Keith Haring: 1978-1982
Brooklyn Museum
On view March 16 – July 8, 2012

Run-DMC and the B52s play on loops from various video monitors positioned around the fifth-floor Schapiro Wing at the expansive Brooklyn Museum. I first encounter twenty Polaroid portraits of a young man, his face slightly blemished and expressionless. He sports various haircuts, some combed carefully forward, others wild and curly, and even unadorned Mohawks. He is quite average. In the photographs—that are lined up in a long display case—the young man stands in front of unmistakable New York City backdrops, posing for the instant and accessible snapshot that is the essence of this exhibit. The young man, who would never get old, is the artist: Keith Haring.

The first large-scale exhibition to include much of Haring’s early work, this showing spans from 1978 through 1982, a period of merely four years. Though Haring would succumb to AIDS in early 1990, this still seems an incredibly short amount of time in the career of an artist. Despite this, these years were not only formative of his art philosophy, but also in producing a massive volume of strikingly diverse works, marked by eager creation, personal “search[ing]”, ideological evolution, and excessive communication. Over 300 pieces total, including works on paper, archival pieces such as journal entries, sketches and posters, and experimental videos decorate the immaculate white walls of the gallery. The variety is indicative of Haring’s idea that art, like every person, is in a constant state of transformation, and to capture single moments of space and time, like a Polaroid, is the most pure and immediate representation of art.

Keith Haring was a young man frequently in motion, sometimes quite literally; after high school he left his native Kutztown, Pennsylvania with a friend to hitchhike across the country following the Grateful Dead, a period documented in his journals, several pages of which are on display here. Haring’s ever-changing artistic statement bleeds from the pages, thick with sophistication, always preoccupied with the distance that existed between the art world and the general pubic. In a 1978 entry, Haring asks: “If the public is afraid of art, should we be afraid of what we have done to make the public afraid of art?” At this time, New York was experiencing a period of artistic and cultural revolution, but also of great political unrest, fear, and racial conflict.

It was the Reagan era, when nuclear warfare seemed imminent, the middle of the Machine Age, the Cold War period. There was an information gap, and Haring set out to bridge it. In one of his earliest experimental pieces, Painting Myself into a Corner (1978), a video made while still a student at New York’s School of Visual Arts, Haring paints a floor-sized canvas with lines and curves, moving to Devo’s post-punk beats, and mimicking Pollock’s practices of action painting. In a time where television and the moving image was king, Haring at once demands attention within the most accessible medium available, and expresses that physical and ideological movement, or evolution, indeed matters.

Other video projects on display include the visual representation of an acrostic Lick Fat Boys, where the artist physically rearranges letters on a wall to spell out the stages of the poem found in his journal entries, and Phonics, both from 1980, that shows tight shots of Haring and several friends sounding out words phonetically, reminiscent of classic segments from Sesame Street. An even more primal example of this type of basic communication is the twenty-five red-on-white series of symbols influenced by a semiotics class Haring took in Kutztown. They are merely shapes in repetition that could resemble hieroglyphs, or even our own alphabet, if we were to de-familiarize ourselves with it. They are as meaningful, or as meaningless, as the viewer wants them to be. His Manhattan Penis Drawings from 1978 can be treated similarly; they might be simply doodles sketched out while idling near the World Trade Center, or they could be an assertion of the artist’s sexuality. Whatever it may be, Haring was perpetually concerned with what his work communicated to an individual viewer, and at these early stages, his intent was immaterial.

In 1980, in an effort to further this idea that “the public has a right to art”, Haring began making chalk drawings on black advertising paper in the subway, perhaps his most defining project of this period. There are several of these drawings on display, many of which depict a spaceship attempting to “beam up” an Egyptian pyramid, or his signature b-boy figures in various headstands and top-rock poses drawn with motion lines, and one that wishes all New Yorkers a Merry Christmas. These simple images permeated the collective subconscious of a city in perpetual flux and have, like Milton Glaser’s ‘I  NY’ become instantly recognizable even to those who are not old enough to have experienced it.

Wallpapered in another section are Haring’s Xerox fliers, advertisements with a ransom-note effect for group shows at Club 57 and the Mudd Club, often curated by Haring himself and exhibited works by his large circle of artist friends including Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cut-outs, which rearrange newspaper headlines to read ‘Reagan Slain by Hero Cop’, among others, inform viewers of a more blatantly political message than other works of this period that perhaps marks an early shift in Haring’s artistic message.

It goes without saying the success of any curator (in this case Tricia Laughlin Bloom and Raphaela Platow, the project and exhibit curators, respectively) lies in their ability to establish a sensible and intriguing narrative using the artist’s work. The exhibit concludes, for me, on probably over one hundred Polaroids of Haring’s friends, acquaintances, lovers, and idols, semi-permanent proof of a vibrant social life many would have killed for, and some may wish to forget. Bloom and Platow paint what I would imagine is a memorable picture of New York at that time, the glamorous grunge so appealing to those of us who missed the ‘80s.

Though many of the pieces in this exhibit are considered experimental, like Haring’s hieroglyphs and videos, they flesh out his genuine depth and versatility as an artist or a visual linguist, or even a poet. Our age, where information is passed through innumerable media outlets that demand our simultaneous hyper-attention and distraction, allows everyone to be an artist or a visual linguist, or a poet. Information has become more accessible than ever, almost to the point of being inflicted upon our culture, and filtered through ready-made analytics. Many people in our generation may only know who Keith Haring is because of a Google Doodle created in his honor. How are artists like Haring, who respect and actively utilize the immediacy of art, going to respond to these alternating attitudes of passivity and hyperactivity? To quote David Hockney, Haring’s art existed “anywhere he stopped moving.” If Keith Haring were alive today, perhaps he’d tell us to stop, just for a moment.

by Robin Beaudoin