IN THE WRITER’S WORLD | Keith Haring « Urban Molecule

IN THE WRITER’S WORLD | Keith Haring

26Jun08

In HaringLand
by Perry Brass

Last week I was lucky enough to go to the Skarstedt Gallery on the very luxe East 79th Street (20 East 79th, to be exact, in the heart of the super-high-rent district; you don’t rent here – you own) to see a Keith Haring show. Not just any Keith Haring show. The Keith Haring show. It was like Keith’s coming out party into the land of High End Art. The Skarstedt Gallery is in a stunning Beaux Arts mansion (Corinthian-leafed wrought-iron stair railings, double parlor rooms with polished hardwood floors, light spilling in from Central Park). It’s the kind of place that, to quote George Jessel, God would have put everywhere “if only He had the money.” It’s the kind of gallery where you’d expect to see Matisse, Picasso, super-valued American Abstract Expressionists and Pop painters like Da Kooning or Jasper Johns; the kind of place where art (or “Aht”) begins in the seven figures and then goes up.

So here we have Keith Haring – our Keith: Keith of the subway babies white-chalked at midnight, Keith of the outrageously pornographic iconography.* And the most amazing thing is that suddenly, here, in this setting Keith Haring shines. He deserves to be here. Almost 20 years after his death, at 31, of AIDS, Haring’s work now takes on the towering monumental aspects of transfiguring art. That is, the kind of art that does not simply engage the viewer, but makes him disappear: you are now exquisitely lost in it, profoundly submissive to it. It is an experience of sheer, divine, S & M sexuality, brought to you on a “public” level.

You don’t even do this in the dark.

And to me – one who had scoffed at Haring back in his younger and more dismissive days – this was a revelation. I remember too well the high Art-worshipping RISD-types who felt back in the mid-80s that Haring was pure humbug: popular bullshit at its best. He had gone from being underground to emerging into the klieg lights of NY celebrityville, pal-ing with Andy, Mick, and the Downtown crowd, opening up a Soho store called the Pop Shop to retail T-shirts, buttons, and plastic drinking glasses with his barking dogs, babies, and guys in 3-somes and more-somes, painting big public murals all over town (my favorite was a playground “Crack IS Wack,” seen from FDR Drive), getting into People magazine, and doing all of this in the bare span of a decade, less even than Van Gogh’s convulsively prolific decade of creativity. Then this beautiful young man died on Feb. 16, 1990. Such a definite punctuation for the bitter end of the Reagan decade.

Back then I thought, he had a gimmick and he used it. Easy as that.

That wonderful Keith Haring line: thick, juicy, controlled, and perfectly choreographed; the refined but simple repetitive images; the hot neony colors: all a gimmick. It was easy to dismiss him back then, and he did not get the close-to-fatal hype that Jean-Michel Basquiat, another graffiti-as-High Art-peddling painter got. But then Basquiat OD’d and Haring died of the queer scourge, and in the late 80s, it was still a lot chicer to die of the former than the later. I do remember Keith’s death. It hit me at a time when I was having too many of my friends die (death was around you constantly). It was part of the generalized nausea of the period.**

Haring came about at a time when it was difficult to be a gay artist, but it was also a time of huge social, financial, and cultural foment. The question was: could you capture all of this, and what would it look like?

It wasn’t until the 90s that I realized how Haring had captured the 80s so perfectly: the controlled, media-rific lines, the jumpy designs and colors. It was the only way you could look at the period, put it into a picture and come out alive. Keith didn’t, but the picture did.

So, there I was at the very elegant Skarstedt Gallery on East 79th Street, where I was told that the headliner of the show, a 1988 piece, this giant marvel of color and Keith-squiggles with just the most perfect amount of Jasper Johns drip in it called “Media Girl with Cigarettes,” had just sold for two and a half million bucks. Probably ten times more money than Keith ever saw in his life. Keith did not die a starving artist, but did not live in that stratosphere, either. That place where the air gets thinner (like the women), and the handbags and shoes talk in a secret language of their own: the celeb code of Excessive Value. Now Keith can talk in it, and I’m sure that some of my friends who still own original Keith Harings – the ones who had bought them back then for a song – can rejoice in that.

But the whole thing gave me a kind of funny feeling. Although Keith Haring now “lives” nicely in the Realm of Art, I truly wish he’d lived longer. Not just to be a fluky vogue like the recent discovery of Chicago’s Henry Darger, his obsession with little girls toting penises. But to have really progressed as an artist. To have left that hormone-fueled creative acceleration of youth, to have pulled the picture so far inward – and then outward – that the next step would be a revelation to us all, something so profound that on leaving its sight we would feel genuinely bereaved.

That’s the place where art becomes so powerful, so mysterious, that it’s frightening. It’s where, as an artist, you’re reduced to being the bashful husband of some bloodsucking goddess-turned-bride.*** I think Picasso must have felt that way about his own talent, as likely did Cezanne. That immobilizing power of art reminds me of a time, years back, when the Met’s exhibition from London – “Jewels of the Courtauld Gallery” – introduced me to the Cezanne still life I still consider the most amazing picture I had ever seen up to that point. I stared at the apples and oranges and teapot emerging from the marine-scape folds of the blue and green table cloth. I got so lost I almost stopped breathing. Then I became aware of another man who stood next to me. He was lost too. We couldn’t move. Our gasps became synchronized. I knew this stranger and I were now dangerously lost in the depths of art.

The stranger was dressed drab, businesslike. I was in jeans and a T-shirt. We were on the verge of tears, trying to possess what could never be possessed: that red daub on an apple with some perfect yellow streak of genius in it. The unsettling, distant ease of it, frozen forever in front of us, possessing us. I could easily imagine myself dying for it.

Keats experienced something similar “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer”*** but unfortunately I didn’t experience that at the Skarstedt Gallery. Still, I am glad I could experience Keith Haring again in that setting. I imagine looking into his eyes looking into those colors as he made that kinetically, exquisitely controlled line. Keith, smile now please. You’ve earned it.

Notes:

*A big word for what can be “read” in a painting: in Keith, even the blind could read that something subversive, hot, delicious or disgusting (depending on your point of view) was going on.
**The SOP Republican cyclopean consumption of dollars and life with AIDS as a sideshow, the same way we now have our Eat-It-Before-It-Eats-You mentality with Iraq in the same role.

more about Perry Brass