Keith haring
Debates like “art vs graffiti” and “art vs politics” can’t be done nowadays without invoking the almighty name of Banksy (well, not his name of course, nobody knows who he is - maybe it’s me?!) but Banksy was foreshadowed in both these hefty arenas by the man I want to talk about in honor of Pride Month: Keith Haring.
Haring believed art should be accessible to everyone, so while he did publish work in galleries (to great success), he often eschewed them in order to showcase pieces in the most humble backdrop imaginable: the New York Subway System.
Keith Haring creating art on black ad space in NY subway
The City of New York would often hang black butcher’s paper over unused Subway ad-spaces and Haring decided to use chalk to decorate as many of them as possible. His aim was the purest it could possible be: to make people smile in a place where smiles are normally hard to come by.
During the early 80s he covertly decorated dozens of NYC subways, leading to numerous arrests, but as his trademark style grew in popularity he became an unofficial New York treasure and the cops started turning a blind eye - much as they do with Banksy today.
Haring gained such widespread acceptance and recognition that he eventually became globally recognized as an artist and philanthropist.
The Boxers, 1987 - Keith Haring (location Berlin, Germany)
Sadly however, both his life and art took a more serious turn in the years that followed. Haring contracted HIV and, as an openly gay man, he decided to use his fame to address public confusion over the topic. This was a time when AIDS was claiming thousands of lives, many of them in the gay community (to the point where it was incorrectly considered a “gay disease”) and public ignorance/reluctance to talk about the problem was making it spread faster.
Frustrated by the way society ostracized gay people and people with AIDS, while simultaneously adoring his artwork, Haring decided to fuse the two. By using the same playful style that had made him a household name, he started creating pieces along the themes of sex education, AIDS-ignorance and homophobia.
Ignorance = Fear, 1989 - Keith Haring
Take this image, where he adopts the Three Wise Monkeys from Japanese artistic tradition and weaves them into his own carefree style to comment on the dangers of being sexually ignorant. It’s a grim topic, but because his drawings remained playful, they allowed him to comment on things that would normally be seen as political hot potatoes.
Sometimes this jarring clash between whimsical doodles and their underlying meanings became harrowing, like this piece where his balloon-like figures are presented against the pink triangle foisted on gay people during the Holocaust.
Silence Equals Death, 1989 - Keith Haring
Suddenly, the stacked-together bodies take on a terrifying and unavoidable connotation which makes it hard not to talk about - precisely what Haring intended to happen. These images should make us feel uncomfortable because this was (and still is) a reality for many.
But at the same time, there’s something deeply inspiring about Haring’s approach. He took something as ugly as society’s contradictory love/hate for him and turned it into powerful, thought-provoking art.
When we’re faced with something scary, it’s easy to succumb to it. But Haring took his own mortality and the disease which claimed his life as inspiration and channeled them into creativity. By using nothing more than simple line drawings, Haring showed us that art can offer hope in even the grimmest of places.
