and the concierge, Gruber remembered, commenting: “He was a wonderful guy. I hope you say good things about him.”
3
The last entry: September 22, 1989. Haring writes from Pisa, Italy, where he paints a mural on the Church of Sant’Antonio and reads the local monument for humor as well as art: “the [Leaning] tower is remarkable. We saw it in daylight and then in the light of the full moon. It is really major and also hysterical. Every time you look at it, it makes you smile.”
From Pittsburgh to Pisa an American spiritual odyssey unfolds, a document of the life and mind of an artist who symbolized America in the eighties to the world. Thousands wore his T-shirts, millions knew his style. He was probably one of the few artists of our time who could cross the Atlantic on a jet and see his art included in
both
in-flight movies.
How did he get there? By being restless, being ceaselessly ambitious. By inventing a line “both archaic and universal and futuristic (with its computer capacities).” Had he lived longer, he would have undoubtedly moved beyond the styles that made him popular: “If they are representative of a specific time, then they are possibly the purest we are capable of at that point, but after that point we have [to] progress. . . .”
The text, in short, is a mirror of an extraordinary life: creativity, thought, and the vernacular, jousting in the crucible of contemporary time. In this regard it is not unlike “the
Journal
which Dürer kept as a strictly personal memorandum . . . notes on the death of his mother burst from the page in the midst of his financial accounts and descriptions of wayside lodgings, and we are haunted by the mixture of sketches and incomplete phrases he jotted down when he awoke from a nightmare.”
4
Haring’s diaries cover similar ground, nightmares and dreams included. On an early page, notes on art history compete with a practical matter:
Romanesque—St. Pierre
Early Ren—Donatello (Bronze)
475-6222 SAL
18 1st Ave.
3 rm. apt. $150.00/mo.
“Since the number of colors and forms is infinite, their combinations also are infinite. . . .”
—Wassily Kandinsky,
Concerning The Spiritual in Art
But if the Haring journals sometimes recall Dürer in their episodic texture, they differ from the famous diary of Andy Warhol.
The latter’s testament is a fascinating compound, fat as a telephone book, essentially involving celebrity action and precisely noted cab and restaurant tabs, as if Warhol were writing half for posterity and half for the IRS.
5
The journals of Keith Haring are richer. Reflection, self-assessment, and evidence of growth crowd out the mere diaristic. Rarely would you get a page in Warhol like this: “Usually the people who are the most generous are people who have the least to give. I learned this first-hand as a newspaper carrier when I was 12 years old. The biggest tips came from the poorest people. I was surprised by this, but I learned it as a lesson.”
Nevertheless, Haring, like Basquiat, loyally presents Warhol as his master: “Andy’s life and work made my work possible. Andy set the precedent for the possibility for my art to exist. He was the first
real
public artist in a holistic sense. . . .”
Haring wrote these journals on planes, on the bullet train to Nagoya, waiting in airports, in a strange dragon-shaped guest-house of patrons in Belgium. Yet regardless of setting, he always found ways of communicating to himself, in a quest for “less talk and more doing.”
Time and circumstance sometimes savaged that ambition. There are breaks in the narrative and lapses into telegraphic haikus: “Eat, champagne—stars—quiet—think.” But most of the time he wrote with responsibility to the future, demonstrating, in turn, the intellectual underpinning to the flow and substance of his art. Chance, he loved to say, favors the prepared mind.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE DIARIES
The text unfolds in two main formations, linked by a bridge in the middle. Both formations are rich with experience and practice. I call them formations to honor the buildup of insight and experience.
The first formation, 1978 to 1980, documents, essentially, a period of apprenticeship, or, as he himself puts it, “the records of a search.” Haring adds: “I should be open to everything . . . I am merely gathering information.”
As he works his way through forms and precepts, he stresses the provisional nature of it all: “Do not place too much emphasis on my current experimentation and investigations.”
The power behind the questing was Haring’s strong and vivid taste. With taste he was able to select and learn from the highest sources, including poets. Two citations from John Keats’s letter to his brothers, December 1817, entered his journals: “The excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth.” And again: “Coleridge . . . would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining Content with half knowledge.”
It was a level of discourse that Haring wished to call his own—and did, later, with the very finest chalked and painted figures.
Keats taught him also that poetry “should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts.” Noticing a hunger, all around him, for substance in communication, however advanced by technology, Haring did just that: he tackled the issues of his times, the threat of thermonuclear annihilation, the obscenity of apartheid, and the horror of AIDS. He drew, also, on the need of women and men for emotional response from others, for variety of experience, for security of the long-term sort, striking sparks with the thoughts of his fellow women and his fellow men. Jonathan Fineberg sums up this gift: “Haring created icons of mass culture to which everyone could relate.”
6
Haring ensconced his visual thinking in a tough-minded vernacular, so that all could share and understand, and see their minds reflected, in the ideal Keatsian sense. He taught himself how to talk intellectual and talk technology and still talk regular.
Haring sometimes drew real issues in imaginary television sets, “broadcasting” his concerns, while at the same time stealing fire from media. Doing this, he fulfilled one of the ambitions of his apprenticeship, “to form a situation of communication, a transformation of energy.”
On another level, the diaries reveal that retrospective exhibitions of major artists were spurs to accomplishment. A Rothko retrospective, for instance, challenged him to his bottom guts. For in such settings he could see how “ideas . . . increase in power as they are explored and rediscovered.” He takes us with him into a room in the National Gallery in Washington where five Rothkos hang: “. . . grouping of these works in a single room centralized their energy and heightened their impact. . . . It was a solid statement, perhaps taken to its fullest extent.”
Haring himself was getting ready, like Rothko, to pursue key ideas to the fullest extent. Increasing his arsenal of formal means, he experimented with a double brush, with different inks and papers. He tried cutting, as well as drawing, forms: “The completeness, accurateness, finalness of a cut may allow me to be more direct, more spontaneous and therefore more interesting.”
And he tried to explain to himself how frames provided order for the tumult of his thought: “possibly the reason I insist on spending the first few minutes of a painting drawing a border around the area I am about to paint is because I am familiarizing myself with the scale of the painting I am about to paint. I am physically experiencing the entire perimeter of a given space.”
Thoughts, borrowed and self-generated, were steadily studding his visual imagination. Beuys, in a lecture at Cooper Union, taught him this: “Poverty means nothing to a man with a dream.” Haring, in addition, hoped that he was studying objects in the manner of Matisse, i.e., “for a long time, to know what its sign is.”
Harbinger after harbinger of what he would become crowd the pages of this first section of his journals, like the day in 1978 when he took notes on an Egyptian drawing: “There is within all [these] forms an indication of the entire object within a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol.”
Haring’s records reveal that, in a strong mixture of Keats, artistic biography, retrospective exhibitions, and many, many other sources, he worked out his own philosophic take on line, form, and color. Remorselessly questing, he let his creativity bide its own sweet time.
And then, bam! All sides to his psyche, all sides to his training, all sides to his spirit, coalesced in a single week in 1980.
A whole vocabulary of forms streamed from his hand, hieroglyph after hieroglyph, all freshly minted, curing, with meaning, an age that dared to call itself post-modern, as if the apocalypse were a mere matter of style. When the smoke cleared, Haring had invented, by means of sexual aliveness transmuted into line and gesture, a hundred interlacing bodies in a score of social situations. And also from his hand, luminous and innocent, emerged soon thereafter the “radiant baby” and the “family dog,” crawling, barking. These were his stabilizing themes. He drew them together with images from science fiction, spaceships and ray guns; technology, robots, computers, and television; and antiquity, pyramids, and never-never canopic urns upon which he drew telephones and pyramids and acrobatic dancers.
BOOK: Keith Haring Journals
7.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Covenants by Lorna Freeman
Legacy of a Dreamer by Allie Jean
My Love Lies Bleeding by Alyxandra Harvey
Sinners by Collins, Jackie
Rouge by Leigh Talbert Moore
The Perfect Prince by Michelle M. Pillow
Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace