Keith Haring Journals (5 page)

Haring thought and dreamt a lot in the Dragon. One of his musings tantalizes us, dropping a hint as to what his style might look like now: “I think thoughtful and aesthetic creative humor is needed. This could be the vehicle I am searching for to make the next transition from the subway works.”

On the Fourth of July the Nellenses had fireworks in Keith’s honor. They even put up an American flag in the backyard. Sunday, July 5, Haring executes four vases for Monique Nellens. “It is great using ink on terra-cotta because it soaks it up really fast and makes a line like on paper.” Wednesday, July 8, Haring does a “big three-eyed face painting on the refrigerator for Roger with oil paint.” All of these works are still in Knokke. In sum, summer 1987 in the Flemish resort restored Haring’s zest and prolonged his life, as he leads us to understand: “I feel more optimistic after being in Europe and I think it might be a good idea to live longer.”

Haring came back to the Dragon early in October: “The moon was almost full last night and sleeping inside the Dragon at the Nellens’ house was really strange . . . light was pouring through all the round holes in the windows. . . . Sleeping in Niki’s dragon is a lot like a dream anyway.” Haring’s last visit to Knokke was in November 1989, when he brought his parents to Europe. Monique Nellens remembers Haring painting contentedly in the Dragon, his mother watching.
²⁶

One of the more dramatic registers of Haring’s ambition, seeking affinity of line with the contours of the world around him, was his finding, in break dance and electric boogie, icons of late-twentieth-century American civilization.

The new dances represented a sudden synthesis of steps and acrobatics going back, through documented midpoints in the pages of Charles Dickens’s
Notes on America
and an early kinescope attributed to Thomas Edison, to ancient sub-Saharan sources. The mix exploded, in the late seventies and early eighties, on the dance floor in time to double-disc DJ music, the “wheels of steel” and their extended breaks, hence the title, break dance.

Haring knew the gist of the break dance sequence—entry-swipes (floor acrobatics)—spin—freeze—exit. He especially celebrated the Antaeus-like spins, dancers in combat with gravity and the laws of physics.

Just as he knew what to pick from Keats, so Haring made points with the moves that he chose to draw: for instance, with young men, spinning on their heads, he silhouetted poise and valor.

He also interrogated the spark of colleagueship within the break dance, those portions of the choreography depending upon close cooperation between two or more dancers. Witness his versioning of the “spider move,” which demands a swift and instant sense of how to share space with an incoming person. Compare, also, man-over-man “totem pole” sequences. Here the safety of those on top depends on the brawn and agility of the man at bottom. This communal form of dancing, strong and genial, lights up a remarkable silhouette-sculpture of 1985: four persons balanced on a barking dog.
²⁷

This in turn mirrors two men balanced on a third in a breaking move known as “the helicopter.”
²⁸
Parenthetically, Haring’s inclusion of the animal in the dance extends the positive, protective nature of the icon of the barking dog.

Haring was equally intrigued with “the bridge”—where one breaker arches his body upward while both arms and feet stay flat on the ground—and turned it into metal sculpture.
²⁹
Even this move, seemingly individualistic, was a call for colleagueship—another crew member often answering it by doing a flip over a body in this low position.

Haring thus saluted the range of poetic methods by which the blacks and Latinos of the early eighties found strength and community in the break dance. The participants themselves recognized their moves in Haring’s subway drawings:

Breaking centers on the horizontal. But electric boogie, the matching dimension to hip-hop choreography, is a stand-up dance. It brilliantly mimes the activating powers of electrical current:

Two critics, Edit deAk and Lisa Liebmann, sensed Haring’s meanings when he began to portray aspects of the electric boogie both in his subway drawings and paintings on canvas:

Haring also saw, in the electric boogie, both social truth and spiritual transcendence. At home in the style, Haring even drew a dancer who lights up a light bulb with current in his hand.
³³

To a wall of metal on FDR Drive near Ninety-first Street, Haring brought in 1984 all of his breaker/electric boogie expertise:

This was Haring at his best, the master documentarist in search of taste and fellowship, showing persons in the dance acquiring value through stealing fire from the age of electronics. He showed them bending, delaying, and transgressing a march toward a post-hominid future. He saw the life force, the subtle medicine, coded in electric boogie, hidden by its very popularity.

In the pages of his journals Haring mourns the closing of the Paradise Garage in 1987.

Haring dealt with the passing of this club by immortalizing certain moves which had impressed him there. At the same time he had come in contact with
capoeira,
an Afro-Bahian martial art as taught in New York and witnessed in Brazil. These styles, too, left traces in his imagination.

In 1987, Haring and Juan Rivera drove me to the Lippincott Foundry in North Haven, Connecticut. There they showed me Haring’s sculpture of two men playing
capoeira,
dovetailed in combat and self-assertion.
³⁵

Haring’s eyes flashed as he decoded a statue standing with arms curved before its chest, fists nearly touching. It was a classic move of the Paradise Garage, a sign, he explained, of metrical encirclement. Haring demonstrated. One dancer would capture, for a millisecond, a partner within this fleeting fence, right fist in left, and then move on to other moves.

This partial cage, encircling arms in the Paradise manner, haunts the best compositions of a one-man exhibition that Haring mounted at the Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles in June-July 1988.

In his conscious pursuit of museum attention, Haring decided to test the impact of the Paradise Garage choreography at monumental gallery scale. And the outcome of this risk was the Los Angeles 1988 dance paintings. In this self-selected genre, Haring pitted himself against the masters: Albers, Olitski, possibly Judd, but certainly Stella. He had placed his faith in the strength of the moves to bring off a triumphant vernacularization of museum art. And his style was changing. Spaceships and barking dogs were nowhere to be seen.

Now he was complicating fine art qualities of line and color with street extravagance meant to level hierarchical distinctions. First, he piled dancer on dancer in the totem-pole image characteristic of group break dancing. But as he did so, he fused two dancers in one. He painted, as well, their bodies in metallic red, not unlike a Don Judd series.
³⁶

He showed, again, the close relationship binding key Paradise Garage dancers by fusing in another composition four performers to form a square of one.
³⁷

The men join hands but “break” into difference: one bends his knees outward, one runs, and two are on the floor, upside down, flaunting hip-hop/
capoeira
legs, the former (at left) pretzeled, the latter (right) with one leg straight, the other bent, a
capoeira
move called
negativa
.

Then he repeated this Afro square dance omitting the legs, squaring the torsos, and coloring the bodies white lined in russet. Four frames emerge, Albers-like squares in green and gold and pink and blue.
³⁸
These capture our gaze with asymmetric phrasing, like the north wall windows of Le Corbusier’s 1955 chapel at Ronchamp in southeastern France.

Pollock is thus not the only twentieth-century artist whose critical vocabulary is that of rivalry.
³⁹
For, having taken on Albers (and perhaps Don Judd as well), Haring elaborated a further quintessence of the B-boy spider move with a lushness of color at heroic scale in the manner of Jules Olitski. The total absorption of lush coloration, red-lined olive dancers vertically poised against a jet black field, was a marvel of cultural transposition.
⁴⁰

In another work (
Untitled No. 7
), Haring’s characteristic “action lines” deepen, again, into something like the strokes of Jules Olitski. This strategy enhances gold-tinted break-dancers performing on a gray-blue field.
⁴¹
Their bodies fuse to form an abstract lozenge. Head over lozenge we have seen before: it is the structural gist of the famous Kota brass-plated (hence the yellow?) reliquary figure, alleged organizing principle behind the right-hand
Demoiselles
of 1907.

Next, Haring targeted dark Stella pinstripes of the sixties. Haring showed how it was possible to respect the master’s sobriety and self-control and still, within all that tight suppression, discover black sound and motion. Haring causes Stella’s concentric squares to curve, regroup, and ultimately form a body, bull’s-eye of pink burning in the head, rectangle of pink stoked near the heart. The right leg descends and bends to the beat; the left prepares a kick. Right arm celebrates the dancer’s state of being, reaching for heaven. Action lines, fat with pleasure, again take on roles as abstract units of design.
⁴²

The left hand’s reach and angle are culturally exact: electric boogie right-angle bending at elbow, wrist, and fingers.
⁴³

And so Haring conquers his rivals, masters their media, in the name of the eroticized fire of New York eighties dance.

One more time, in 1988, he deliberately disturbs the optical neatness of his powerful rival with the trace of black bodies in action.

The composition, monumental in scale, is a Haring master-piece.
⁴⁴
Two fugitives from the Paradise Garage take possession of the pinstriped line and turn it into dance. They celebrate their celebration, arms curving up in affirmation. So decisive is their fusion they become a pair of scissors. Their legs cut through ribbon. This frees a person, bound and immobilized, at the right.

Haring, at the end, confers a metaphor of liberation upon bodies debated by intensities of sweat and spirit. Black dance becomes a medium of transcendence: “Dancing [at the Paradise Garage] was really dancing in a way to reach another state of mind, to transcend being here and getting communally to another place.”
⁴⁵
It was lights and disco, but something else was happening.

Haring assumed, as he wrote in his diary, that the Paradise Garage and his dearly mourned friend, Bobby Breslau, had both gone to heaven. Now he is with them.

This is a blue moment . . . it’s blue because I’m confused, again; or should I say “still”? I don’t know what I want or how to get it. I act like I know what I want, and I appear to be going after it—fast, but I don’t, when it comes down to it, even know. I guess it’s because I’m afraid. Afraid I’m wrong. And I guess I’m afraid I’m wrong, because I constantly relate myself to other people, other experiences, other ideas. I should be looking at both in perspective, not comparing. I relate my life to an idea or an example that is some entirely different life. I should be relating it to my life only in the sense that each has good and bad facets. Each is separate. The only way the other attained enough merit, making it worthy of my admiration, or long to copy it is by taking chances, taking it in its own way. It has grown with different situations and has discovered different heights of happiness and equal sorrows. If I always seek to pattern my life after another, mine is being wasted re-doing things for my own empty acceptance. But, if I live my life my way and only let the other [artists] influence me as a reference, a starting point, I can build an even higher awareness instead of staying dormant. If I can take this and apply it, it will help, but again I am afraid. Afraid I’ll just ignore this whole revelation and remain in the rut and rationalize and call it human nature or some shit. But, I’ve been living like this for so long that it seems I’m doomed to continue. Although I realized it now, so that is encouraging. If I can do this, then it should not be hard to answer my questions and doubts about my forthcoming adventure. If I am all that is in question, then I should be able to answer all. Like past experience, there is always a certain magic that some call “Fate.” Lately it hasn’t been as evident, or perhaps I am just more ignorant of it, but I know that I’ll end up somewhere for some reason or no reason, but with some answers or at least be a little clearer on why I am and what I am aiming to do or what I am gonna do or just “do.” If this fate is negative, that isn’t negative because that is what happened and that then
was
the fate. I only wish that I could have more confidence and try to forget all my silly preconceptions, misconceptions, and just live. Just live. Just. Live. Just live till I die.