We went to Mons today to see the Keith Haring retrospective - a first in Belgium - at the baM (Beaux Arts Mons). I rediscovered Haring after years of oblivion. What I like about him is the obsession with the black line surrounding the drawings, which both confines and liberates meaning, the pure colour, the paint drops reminding you of the movement of the hand and brush across the paper.
The first time I read about him was in 1988. I had just finished my AFS year of studies in Belgium and there was an article about him in a magazine I got as a farewell present. There was a picture of Haring, naked, with his body painted in what I now know is a signature pattern, but at the time it basically reminded me of African and Aboriginal drawings (actually, these are also influences behind Haring's work, so I wasn't too far from the truth). The reason I also liked the picture so much was because I found it sexy.
Haring interests me too, because he was socially engaged and his art his about issues that have also touched my consciousness as I was growing up in the 1980's and the 1990's, the devastation of the AIDS epidemic in particular. He himself would die of AIDS in 1990. Haring also dealt through his painting and artistic interventions with issues such as racism and the scourge of crack cocaine.
I read in the baM catalogue that he dealt with very serious issues in a light and fun way. I agree. But what I also find about his artwork is that he managed to communicate widely, directly and with force to people all over the world. And he was able to create a language all of his own that didn't need to borrow any meaning from the outside world, because his creations were iconic per se. Haring did signature painting, i.e. a style that could be easily identified anywhere it showed.
I learned about Haring's close collaboration and contact with Grace Jones and Madonna, and their shared involvement in New York's underground culture of the early 1980's (I was faraway in Lisbon at the time just being a kid, but also becoming slowly aware of this other world out there). Grace Jones and Madonna, in particular some of their early work, have also left a mark in me.
It's not just the "gay dance floor thing" and the "alternative club scene" that I like (and somehow identify with), which Haring, Jones and Madonna shared, but also the fact that they brought the "New York City street" into that expression, transformed it and made it universally appealing and culturally relevant, despite the negative pop connotation and the criticised mass consumption label. The street reclaimed a voice in the art world through and because of their work. They were counter-culture and the fact that they appealed to so many people did not necessarily make their art less worthy.
This brings me back to Haring. His mass production art, its mass appeal, instead of reducing the value of his artwork, are just constitutive elements of his artistic production. They actually enhance the relevance of what he did, because so much of his paintings is about communicating through symbols, the most ancient and important art form of all, to the widest audience possible. And all artists want to see their emotions and thoughts reach as many people as they can, because art - particularly how we understand it today - is so much about individual expression and its projection in the world. So many of the roots of my own intellectual upbringing lie in there too.
I guess you can tell that all this made the trip to baM and to Mons well worth it!
