happy birthday keith h

-
untitleds 1981

portrait of macho camacho
1985 by keith haring

someone from Portland Oregon came to my blog by searching Google for
'the message is the message' haring

i went to see Patti Smith at the Bowery Ballroom on her birthday in 2002. unexpectedly she covered Pale Blue Eyes by The Velvet Underground. i ended up passing out during it actually, right before my favorite line, from all the tobacco smoke around me, but anyway. right before playing Pale Blue Eyes, Patti Smith said, 'this is a request... but not from anybody in particular.' brilliant hotshit stage banter, i thought. i didn't feel like it meant anything though; there was just this pleasure of hearing those sexy words.

now this
this actually is a request from nobody in particular. if you know me, you know i read my site visitor logs every day. i get loads of hits from people searching for things like 'A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat by Keith Haring' because awhile back, i mentioned seeing that painting in a San Francisco Haring retrospective, when i was younger.

so i do have that image on hand, from the official Keith Haring biography by John Gruen. [the book is incredible- intimate and filled with Haring's art, and it's supercheap on sites like Amazon.]

--
now, for your pleasure

A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat
by Keith Haring, 1988

The heroes in front of the Moscone Center are always plenty for me.

Top: Kermit Oswald 1981. The photo is from his own collection, but I don't know who snapped it. Kermit was Keith Haring's best friend throughout his childhood, and when Keith was briefly studying commercial art at a now-defunct art school in Pittsburgh, Kermit organized a carful of Keith's friends to all go visit him as a surprise, in conjunction with some art thing Keith was doing there at the time. Kermit was surprised by how much this touched Keith, his major impression of the experience being that Keith Haring, the artist, was 'obviously on his way'. Kermit saw the edges of a star expanding fast, fusing light. He also remembers that Keith tried to talk to him, but something stalled and failed. He remembers being embarrassed without understanding why.

^that's interpretive, some of it. K+K were of course best friends; the Pittsburgh carful happened; the 'obviously' quote is real. The remainder =how I read one of the memories Kermit shares in Keith Haring's official biography [1991], a book composed of quotes from Haring and people who knew him [family, friends, boyfriends, artists, musicians, Timothy Leary, etc]. Kermit Oswald has a few long passages. I find myself absolutely stuck on his story.

different scene from Kermit, in his own words [emphases mine];

When Keith and I graduated from high school, Keith went off to Pittsburgh, and I enrolled at the Kutztown State Teachers College, which is now called Kutztown State University. [...]

Around 1977, I was into chalk drawings, which is part of a well-kept secret. I did them all over the university. I did them on every wall... I was getting sick of working in the classrooms. I was sick of making objects that nobody was paying attention to. So I decided to take my art to the streets.

In addition to the chalk drawings, I did chicken-fat drawings, which I did on the cafeteria steps. I did salt water drawings on the gymnasium floor, to represent sweat. I was making paintings with salt. I was carving wax. I was experimenting all over the place. So these were pretty aggressive works which I did all over the campus , and I was nearly thrown out of school. I lost my student job. I was stripped of financial aid. I have nasty letters from the president of the university.

Well, when Keith came to visit, I showed him my stuff, and he said, 'This is urban guerrilla art!' It really raised the hair on the back of my neck- like, all of a sudden, something clicked. And he said, 'Kermit, on this one you're years ahead of your time!' And it scared the living shit out of me, because for the first time in my life the person I really looked up to and respected for having the balls to go after what he really wanted, was slapping me on the back for something he admired. I kept thinking to myself, 'What the fuck am I going to do to top this?'

Now: not to say that a single thing Keith H ever said to Kermit about loving Kermit's art was disingenuous. Not to say that at all. Keith was probably the biggest fan of Kermit Oswald's art who ever lived [for those familiar with another discourse, we might say Keith Haring : Kermit Oswald :: Morrissey : Linder Sterling]. And, certainly, Kermit makes his art sound completely prophetic for 1977. Just reading his descriptions of his work, you can tell Kermit Oswald is a fantastic rhetorician/bullshitter, or he is a genius that hardly anyone ever knew because he thought, quote, 'you can't really go after art; it's more like it wants you.' Still, Kermit eventually did get a workspace one day, a place in Nyc where he could paint, and like I said before, he ended up doing a whole bunch of paintings of trees that apparently no one found even the slightest bit interesting, because I've never been able to learn anything about them other than the fact that they exist[ed?]. I'd really love to see them.

By the time Kermit is interviewed for Keith Haring's official biography, in the late 1980s, there is still something he doesn't understand-

Even though Keith and I were separated and doing our different things, we still kept up our friendship. In fact, he'd come back from Pittsburgh and so we'd be in contact every thirty or forty days. And, we were always writing to each other. I mean I have these really beautiful letters from Keith and these incredible drawings that he'd send me. The letters didn't make sense, somehow, because I wasn't aware of the gay issue... all of a sudden this guy I've been spending my whole childhood with turns around and has an attraction for me.

So when I started receiving these really beautiful letters and drawings I said, 'What is this?' I mean, what does this suggest? Because part of me was experiencing some sort of guilt about what people might think about me. I mean, they'd obviously assumed that Keith and I must have had our moments. But I would point out we had done absolutely everything together but that! So it is what it is.

Yeah. First of all, what I would give to read those letters and see those drawings. Wow.

And yeah second, you probably don't become a major artist if people think you had sex with Keith Haring and this is somehow a problem for you. Rushing to point out that you did everything 'but' that is... 'what it is'? Is that actually a helpful way to think about it, 'it is what it is'? Maybe Kermit is right when he says that art has to claim you, and not the other way around, but I think he is talking only about himself.

of course
talking about yourself, to yourself
[as Kermit did]
there's a name for that. think it's
the rainbow connection?

anyway, yeah. discomfort Has
a fucking beautiful face [more images] -->

just found this the other day. the best kind of free art.

radiant baby

Radiant Baby, 1990
by Keith Haring

--
a point of reference. the Radiant Baby was actually born sometime around 1981, but i combed through my Haring books, and amazingly, this was the only decently scannable image of it that i could find. it's from the Icons set that was produced posthumously.

it was pretty startling to go through my Haring books and find only 1 decent Radiant Baby. but sure, of course. for a time, that image was so ubiquitous that yeah: who would want to see it in a Haring book? it was Absolutely Everywhere: the street, the museum, and bootlegged Japanese t-shirts.

to me the Radiant Baby will always be yellow, but i didn't want to recolor the scan using my computer. i think Keith H must have drawn them in pretty much every color he ever used. it remains his major symbol, and it was the second tag he originated after the laughing/dancing dog dude.

talking about the Radiant Baby in his official biography, Keith H says it started out as a cartoon drawing of 'a person down on their hands and knees' and it developed into a baby. to do Radiant Baby 2006, i basically thought: Radiant Baby's about 25 now, so what does s/he look like?

for me, probably Radiant Baby is a he, and he's living in New York still, and in fact, he's back on the streets again because the Pop Shop has closed. he's thinking about all the countries he hasn't visited yet, and he's wondering if he'll ever get there. at the moment, he's a little bit desperate, and he's doing something naughty for money. if you ask him to pick a number any number, he will pick the number 5. he trusts in the lines around him; he always has and he always will. he thinks about the subway like it's one enormous cock.

Radiant Baby 2006
[014 / 100]

i'm pretty sure that my art is fundamentally a line art, but i felt like experimenting with some fields of color today. since i basically don't know what i'm doing with ref to fields and color, i first wanted to make a super-'safe' place to paint fields, so i stuck [1] two of Keith Haring's dudes and [2] a quick impressionistic drawing of parts of Brooklyn on the page. then i made colored fields using a fountain pen and turquoise ink.

holy shit people, _fountain pens_. they're amazing!

oh, yeah, so far as i know, Keith Haring never actually drew any of his figures with a +. that's my addition.

--

The Sky Over Brooklyn

title from the literal English translation of the German title of the film aka Wings of Desire: Der Himmel Über Berlin, or The Sky Over Berlin

Ha, finding shit like this makes me want to manifesto, 'every [populist?] artist of any note, who has ever lived, has made use of the red + at some point.' Warhol's red-painted cross silk screening: easy for_instance. Maybe there are better red +'s in Warhol to discover.

The incredibly photogenic Keith Haring managed to make art that looked even sexier than he did. I hadn't really thought about him or his art for a really long time when I most recently started using the +; it wasn't a conscious reference to anything, though I have drawn the + in margins and shit since I was a very little kid. But Haring's art has been in my life an incredibly long time, as it's basically modern art training wheels. The cartoon version. I bought Keith Haring Editions on Paper 1982-1990 [the Katz book] for an incredibly low price, like $25 maybe, in Boston, over ten years ago. It's an outsize book so it's followed me anyplace I've had large bookshelf space, including to Brooklyn. Until I picked up that Mao Mag thing I mentioned, I hadn't thought about Keith Haring or his art for years. In my recent reappraisal of his stuff, I've been pleased to discover

[1] dude was a genius
[2] dude also tagged using the red +.

'Untitled', 1985. Yeah, basically all his works were untitled, and their number is staggering. It makes me want to sit down with all his work and title it. I mean, not like I feel my connection to the work is _that_ special or anything, but I'm competent at writing titles. Who does not love to title their artwork? That's fucking daft. It's totally the best part.

This 1985 one, I think I call it Red Plus.

God. Heroes you acquire at age twelve are easy to forget.

Not true. That's bullshit.

I don't know why I forgot about Keith Haring, the art darling who slips between Matthew Barney and Andy Warhol, a bigger and truer prophet than either. This past week, I reread his diaries and official biography for the first time since 1995. Why can't I be like that? Well of course I can. Why aren't I like that already? Girl? Gah.

From Keith Haring's diaries:
'You don't know me.
You never will.'

Ha. He wishes? But he doesn't wish that at all. What a queer thing to say. Something There, Something There, Something Here...

And:
'I don't care if I don't paint on it.'

Swoon.

Smart:
'The medium is a tool of the message.
The medium is not the message.
The message is the message.'

Killer K. Can you believe his best friend Kermit grew up to make _frames_? Jesus fucking christ.

George Condo on 'what is inside a Keith Haring painting':
'that suspense'.

all other entries are in the directory. some questions are answered at return the ring.