The Jackson Pollock of the hip-hop era
Keith Haring Tate Liverpool
Keith Haring’s funky cartoon images are some of the most ubiquitous of the past half century. The Pennsylvaniaborn painter, political activist and entrepreneur burst on to the New York art scene in the mid-eighties with an exuberant graphic style that is instantly recognisable and so apparently simplistic it makes Andy Warhol, the principle NY scene-maker of the previous generation, look like Michelangelo in comparison.
Thick lines describe Haring’s round-headed figures, while dashes and squiggles intended to emphasise movement bring an irrepressible energy to art that feels like a kind of upmarket graffiti. Endorsed by fashion designers and pop stars as much as art critics, he came to epitomise the turbulent New York Eighties of underground club culture and the Aids epidemic that killed him in 1990.
Yet while his imagery makes a fantastic impact on album covers, posters and, not least, the clothing sold in his Pop Shop boutiques, it’s been difficult to assess its value as art, as there’s never been a proper exhibition of his work in this country – until now.
It’s apparent from the beginning of this hugely entertaining show at Tate Liverpool that Haring was far more
complex as an artist and much more than the illustrator or street artist with presumptions that many – including, I admit it, myself – have taken him for.
A freely improvised and rather beautiful brush and ink drawing from 1978 suggests an influence you’d never expect from this master of brittle high style: abstract expressionism. In works such as Untitled (1983), with its free-form, hieroglyphic like brushstrokes, he feels not so much the heir to Warhol – a role he’s often assigned – more the Jackson Pollock of the hip-hop era. His desire to create a universally comprehensible art that would speak to people beyond the elitist art gallery was inspired as much by the utopian visions of the French modernist Fernand Léger, as by pop art or the graffiti scene.
As Haring’s paintings become tighter and more illustrative during the early Eighties, combining an ever more explicit homoeroticism with a startling violence – stabbings, kickings and even castration – the images fairly bounce off the wall with a sort of toilet-wall, kinetic energy. Featuring signature images such as the wolf-headed dancer and the crouching baby with its radiant halo of lines, paintings such as Untitled (1983), and Untitled (1984) – sorry, most of his works are called Untitled – may be none too subtle, but boy does Haring know how to create a sense of movement. Haring’s underlying theme is the male – especially the male homosexual – struggle for identity and self-realisation. And this appears a traumatic business. There are moments of tenderness, certainly: Untitled (1983), with its pair of faceless, round-headed lovers reaching towards each other might be seen as an emblem for our genderfluidity concerned times – without gender attributes the pair can become equal. Yet this idyllic and quite small image is overpowered by more troubled works, in which the male form is harassed and abused, and does the same to others. In Untitled (Apartheid) (1984), a huge black figure with a cross shedding red rays boots a small white figure out of the frame in an image presumably promoting the Anti-apartheid cause. A self-confessed teenage “Jesus freak”, Haring reacted against his parents’ evangelical Christianity, though his attitude to religion remains ambivalent. There are almost as many “radiant” crosses in this exhibition as there are phalluses – and there are very many of the latter.
The show takes us on an atmospheric journey through Eighties New York, with slides and films of the bespectacled, nerdy-looking Haring drawing in the subway or dancing preposterously for the camera, alongside images of bizarrely dressed clubbers and Aids protests.
A typical work such as Untitled (1983), showing an upright male figure apparently threaded through a horizontal male figure, combines a throwaway punk aesthetic with the
‘Haring came to epitomise the New York Eighties and the Aids epidemic that killed him’
decorative energy of an Australian aboriginal bark painting; and Haring cites African and Native-american art as influences. It’s also inescapably “Eighties”.
Yet the best of Haring’s work has kept its freshness through sheer gonzo invention: The Matrix (1983), a riot of phantasmagoric figures – a pregnant woman with a TV showing a $ sign for a head, a man with babies cascading down his arms – unrolling over a 30ft-long sheet of paper, the whole thing apparently improvised with brush and ink in front of an audience, is an extraordinary tour de force.
The show makes much of Haring’s role as an “activist”, citing his involvement in good causes, from Anti-apartheid to the Aids crisis, as though he was the first artist to have a social conscience. But in the show’s final works, created at the height of the Aids crisis, when he was aware that he was himself HIV positive, the politics and the art come together in a truly hellish way. Two square paintings on yellow canvas and tarpaulin, both called Untitled (1985), show a nightmarish sprawl of monsters morphing into genitalia or excreting tumbling piles of “Haring” men. Bringing to mind Bosch visions redrafted by the underground illustrator Robert Crumb, they might seem quite crass if their sense of self-disgust wasn’t so painfully real.
I went into this exhibition a Haring sceptic, and came out feeling I’d seen one of the shows of the year. Haring’s paintings aren’t all equally brilliant, but his world is evoked with a richness that gives even the slightest works a compelling aura. We’re given a vivid sense of how Haring illuminated a period that feels both very recent and hauntingly remote.
‘I went into this exhibition a Haring sceptic, and came out feeling I’d seen one of the shows of the year’
Until Nov 10; 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk