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Art

The lines that bind us all

Keith Haring creates a language that can speak to anyone about love, death, war, intolerance and culture.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published March 28, 2006

His most successful vehicle in his quest to democratize art was the Pop Shop, which he opened in 1986 in New York. An homage to the Pop Shop and other commercial ventures has been installed in a small gallery at the Tampa Museum of Art.

The exhibition makes no claim to comprehensiveness, and those unfamiliar with Haring's larger body of work might wonder, among the T-shirts and skateboards, why he was considered a fine artist.

Maybe the more interesting discussion is about how these inexpensive, mass-market consumer goods were proud expressions of his deepest beliefs about all art rather than cash cows to underwrite his "real" art. If they are rejected as serious art, so must everything else Haring ever created, including the six-digit paintings snapped up by wealthy collectors and museums.

Haring became famous as a graffiti artist. Unlike many in that genre, he enjoyed working in full sight of his audience rather than under cover of darkness. Drawing the Line, a video shown in the gallery with the exhibition, makes it clear he wanted people to interact as much with him as with the chalk drawings he executed on the black paper covering advertising space in subway stations all over Manhattan. It was a form of performance art.

He stopped doing subway drawings at about the same time he opened the Pop Shop, when he was making a big splash in the gallery world selling his work through the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery. Haring was derided at the time for selling out, but even before that, critics took aim. Robert Hughes labeled him a "disco decorator."

Haring shrugged off most of those remarks.

"I wanted to continue the same sort of communication as with the subway drawings," he said in an interview for his authorized biography, published in 1991. "These drawings had run their course, because they had achieved what I wanted them to achieve and that was getting the work out to the public. The main point is we didn't want to cheapen the art. . . . This was still an art statement. . . . Of course, the Pop Shop was an easy target . . . but I didn't care. It's an experiment that works."

Haring's line drawings, whatever they're on, rise above illustration because of the sophistication of the visual language he creates with those simple, but not simplistic, drawings. A student of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, Haring developed his own alphabet of figures, refined to instantly recognizable archetypes. The Radiant Baby is his most famous, an infant on all fours surrounded by an aureole of vertical lines. Haring uses the baby, and all his familiar primal characters, in various ways to pitch ideas about love, death, war, intolerance and culture, morphing and combining them so that their associations deepen as we get to know them better.

They are in that sense like characters in long-running sitcoms whose personalities become more fleshed out over time. The difference is that Haring keeps his cast anonymous everypeople, without features or voices beyond broadly eloquent gestures.

His cultural excavations are the most intriguing and ambivalent, but we mostly see straightforward messages in this show: anti-nuclear, anti-drugs, anti-AIDS intolerance.

What strikes me most is Haring's complete lack of resignation in the face of his concerns about the world, even when he knew he was dying. We see on the video, and in sketches in the show, his commitment to a social agenda. Haring, probably more than any other 20th century artist, used his celebrity to promote his beliefs. More than simply donating his art, he actively involved himself, especially when he could work with children. He was less interested in the grand gesture than in doing what he could to help in the here and now.

Haring's life had the same brave, sometimes inexplicable, naivete as his art. He said without irony that he loved visiting the city's bath houses, where he probably contracted the AIDS virus that killed him at 31 in 1990, because nudity did away with the kind of judgments we make about people based on the clothes they wear.

In a journal entry, he wrote, "The social responsibility that I find in my work is found in the line itself."

Watch him on the video as he makes one of his densely patterned murals and you see his complete control of it, needing no preliminary sketches or paint-overs. He wanted that line to connect him, and by extension his viewers, with the past, beginning with the earliest self-conscious human expressions found in cave drawings. "Art and Commerce" makes a case for Haring's belief that the line could connect us to our future, too, tethering us to our responsibility for it.

The Pop Shop closed in 2005. Haring's art, based on pop culture and public consumption, was probably a victim of its immediacy. Tastes change, and the public moves on.

In a bit of filmed performance art seen on the video, Haring paints himself into a corner. His last works indicate that he was moving in new directions, creating art that was looser, less hermetically devoted to his iconography, trying to paint himself out of his famous corner. We'll never know if or how his art might have grown and evolved. But we can see how, in its time, it was art that mattered.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com.

[Last modified March 28, 2006, 08:23:25]