Haring, Keith

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HARING, Keith

HARING, Keith (b. 4 May 1958; d. 16 February 1990), artist, writer, activist.

Keith Haring was one of a number of U.S. artists who achieved rock-star levels of international celebrity in the 1980s. Haring's post-Pop brand of postmodern primitivism exploded across the art world and popular culture more generally, and he became the unofficial iconographer of the gay liberation and AIDS activist movements in Europe and the United States. Living as a gay artist with (and eventually dying from) AIDS attuned Haring to the perverse intersections of indifferent government and inadequate health care systems, the rise of neoconservative politics and fundamentalist religion, globalizing media conglomerates, and the 1980s cult of fame and celebrity. Haring engaged all of these issues in an art that was deceptively simple and sexually playful, bridging ancient and modern as well as popular and elite traditions. His signature was the absurdly naïve, primary-colored crawling baby, barking dog, or jumping man graphically limned with thick lines and drawn from such diverse sources as comic book art, hip-hop music, urban graffiti, South American street dance, and ancient petroglyphs.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Haring attended art school in Pittsburgh in the late 1970s before moving to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts. By 1980 he was curating other artists' shows and exhibiting his work in small galleries. In 1981 he began drawing with chalk on black paper in space allotted to large-format poster advertising in New York City's subway stations. His early social circle included so-called bad boy artists Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the latter of whom produced similar graffiti-inspired imagery in nontraditional urban spaces. Haring's first major gallery show was in 1982 at Tony Shafrazi Gallery and that year he participated in Documenta 7, the prestigious German showcase of contemporary art. In 1983 Haring exhibited at the equally prestigious Whitney Museum Biennial, and he went on to fulfill numerous international mural commissions. Along the way he appeared on MTV, associated with pop stars, socialites, and famous artists, and was profiled in both art and general readership magazines. He died of complications related to AIDS in New York City in 1990.

Visually recalling the style of Andy Warhol and other British and U.S. Pop artists of the 1960s and later, Haring similarly crossed between high and low arenas, exploiting the mass-media saturated, consumer-oriented cultures that reigned in global metropolitan centers in the late twentieth century. Although Haring produced artworks in traditional formats of painting and sculpture shown in the conventional art institutions of the gallery and museum, his imagery appeared in every imaginable format and medium: blimps, posters, videos, Swatch watches, the bodies of dancer Bill T. Jones and singer-actress Grace Jones, subway walls, Absolut Vodka advertisements, lampposts, leather jackets, set designs, buses, T-shirts, and album covers. In 1986 Haring further blurred art and commerce by opening the Pop Shop, a SoHo outlet for Haring-designed, mass-produced Tshirts, inflatable animals, posters, and other sorts of giddy consumer items. He was famous for handing out drawings like tips at restaurants and hotels. In his journals he wrote,"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" (Haring, p. xiii).

Haring was one of a number of 1980s gay male activist-artists who used visual imagery to critique the overwhelming power of the anonymous city and the manifest inhumanity of intractable corporate and governmental bureaucracies. With a satirical wit and bright colors, his art aimed to shock and cajole the complacent into an awareness of their physical world and the people who inhabited it. Continuing a long artistic tradition of collage and appropriation, Haring cut up and rearranged words from New York Post headlines, then pasted them as posters around New York City. One example was "Ronald Reagan Accused of TV Star Sex Death: Killed & Ate Lover."

His good-natured yet biting style of graphic agitprop (agitational propaganda) would be taken up in the late 1980s and early 1990s by AIDS activist groups like ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury, and Queer Nation. His imagery became inseparable from the "queer" moment from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, visible on confrontational posters, bumper stickers, bus billboards, and buttons. The best known are probably his Safe Sex images and his 1989 "speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil" figures with the now-famous slogan "Ignorance=Fear, Silence=Death, Fight AIDS, Act Up," which became an international slogan of AIDS activist movements.