Keith Haring & Jean-michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines
This double-header exhibition shows how two of the most influential artists of the ’80s forced marginalised voices into the mainstream.
DR DIETER BUCHHART, guest curator of the National Gallery of Victoria’s upcoming blockbuster exhibition of acclaimed New York City artists Jean-michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, is the spitting image of German actor Udo Kier; he has the coolly detached precision in the accent, the strikingly handsome face, and the hint of mad passion behind the eyes. It’s quite fitting, given that Kier was rocketed to fame by Andy Warhol’s film Flesh for Frankenstein, and both Haring and Basquiat were protégés of the great pop artist. So, all roads lead to Warhol?
“It’s true, the time and the pace [of New York in the ’80s] was set by Andy Warhol,” Buchhart tells Time Out on a rare break from work. “It was his idea to cross borders and disciplines in art, and he believed you could be whatever you wanted to be.” It was a period of massive adjustment not just in the art world itself, but in the way artists were perceived by the general public. “He said the best artist is actually the businessman. That statement opened up everything, really.”
Basquiat and Haring took full advantage of this window, and in the process turned themselves into a byword for the city itself. “It was such a vibrant scene, in those days. New York was bankrupt, so you could get cheap rentals, you could get squat houses.” Haring in particular made himself synonymous with the streets of New York by painting an
exhaustive series of drawings on the subway walls. And Basquiat’s output influenced decades of street art to come.
And yet, Buchhart baulks at the title. “I wouldn’t call Basquiat or Haring street artists, actually. There’s no one more influential than those two, but while they reflect the life of the streets, neither artist was opposed to galleries or gallery art.” If anything, they were the darlings of the art community. Haring was something of a pop phenomenon, as famous as Banksy is today; Basquiat was an artist with enormous cultural cachet, dating an as-yet unknown Madonna.
The idea of mounting a major exhibition of the two artists – under the same model that brought us the fascinating Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei exhibition of 2015-16 – was brought to Buchhart by the NGV, and he was instantly hooked. “How these artists talked about politics, the way they created their unique line, their relationship to the city, meant it was easy to conceive of an exhibition where they could both inform each other’s work.”
It wasn’t just an artistic connection; Haring was a major champion of Basquiat, and a dear friend – something made explicit by the tender photo of the two artists that defines this exhibition. For Buchhart, given that both artists were famous for their output, one of the key challenges was deciding how to exhibit them in the same space. “You have to be very careful. You can’t just put masterpieces on the same wall. You have to find a way to let the works speak to each other.”
Both artists died far too young – Basquiat of a drug overdose at 27 and Haring of an Aids-related illness at 31. Haring was born two years before Basquiat and died two years after him. “Basquiat was the first person of colour to become an ‘art star’. Haring was a ‘pop star’, as big in the ’80s as Warhol was in the ’60s. They were friends and rivals.”
They lived and died together, in some ways, and their race and sexuality were subsumed in their works. Basquiat and Haring were the great outsider artists, forcing marginalised voices into the mainstream. It feels like their pairing is perfectly timed. ■
ÀNGV International, 180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne 3006. 03 8620 2222. ngv.vic.gov.au. Daily 10am-5pm (closed Christmas Day). $0-$30. Until Apr 11.
“They reflect the life of the streets”