-Outer Appearances from the Annals of the Gay & Lesbian Review
In 1980, graffiti-inspired chalk drawings proliferated throughout New York’s subway system. Keith Haring’s whimsical, cartoonish iconography was everywhere. Zapping spaceships, pulsing TVs, barking dogs, crawling babies, flying angels, leaping porpoises, and smiling faces abounded.
Haring’s “tagging” was soon legitimized by the art world; his first gallery show was in 1982. One year later, he was featured in biennial shows at the Whitney Museum and at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavillion in São Paulo. Before long, he was collaborating with Andy Warhol, Madonna, Grace Jones, Jenny Holzer, and Bill T. Jones in galleries, museums, theaters, outdoor spaces, and dance clubs. Next, his artistic œuvre expanded to include ink drawings, woodcut prints, paintings on tarpaulins and wood, aluminum sculptures, sets and costumes, and large-scale outdoor murals in New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris, and Melbourne, and on the Berlin Wall. By 1986, his very own Pop Shop in SoHo sold branded merchandise, including pins, T-shirts, calendars, watches, magnets, and prints.
In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with HIV, which only seemed to escalate his artistic output. He was ubiquitous, even designing a label for Absolut Vodka and a carousel for an amusement park in Hamburg. Two years later, at the age of 31, he would be dead of AIDS. What he achieved in just ten years of public art-making is astounding.
Even before his furtive subway chalk drawings, Haring was posting absurdist agitprop collages, guerilla-style, on walls and lampposts, composed of headlines from The New York Post to create messages like “Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope.” His 1985 painting Untitled (Self-Portrait), in which his own face is covered with red spots, was grimly prophetic. A raw sexual energy permeates his later works, as depictions of disease and death come to dominate. In many of these drawings, amorphous, multi-limbed, grotesque monsters are being penetrated through various orifices in a frenzied kinetic energy. This work hints at new directions for the artist that were never fully realized due to his premature death.
Haring was always out as a gay man and donated numerous designs for LGBT causes, notably ACT UP, National Coming Out Day, and Day Without Art (World AIDS Day). Most iconic, perhaps, was his 1989 Silence = Death acrylic on canvas showing a pink triangle filled with his schematically outlined figures covering their eyes, ears, and mouths. Notebooks of the numerous drawings of penises that he did in front of Tiffany’s and the Museum of Modern Art are always fun to see as well.
(Originally from the March-April 2015 edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review)