The Brooklyn Rail

Of the Brant Foundation’s Keith Haring exhibition, one Puck critic remarked, “Does the world need another Keith Haring show?” The answer—yes. The current administration’s gutting of HIV/AIDS research and medication access is precisely why we need more shows of Haring’s work, never mind all the other artists who died during the epidemic. Exhibited across several floors, including a cavernous hall—the foundation is housed in a former Con Ed substation—the survey of Haring’s early work from 1980–83 is nothing less than a monumental rallying cry, a trenchant reminder that before the posthumous mantle of blue-chip darling, Haring (1958–90) was a fierce social activist who, like that of so many of his fellow queer artists, forged work in an era marked by the looming specters of plague and homophobia.

A word about dates, the “when and where” of things, and the poetry retrospection affords. A life defined by such creative incandescence, cut down in its prime, is bound to be telescoped by memory. Haring the artist, in other words, transcends the short span of time he was allotted. Yes, his AIDS-related works—the ubiquitous “ACT UP” posters, Barcelona’s Together We Can Stop AIDS (1989) mural—are absent from the show, and the logic of its curators, Dr. Dieter Buchhart and Dr. Anna Karina Hofbauer, is sound: we know those works came later. But absence on the canvas doesn’t mean Haring wasn’t conscious of events unfolding around him. As he told Rolling Stone in a 1989 interview, the first person Haring knew to die of AIDS was the operatic, alien-glam performer Klaus Nomi, in 1983—both the year of Haring’s first East Village show at Fun Gallery and the closing of Club 57, a hub for the downtown scene. In other words, the East Village cosmos the exhibition conjures wasn’t pre-AIDS—it was the front line.

But what a universe it was, a constellation of white-hot stars, each with their own gravitational pull—Ann Magnuson curating ad hoc shows at Club 57 and Taboo, and Lady Bunny dragging it up at the Pyramid Club, not to mention Kenny Scharf, John Sex, and Tseng Kwong Chi, who was photographing it all in real time. In this kinetic firmament Haring was, by the early eighties, already a force to be reckoned with, producing work imbued with a feverish, improvisational virtuosity, among them his “subway drawings.” Standouts from the foundation’s show include several such drawings, early works evincing Haring’s fusion of bold iconography with elements of graffiti—velocity of composition among them—and an opportunistic eye for materials to work with. Haring began making subway drawings—composed largely with white chalk—after noticing the exposed black matte background of an ad panel in a Times Square subway station. Viewed together, the untitled subway works in the show—all dating from 1981 to ’84—become a codex of sorts for Haring’s iconography: featureless figures wildly contorted, some kicking, others jumping; vertical lines and nimbuses for sound, thought, and motion; robots and dollar signs; and, in several works, two-digit numbers marking the year of their making. As if to underscore the in-situ character of these works, Untitled (Subway Drawing) (1983) features twin panels—Haring’s jagged outline of a running figure on the left, and, on the right, a paste-up ad for Penthouse’s October 1983 cover star, Pia Zadora. In Haring’s subway drawings, like so much of his public work, New York is both muse and medium; he’s quite literally painting the city.

Climbing the heights of the vast central hall, Haring’s vinyl tarpaulin paintings offer densely composed, vividly chromatic counterpoints to the altogether loose and economical subway drawings. An untitled acrobatic assemblage (1983) of pregnant figures capped by Haring’s totemic “Radiant Baby,” and an untitled trio of figures (1982) rendered in green outline against a dense background of red glyphs and sigils are at once arresting and overwhelming. Bound within the four borders Haring drew around his images, a calculated frenzy and a touch of cartoonish lunacy are amplified by an incongruous, often jarring palette. Haring’s world is gleeful, though teetering on the manic—the boundary between ecstasy and despair constantly being redrawn.

Speaking of ecstasy, 1980s East Village nightlife was a hotbed of cultural exchange, a landscape dense with bars and clubs where downtown’s overlapping tribes—newbie SVA students, boundary-pushing drag queens, runaways and street kids—all mixed together. Bathed in strobes and blacklights, Haring was immersed body and soul in the village’s nightlife; his materials directly reflect those spaces and experiences. In a back room, several of Haring’s Day-Glo works restage the artist’s now-legendary Blacklight Room—the basement installation of his 1982 solo show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Made in collaboration with graffiti artist LA II, aka Angel Ortiz, Haring’s Day-Glo enamel paintings on metal and wood were exhibited under ultraviolet light while a hip-hop DJ added to the night’s club atmosphere. Early Haring iconography—barking dogs, contorted and faceless figures, UFOs and pyramids—all make appearances in the selection of Day-Glo works, but it’s the paintings’ phosphorescence that dazzles. Due to conservation concerns, the works are not exhibited under black light, but for a brief moment during the press preview, LED was swapped for UV, and Haring’s works glowed in all their clubland radiance. Far from mere gimmick, Haring’s capacity to draw upon all manner of materials and media—Day-Glo, chalk, spray paint, vinyl tarp—reveals a boundless spirit of curiosity and play.

Haring’s 8½-foot-tall terracotta vessel, Untitled (Tinaja) (1982–83), installed on the third floor, is the exhibition’s centerpiece. Traditionally used for wine or oil, a tinaja is a Spanish-style earthenware jar, an ancient form scaled to monumental dimensions. Haring was fond of visiting the Met’s collections of ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts, and in Tinaja there is something of the classical Greek amphorae and kraters with their banded depictions of mythological figures—Achilles, Dionysus, Artemis, and the whole Olympian lot. Trading Olympians for radiant babies, robots, and barking dogs, Haring’s Tinaja is a modern artifact, a record in clay of a brief, incandescent period we’re still reckoning with, a work that both transcends time and is very much of the moment. So, does the world need another Haring show, especially now? Consider this: a week after the Brant show closes on May 31, the federal government will cease maintaining HIV clinical guidelines.