Keith Haring Journals (40 page)

In short, art is still being manipulated by and for the wealthy, educated white minority. Any others who happen to succeed are merely curiosities.

Nothing has changed, it is only more subtle. Artists pretend to be independent. Artists are, of course, allowed little liberties and even encouraged to be “subversive” and “political”; this only makes the control less obvious while in actuality it is strengthened.

But all of this is nothing new. It wasn’t new when Dubuffet wrote about it and it wasn’t new when Jesus spoke of it. But Dubuffet and Jesus couldn’t escape it, either. That’s why, I suppose, I feel hopeless and confused. It is a never-ending cycle. The condition of being a human being in 1988 is bad enough, but the gift of being an artist is equally hopeless.

I mean, what can I accomplish, really? The situation I find myself in is not very promising. We are being controlled. The roots of this control are so deep that they are completely disguised and part of everything: language, “culture,” geography, religion, the economy, technology, history, education, everything, everything.

So what? I can see it, a lot of people can see it. But, take South Africa for example: How can it be possible that apartheid still exists? Dr. King was speaking against it 20 years ago. The world knows it’s wrong: journalists, protests, books, songs, movies—no matter how many oppose it, it exists now in 1988 and it is as strong as ever.

AIDS, crack, military escalations, elections, fundamentalists: it’s too big and it’s too late.

The art world is just a small model or metaphor of the Big Control. All you can do is these little things to feed the situation. Try to expose it and try to make things a little more bearable. Go to Hiroshima, paint P.S. 97, do an AIDS book cover for teens, try to go to the USSR, paint what you see and feel. But
shit is going to go down
. The world goes on and on, but things are changing faster and faster.

And here I am. I mean, picture this: Picture the Earth from a distance as this big ball. I was on one side yesterday and in a few hours I’ll be on the other side. A trip that would have taken months (or years) a few hundred years ago.

We go forward, we have the means, but we’re still in the same situation. And we still fightin’.

By any means necessary.

By any means necessary.

By any means necessary.

I go to dinner to talk with Fran and Kaz about the future of the Pop Shop. It seems it can’t go on at the level it is and still make money. The money Toko invested has to be paid back so that they can be permanently cut off. Toko has been “faking” their management the whole time and pocketing money, trying to recoup their investment. It’s not a pretty picture. We’re trying to settle on the balance we owe them without prosecuting them.

To start over we need money. Money to produce goods and money to maintain the Shop. Sales are declining or are stabilized at a low level. All the fakes may have something to do with this, but I don’t think that’s it. Kaz wants to move the Shop to Hokkaido (in Sapporo) as a kind of franchise and then open a permanent shop in Tokyo. There are several possibilities to pursue.

All of this is depressing and unnerving. Can I handle a more complex situation in Japan? I know it’s the only way I can make money and really penetrate the culture at the same time. I think of all the options and consider giving up.

Couldn’t sleep very well. Woke up around seven o’clock and lay here thinking about Pop Shop dilemma. To insure a future here I may have to do the Shop in a more Japanese way, which means to sell things in more than one place, like everyone else. I don’t think I can get people to go out of their way to come to the Shop, especially if there are fake things everywhere else. I am worried that maybe people are tired of the things because they have seen them so much because of all the imitations. And unless a bigger company is involved it will be very costly and time-consuming to pursue all the fakes. I suppose I have to decide if I want to be involved or not—or find a way to be less involved, but still have the work be present. Maybe I just have to hire someone in New York who will act more like an agent or manager for the “things.” I seem to have distanced myself more and more from the mass-produced K. Haring, and I am certainly more interested in inventing than distributing.

I went to Tatsuno (the lawyer) with Kaz and had a short meeting. We are going to the police department tomorrow to officially file an accusation and complaint against Indio, the company we want to prosecute as an “example” to everyone else. We have samples and photos from their catalogue of things of mine they copied from the inside cover of
Art in Transit
. It is a pretty clean case. Hopefully the police will do something this week so it can be presented to the press this week while I’m here.

After the meeting I walked around, saw a show of Andy’s prints (where I was besieged by all the gallery workers) and “shopped.” There are so many fakes now it’s hard to believe. It is hard to find a store that
doesn’t
have some fake KH things or KH-inspired things. I’ve stopped collecting them, unless they are particularly amusing.

It is interesting to see the way the images have become generic in a way. They don’t really signify KH, but something that seems much more of the collective consciousness or “universal” culture. Sometimes they are only barely recognizable as my drawings. This is interesting to a degree, but when it gets to the point where they are overshadowing my own things then it becomes more of a problem. This puts me in a strange, but interesting, position in Tokyo. I’m not quite sure how to resolve it, and I’m trying to figure it out as I go.

After walking around, eating pizza at the restaurant across from the hotel, and more walking, I faxed Julia and decided to stay in and read instead of going “out” to Shinjuku to the bars. I read the first chapter of
Cities on a Hill
, which is about gay politics and gay liberation in the Castro area of San Francisco (pre-AIDS and post-AIDS). It was pretty compelling reading and, as an objective view, made some things clearer to me than they have been. The amazing transformation of gay life from the early Seventies through the Eighties is exactly the same story of what I went through in New York. It is a kind of report on my generation and the preceding one for those of us who have chosen to live our lives in the open and not hide in the closet. In many ways it made me proud and in some ways very sympathetic. It’s not an easy time to be alive, and maybe an even more difficult time to die.

Woke up and went shopping in Harajuku and Shibuya. Coughing a lot and not feeling so great. It’s hard not to worry or speculate about being “sick,” and this coughing doesn’t help, especially after reading about AIDS until three in the morning last night. Walked around, visited Pop Shop (which was empty) and was sort of depressed and discouraged. Saw lots more fakes or versions of my art on all kinds of things. It has become such a part of the visual culture of Japan and been assimilated so much that it has completely lost any association with me, but rather appears to have been here all the time and is now akin to “the English characters of the alphabet.”

Met Kaz and Tatsuno to go to the police station in Shibuya to officially file an accusation against Indio. It seemed to go well and they may take action before I leave Tokyo. We cannot alert the press or do any kind of action for the media until the police have made their move.

After the meeting we returned to the office and Fran and I went to eat something. We discussed her next movie and talked about sex and gender roles in Japan, trying to figure out why people do what they do or act the way they do. Because there is no moral code as laid down in the Bible here, the sexual rules seem more a part of traditional male/female definition and not so much “morality.”

A guy from Swiss Air told me a story of a recent dinner he was at with many important art dealers where he asked the Saatchis, “Do you work with Keith Haring?” There was total silence at the table, and he was later told he shouldn’t have brought up the subject. How was he to know?

We had a long discussion trying to figure out Japanese understanding of American culture, particularly me. Through trying to answer their questions about my situation in the past and present in Japan, I came to explain how I felt I was losing my naive confidence in the Japanese understanding of (or capacity for understanding) my work. I had always felt that the things people responded to in my work were tied to their own traditions of the “sign” and the gesture and the concept of the “spirit of the line” that is so evident in sumi painting and calligraphy. I thought people here were more receptive to my work than Westerners because they understood it and felt it more clearly and deeply. The proliferation of all the imitations has taken away some of my confidence. The things that are copied are usually redrawn and therefore the whole “power” of the line is lost. This is very distressing to me since I believe the very essence of my work rests in this concept of the “gesture” and the “spirit of the line” to express individuality. The only thing that remains is the concept or the “cuteness” and the fashionable hype. I really wanted to believe that people here loved the work for the right reasons and that they were even more in touch with it than Europeans and Americans because they “felt” it and “read” it in this way. I still believe that this is the case, but only to the minority. The majority of people only know about my work from all the things they see on clothes and in magazines.

This is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it is a fact. I mean, I am a new phenomenon that is neither “good” nor “bad” or “right” or “wrong.” It just is what it is.

My challenge now is to deal with this situation and try to go forward by continuing to work and define my position and my art. I believe that in time all things will become clear.

Fran and Kaz and I had an emotional dinner/meeting at the Korean restaurant. We decided to continue working on Pop Shop, but agreed we all have to expand to deal with it. I also explained to Kaz that I would relinquish much more responsibility to him as my agent in Japan if I thought he was prepared to handle it. Keith Haring is a full-time job. He has to hire someone to work for him to work for me. Up until now he hasn’t really seemed like he could devote enough time to it to justify giving him a contract with a percentage and the power to find and negotiate work for me. I feel he’s capable of it (theoretically and aesthetically) but he needs to have someone to do all the running around under his direction. I would like to work with him if we can work this out. I also stressed to them the importance of acting on this as soon as possible since, realistically, things could change very quickly since I may be sick. I want to have everything in place so if I do pass away, things will continue without me. I want my contribution to be an ongoing and a living contribution, with or without me.

Woke up and went to the lobby to meet Fukuda and his wife. We drove to the airport and took a plane (one and a half hours) to Hiroshima, where we were met by a TV crew and photographer who followed our exit from the airport and arrival at the hotel. We checked in and met the other people who were going to be our hosts. They had already been researching the possibilities of doing a mural and had several sites to show me.

We all went to visit the Peace Museum & Memorial, which is a vivid documentation of the horrors of Hiroshima. It is impossible to imagine the magnitude of the bombing until you personally experience this museum. I was followed by the photographer, which was uncomfortable, but not even that could minimize the shock of what I was looking at. There were many families with children in the museum at the same time. I had, of course, read about and seen some photos of Hiroshima, but I never felt it like this. It is incredible that this destruction was caused by a bomb that was made in 1945, and that the level of sophistication and number of nuclear warheads has increased since then. Who could ever want this to happen again? To anyone? The frightening thing is that people debate and discuss the arms race as if they were playing with toys. All of these men should have to come here, not to a bargaining table in some safe European country.

There was one photo of a pile of human skulls that was beyond reality. Pictures of radioactivity’s aftereffects were nothing short of science-fiction horror. Descriptions of black raindrops, photos of melted faces, etc., etc.