Keith Haring
Keith Haring
1958-1990
Keith Haring’s simple yet instantly recognisable images, inhabited by dancing figures, dogs and flying saucers, are telling of the artist’s intent to make art ‘for everybody’. Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, he studied at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Here he became fascinated by the vibrant scene of graffiti and alternative art, which complemented his belief that art was meant to be a communal, uniting experience. Haring started producing his spontaneous drawings in the early 1980s, using empty advertising panels in subway stations. Made quickly to avoid the police, and often to the sound of music, the fluid lines and kinetic forms of these images reflect the process of their production. These figures soon developed as a unique visual vocabulary which Haring would employ to express his social and political concerns. Playful yet provocative, they continue to sparkle engaging artistic and social conversation to this day.
Keith Haring’s simple, bold and instantly recognisable Pop Art drawings are chequered with dancing figures, barking dogs, flying saucers and the like, that radiate movement and energy. In a graphic style composed of simple lines and bright colours he raised awareness about social concerns and reflected on universal human conflicts like love, sex, war and death. Armed with his mantra ‘art is for everybody’, Haring composed a wide-ranging visual language that can be found on t-shirts, buttons, caps and the walls of prestigious art galleries alike.
Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania and raised in nearby Kutztown, Haring’s early love for drawing was nurtured by his father who taught him basic cartooning skills. He enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh in 1976 but dropped out two years later to move to New York where he continued his studies at the School of Visual Arts (SVA).
In New York, he was greeted by a buzzing alternative art and graffiti scene, filled with artists like Kenny Scharf and Basquiat at its gravitational centre. Haring was deeply moved by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1976 installation art piece ‘Running Fence’ which has the underlying, firm belief in art as a uniting, rather than individualistic, experience.
Using empty advertising panels in subway stations, in the early 1980s Haring created hundreds of subway drawings. His spontaneous drawings were executed in swift and confident moves, in part to evade the notice of police. Despite his conscious subjects, Haring’s way of working was also strictly intuitive. With no sketches to guide him, he followed where his line led him, like a dance. Haring’s fluid lines and moving forms are echoed in his process as he typically worked while listening and dancing to music.
Soon, his drawings began to appear all over the city’s streets and walls, continuously catching the attention of the everyday commuter, the mainstream media and art world. In 1986, Haring opened Pop Shop, a fun boutique that offered an immersive experience into his art and sold merchandise bearing his imagery at affordable prices. Warhol, fascinated by Haring’s stellar success, befriended the 30 years younger artist, sparking a lifelong friendship. From Warhol, Haring developed further his understanding of the crucial relationship between commodity and art.
Having studied semiotics at SVA, Haring understood his images to be the vocabulary of his unique language and was conscious of the messages he sent out. He became an outspoken advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness and used his popular imagery to support Anti-Apartheid and other political movements.
Haring produced more than 50 public artworks, many of which were created for hospitals, children’s centres and orphanages. In a ‘humanistic gesture’ he painted a mural on the Berlin Wall three years before its fall, expressing in vibrant colours his belief that the human bond transcends borders, cultures and politics. Notably, his 1986 mural ‘Crack is Wack’, which can still be seen in Harlem today, warned of the harmful effects of the drug.
Haring died of AIDS-related complications in 1990, yet the spirit of his devotion to a truly public art lives on. Contemporary artists from Banksy to Shantell Martin continue Haring’s legacy of engaging in meaningful conversations through playful and provocative imagery.
BABY
Keith Haring
A lover of semiotics, Keith Haring’s generative career is defined by the repetitive use of images as symbols, including a crawling baby. From its first emergence in 1980 until the artist’s death in 1990, ‘Baby’ was a recurrent and crucial feature of Haring’s visual language.
Haring’s practice was notoriously quick, producing his images with just a single, continuous line. In his early years, Haring drew a man crawling, however, this motif soon morphed into ‘Baby’. Speaking of the development, Haring stated ‘at first, the more I drew it and the more the proportion of the head got bigger in the way that I drew it, the more it got referred to as a baby’.
Haring’s ‘Baby’ is a simplified line image of a baby crawling, its head enlarged. This original motif developed into various forms, including ‘Radiant Baby’, in which the baby is surrounded by sun-like rays. For Haring, ‘babies represent the possibility of the future, the understanding of perfection, how perfect we could be. There is nothing negative about a baby, ever’.
Too, Haring experimented with the multiplication and juxtaposition of his motifs. He was captivated by the cut-up approach of the Beat writer William S. Burroughs and artist Brion Gysin and therefore frequently arranged his ‘Baby’ images into different configurations with other motifs. Speaking of the process, Haring stated that he was ‘juxtaposing these different signs so they would have a different meaning depending on how you combined them’.
While the baby motif was not an intentional invention, it nonetheless became a defining feature of Haring’s oeuvre. Haring referred to ‘Baby’ as his logo or signature for the reason that ‘it is the purest and most positive experience of human existence’. Effectively, ‘Baby’ exists as a constant reminder of the underlying optimism that pervades Haring’s work.
DOG
Keith Haring
In the 1980s, Keith Haring was emerging in the New York art scene, producing graffiti works across the city and subway stations, depicting what would become his most iconic motifs, including dogs. Haring’s ‘Dogs’ are varied, from the ‘Barking Dog’ to the ‘Dancing Dog’, each imbued with its own symbolism that reflects the artist’s lifelong dedication to semiotics and social issues.
Haring’s ‘Dogs’ did not begin as such, but rather as indecipherable creatures. As is true of his ‘Baby’ motif, the more he drew these creatures, the more they began to resemble dogs.
Perhaps the most recognisable of his ‘Dog’ motifs is ‘Barking Dog’, a simple line drawing of the animal on four legs, mouth open with lines emerging to indicate sound. In barking, the dog become symbolic of both protectors and predators; it wakes viewers up to the oppression of minorities and the intentional ignorance of the AIDS crisis, as well as representing abuse of power, be it governmental or police.
‘Dancing Dog’ recalls the importance of ancient Egypt to Haring’s career, the hieroglyphic symbols influencing his focus on semiotics. The motif recalls the ancient Egyptian god Anubis, a dog like god who watched over the dead. Therefore, ‘Dancing Dog’ is often portrayed handling human forms. Too, ‘Dancing Dog’ recalls the Christian notion of the ‘dance of death’, nodding to death as the great equaliser.
Haring’s ‘Dogs’, seemingly playful motifs that pervade his visual language, are representative of humans and animals. ‘Dogs’ were continuously used throughout Haring’s career to explore semiotics and the changing nature of meaning. Matching ‘Dogs’ together or pairing them with other motifs from his repertoire, ‘in different combinations they were about the difference between human power and the power of animal instinct’, nonetheless always discussing greater issues of contemporary society.
APOCALYPSE
Keith Haring
Across his career, Keith Haring produced works that are both playful and provocative, sites of visual exploration of everyday joy and sadness. In 1988, the same year he received his AIDS diagnosis, Haring collaborated with the influential Beat poet and novelist William S. Burroughs on the ‘Apocalypse’ series. In 10 prints, Burroughs produced text while Haring visually translated onto paper the intense emotions and passionate issues that occupied his life at the time.
Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin’s 1977 book ‘The Third Mind’ argues that language can be broken down to ‘cut ups’ and rearranged to produce alternative meanings. This informed Haring’s approach to constructing his images, arranging his motifs and experimenting with how their meanings change accordingly.
Against a vast white background, ‘Apocalypse’ is covered with Haring’s thick, black lines, spurts of colour and action-packed imagery. Haring overlaid mainstream symbols and collaged images reflective of mass consumerism, religion, art and advertisement with his own iconic motifs as well as stream of consciousness thought.
Haring characteristically produced works that were paradoxical, juxtaposing life with death, religion with sexuality, heaven with hell and political activism with conformity. This is true, too, in his ‘Apocalypse’ works, where a single work can depict a picture of Jesus and phallic imagery, as in ‘Apocalypse 5’ (1988).
Completed just two years before Haring succumbed to AIDS, the ‘Apocalypse’ series is indicative of the intensely emotional life of a man who watched his friends suffer and die from a disease that he now had. Haring’s images are raw but also distinctly clever, evocative of his perennial fascination with semiotics. Depicting computers, sperm, devils, halos and references to divinity, Haring’s ‘Apocalypse’ works reflect the complexity and torment he was experiencing but the nonetheless optimism and love for life that pervaded his career.
POP SHOP
Keith Haring
Keith Haring famously got his start as an artist by producing chalk drawings over blank subway advertisements. These graffiti works were intended to be experienced and enjoyed by people from all walks of life. By the 1980s, Haring stopped producing these drawings, in part because they were being stolen and sold, effectively contradicting their purposes. Instead, in 1986, Haring replaced them with his Pop Shop, a place where his work could be affordably purchased.
On Lafayette Street in Soho, New York, Haring first opened his Pop Shop, which remained open until 2005. He intended it to ‘be a place where, yes, not only collectors could come, but also kids from the Bronx’.
The Pop Shop was unmistakably a Haring enterprise, adorned by his iconic murals and selling commercial products covered in his characteristic motifs, such as ‘Baby’ buttons and ‘Three-Eyed Face’ t-shirts. Haring was adamant that this was not a commercial venture, stating that ‘this was still an art statement’.
Too, he also sold prints depicting his most widely recognised motifs, rendered in blocks of popping colours. These included his ‘Figure with a Hole in its Stomach’, a motif symbolic of death and human fragility and ‘Best Buddies’, generic embracing figures that represent universal love and acceptance.
In 1987, Haring opened a second Pop Shop in Tokyo. While both shops have since closed, the spirit and accessibility of them remain alive in the t-shirts, tote bags and buttons covered in his motifs that continue to be produced. Be they in the form of commercial objects or print, what remains clear is that the works sold by the Pop Shop were innovative and unprecedented forms of public art, continuations of Haring’s fundamental belief that ‘art is for everybody’.
ACTIVISM
Keith Haring
Keith Haring’s oeuvre, peppered with energetic and optimistic imagery, is also largely defined by his activist work. Uncomfortable with his overtly conservative parents, Haring nurtured an early passion for grassroots political activism to which he dedicated his short life.
As an openly gay man in a world plagued by AIDS and homophobia, much of Haring’s work advocates for the LGBT community and for awareness of the epidemic that was destroying it. The era addressed the AIDS epidemic with harmful policies and suppression of research which created an aura of fear within the gay community of revealing one’s own condition. Resultingly, Haring produced powerful works such as ‘Ignorance = Fear, Silence = Death’. This work, defined by three figures in motion, each with their hands over their ears, eyes and mouth respectively, encouraged people to speak up. Produced in 1989, a year after Haring receiving his AIDS diagnosis, each figure is shown with an ‘X’ on their chest, a marker for figures that are HIV positive.
Haring also approached issues like the Apartheid in South Africa with his work ‘Free South Africa’ (1985). These images of a large black figure with a white rope tied around its neck, stomping on a smaller white figure portray the power of the oppressed over the oppressor.
Too, Haring also raised awareness about drug use, particularly of crack cocaine. He often developed catchy slogans to address these issues, as in ‘Crack Down!’ (1986), a screenprint of a foot stomping on a pipe and two figures holding it.
Haring’s visual language is captivating and, when paired with his popping colour, energetic and joyous. He used his position and attention-grabbing aesthetic to his advantage, producing not only lovely pictures of figures embracing, but works that address crucial contemporary issues that were deserving of attention.
