Keith Haring Journals (3 page)

Haring was constantly worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War. Drawing the family dog, barking at televised nuclear explosions, was a way of both expressing and dealing with his fears. All of which lead to an incredible moment in Hiroshima when he notices a photograph of President Carter’s daughter, Amy, as she viewed photographs of the vaporization of the city in August 1945: “The terror in her eye is so real and so sincere that it riveted me to tears.”

Babies took the sting out of feeling obsolete in the age of the smart machine. They healed, as well, atomic dread. Voicings of social conscience pulled in those who might have balked at subway venues for philosophic reflection—for he worked out many of the best ideas of his early style on black advertising paper on the walls of the New York underground. It was a brave and gutsy proving ground for his later museum masterpieces. Now, with the first part of his diaries, we have a clearer reading of his emergence into world fame, and the steps that led to it.

The phenomenal success of his personal ideographs blasted his private life, leaving no time for writing. When Haring comes up for air, on May 4, 1982, in the Brussels airport at Zaventem, Belgium, two years have gone by since the last written entry.

He is wry and self-conscious as he briefly returns to self-assessment minutes before his plane takes off: “It has been a long time since I have written anything down. A lot of things have happened. So many things I have been unable to write them. . . . In one year my art has taken me to Europe and propelled me into [the] limelight. . . . I don’t know what I want the world to be. But only I can make these ‘things.’ These things that are called the works of Keith Haring.”

And then up, up, and away, and we scarcely hear from him over the next four years.

Haring takes up his pencil again in Montreux, Switzerland, on July 7, 1986. Claiming that artistic biography was “probably my main source of education,” he told himself that if he did not return to his journals the rest of his tale might disintegrate in compilations of airline tickets and random, fragmentary notes from catalogues and interviews.

Once he thought his journal pretentious and self-important. But this was no longer the case in 1986: “For almost everything I write about ‘wanting to do,’ I actually did in the four or five years that followed.”

Take his sensible view of photography as ancillary to his art. In the early journals, he dreams out loud—“I can be made permanent by a camera.” By 1986 he had done just that, often with the help of a colleague in photography, Tseng Kwong Chi, and the results were fabulous—“photography and video [have] made the international phenomenon of Keith Haring possible.”

By now, in sheer logged hours and places visited, he rivaled Bruce Chatwin as an ethnographer of the night. He hung out the world over, enjoying “neon like you can’t believe” in Tokyo, savoring an odd party in Switzerland where the “music” was a recording of the sound of trains in Grand Central Station, and collaborating in Kansas with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Nevertheless, from time to time, Haring gets the blues: “I am wondering if the museum world will ever embrace me, or if I will disappear with my generation.” But it’s just a mood. He cures depression by adding on the work, “to stay busy and keep my mind and body occupied—and keep my mind off of what is disappearing around me. After Bobby Breslau died in January, I had to start to deal with a new situation of aloneness.” And so, more labor, more travel, more commissions: “I really love to work,” he notes on the run in Tokyo, “I swear it is one of the things that makes me most happy and it seems to have a similar effect on everyone who is around me while I work. Now Juan and Kaz and Sato and I are all joking and talking and really sort of ‘wired.’ ”

Naive, sophisticated, sexy, puritanical, confident, troubled, a man of the people who, at the end, had his last apartment designed in the style of the Ritz—the contradictions in the final sections of his diaries become acute. Where they most accumulate, there Haring is most alive. As in the case of sex and innocence.

Explorations of the night logically include Keith’s sex life, which, as it comes through the pages, taunts the prurient—with brevity and wouldn’t-you-like-to-know foreclosures—and challenges the conventional—with post-Stonewall confidence: “I’m glad I’m different.” The text, for example, does not linger on a night in London when Keith and a friend and two male strippers come together for safe sex in a single room, but you get the general idea. He documents himself at peace with Juan Rivera, New York Puerto Rican, his lover of the middle eighties, and he documents their arguments, both real and petty. Rivera helped him complete an important mural for the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris—“we both paint at the same time, I outline, he rolls.” He leaves us a quick-study cameo of Rivera: “Juan: forever handsome with a chameleon face that adapts to every place we go, making him look Brazilian, Moroccan, or in this case part Japanese.” Then he meets Gil Vazquez, another Puerto Rican, with whom he has a platonic relationship. He travels the world with Vazquez during his last two remaining years.

Before these loves, moments of loneliness yielded haikus of yearning: “. . . thinking about the smile exchanged on the street and nothing but a second glance and lots of dreaming.” And he answers rejection with tough-guy humor: “—don’t feel sorry for yourself—read Nietzsche, right?”

Keith’s sexuality, continuous and wild, clearly sparked his visual daring. He took, in his own words, “[sexual] energy into another form.” Sex lights up, directly or in code, his intermeshing forms. This was especially true when executing overall art, like a prick-arabesque he dreamt up for a painting colleague in 1979. No Freudian veil there.

Call this dimension to his work erography, as opposed to pornography. Erography transforms sex into a script of liberation, so that many can benefit, partaking of the freedom and the energy, whereas porn plays for single consumers.

Sex is not the only subject matter of his art. As Bruce Kurtz points out, it is only one of many facets .
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The diaries confirm this. There are powerful glints of desire, again and again, but Haring also writes about art, work, and play, with important digressions into artistic criticism and philosophy. Plus, something else happens.

Dare we say it, the counter-trope to sex in Haring’s life and art is innocence. This comes out in his respect for infants and for children. With the sincerity of children he builds himself a fallout shelter against cynics in the atmosphere: “Re-reading this last page I have to add the possibility of purity during the moments of working with children. When I do drawings with or for children, there is a level of sincerity that seems honest and pure.”

In Belgium he writes, again, of the “purity” of children, with whom he sat at a formal dinner. He found their “conversation always entertaining, and the humor fresher,” as opposed to the bankers, dealers, and collectors at the other end of the table.

Haring also believed that “you can do whatever you want in the privacy of a gallery or in a book,” but did not execute sexually explicit drawings in his public subway work “because of children.”
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Babies to Haring were sacred: “Babies represent the possibility of the future, the understanding of perfection, how perfect we could be. There is nothing negative about a baby, ever.”
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In his diary he adds: “The reason that the ‘baby’ has become my logo or signature is that it is the purest and most positive experience of human existence.”

When Haring painted a crib for the child of two friends in 1983,
¹⁰
the design, consequently, radiates belief that “children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form.”

Perusing this crib, you see Haring in action, you see that he can draw. But love made him jump, suddenly, from his own creations to Mickey Mouse. Fugitives from his subway series dance on the panels. Most of the figures are minted fresh, for the pure amusement of his tiny “client.”

As Laura Watt, a young art critic in New York, put it: “There is no ego in this painting whatsoever; the activity is pure, like the way you’d go about decorating a Christmas tree—for children, not for self.”
¹¹

At his best, when line and purity took over, Haring could move swiftly from a drawing of an athlete with a tank for a head, denouncing militarism, to a pileup of bodies, denouncing Idi Amin, then to myriad infants, a blessing on the edges of the world. In the process, he was able to give us Eden, the Fall, and the return to Eden, all at once.

In short, the richness of contrast in his work, babies and nuclear explosions, guys getting it on and angels swimming with the dolphins, a barking dog in the midst of technology, is unprecedented in twentieth-century art.

In the pages of his diary, where he alludes to this tension between terror and decorum, the tone is even. He fluently transcribes his dreams, fears, and aspirations. All of which facilitates recognition of the mind behind the art.

Keith’s toughness, combined with taste and spontaneity, was to serve him well in combat with rival painters of the twentieth century. Haring was always competitive. He could not, for instance, note the hanging of one of his works near A. R. Penck in the Cologne Art Fair of 1987 without commenting “I blew him away.”

All of which fits well Harold Bloom’s feisty vision of how the strong artist sets up shop and reputation. In his
Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages,
Bloom writes that “originality becomes a literary equivalent of . . . individual enterprise, self-reliance, and competition.”
¹²

Part of Haring’s genius, part of his pathway to recognition, was becoming strong through battle with masters of midcentury modernism, especially Frank Stella, but also, at a quieter level, Léger, Olitski, Alechinsky, plus Pollock, too, when Keith worked on the floor in an all-over mode. His use of line made him spiritual kinsman to the work of Jean Dubuffet and Stuart Davis, an affinity he himself mentions in his journal upon completion of an important mural on the coast of Belgium.

With a series of metal masks, particularly one with a twisted nose and expressive eyes, Haring once consciously answered the challenge of Picasso’s two right-hand faces in the
Demoiselles
of 1907
.
But this was more of a sport, a divertissement, and not important to his strongest works of 1988-89. Here he took, for example, what Frank Stella had thrown away, concentric pinstripes, and beat them into novel shapes answering the splendor of the moves of black vernacular dance of the early eighties.

Hogarth is part of the canon because of how he saw and documented the social life of eighteenth-century London; Goya for capturing not only the atrocity of war but the benisons of peace.
Los Desastres de la Guerra
are a cultural given; but how many know the other side of Goya, where he paints Spaniards at play—with kites (
La Cometa
), or bouncing a mannequin on a sheet of cloth (
El Pelele
)?

Haring, similarly, insinuates mushroom clouds, apartheid, and popular dance into our consciousness. In 1988 and 1989 he also recoded the silhouettes of New York break dancing and electric boogie dance in terms evoking the richness of classical modern art. In so doing, certain key steps of the Paradise Garage collided incredibly with the squares of Albers, the lush curves of Jules Olitski, even a trace of color, like red lacquer on galvanized iron, from Don Judd in 1967. Haring cracked the whip of beat-box rhythm over the “relentless sobriety”
¹³
of Frank Stella’s concentric pinstripes, restoring flexibility, and made them do his bidding.

How do we parse this formidable array of artistic perceptions, hidden as they are in transformations?

By returning to the diaries. Haring is explicit where he discusses his relation to the art of Léger and the challenge of Stella, as well as his passionate commitment to the dancing of the Paradise Garage, in SoHo, in New York. The latter, a most important font of inspiration, recalls Toulouse-Lautrec’s relationship with the Moulin Rouge, particularly where he drew a famous Parisian black dancer of that era in action,
Chocolat Dansant
(1896), caught in a Kongo pose.
¹⁴

Turn, now, to these challenges and sources.

1. Haring and Pierre Alechinsky. When Pierre Alechinsky, the Belgian member of the Cobra group, exhibited his works at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1977, Haring was in town. He saw the show: “I couldn’t believe that work! . . . It was the closest thing I had ever seen to what I was doing with these self-generative little shapes. Suddenly I had a rush of confidence.”
¹⁵