Keith Haring and the Downtown Art Revolution

As New Yorkers of that era will recall, a public artist named Taki 183 had covered the city with his magic marker tag in the late 1960s, and this was followed by a carpeting of graffiti on every public surface of the city. There were artists covering train cars with bubble-style spray-can work, and there were gangs tagging buildings to delineate their territory. The graffiti and tags were a way for poor people and artists of color to reclaim New York as their home turf. It was an expressive insistence on their presence, their point of view, and their experience as a set of communities that had been systematically silenced.

Since the East Village had a strong Nuyorican presence, graffiti abounded. And since it had a strong art-scene presence, aspiring artists participated as well. There was someone named “Rene” who repeatedly insisted on walls: “I am the best artist.” There was “SAMO,” a collaboration with Al Diaz that was eventually claimed by Jean-Michel Basquiat. And there was a band called Missing Foundation that covered the neighborhood with an upside-down martini glass and the warning “The party’s over.” Some graffiti artists of color, like Lady Pink and others, also began to migrate into the art world, with their art becoming part of the commodity-objects gallery system.

Haring soon got involved in the graffiti scene as well as the queer scene of Manic Panic hair dye, the B-52’s, and cheap Polish food. A hard-working and perceptive young man who enjoyed imagining, he soon became friends and collaborators with an exciting list of artists and East Village types: not just Basquiat and Kenny Scharf and John Sex, who also died of AIDS, but also lesser-known but iconic women dancers such as Molissa Fenley and Simone Forti, the actress Ann Magnuson, and, of course, Madonna.

How does a student at the School of Visual Arts end up sliding into the lives of such an array of exciting and influential artists? Is it too easy to say that things were different then? There were fewer artists, because the professionalization process of MFA programs with their homogenizing selection apparatus was just kicking off. The city was economically viable, and so edgier, more innovative people had a chance to live there and make work. Not every single thing had been commodified, and marketing and branding were not the foremost interests of younger people. It may be fair to say that given the different social conditions, artists were fewer and more interesting and therefore the field was more open and less controlled. And because there was a collective process of discovery taking place, everything was interdisciplinary, and most people—even the nerdiest writers like myself—ended up on a stage performing something. Improv was a way of life, and collaboration its only means.

Haring’s initial forays into this exciting world of public art were wheat-pasted posters with overtly political themes combining anti-Reagan sentiments with tabloid formats. But soon he was drawing on the empty black advertising panels at the F train station near his new place in Times Square. He used low-dust Crayola Chalk and started with his lifelong referents: barking dogs, radiant babies, and the new addition of UFOs. These drawings victoriously passed the greatest test of their popularity: They usually remained intact, neither written over nor taken down. Subway riders showed respect for them and treated them like artworks. A marketing genius with a natural instinct for advertising, Haring made a thousand tiny lapel pins with radiant babies on them and handed them out as his own version of free publicity. The photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, who worked with Haring at the Mudd Club, started documenting his street art. Within a couple of months, Haring had received two summonses and was handcuffed by the police in the Prince Street subway station for his pains. Over the next five years, he made more than 5,000 chalk drawings in all five boroughs.

Haring’s first solo show in New York was in the Westbeth Painter’s Space gallery in February 1980. From there, his rise was meteoric by most measures, while his five-year romantic partnership with Juan Dubose was grounding. Gooch provides plenty of insight into Haring’s developing career and persona and the changes in the surrounding art world, but at times he is less successful in capturing the foundational cultural explosion of “Downtown,” which is odd because he was part of it. Some of the context he does provide feels by-the-book and lifeless, perhaps because there is a lot of pain there for the survivors of AIDS and gentrification.

Despite Haring’s worldwide fame and postmortem permanence, his greatest accomplishment is how he faced his own suffering and impending death from AIDS and his contribution to the larger AIDS community. Like many, Haring assumed that he was probably infected based on his sexual history, and he had early symptoms like swollen lymph glands even before an HIV test was developed. As his first close friends died, Haring’s fears turned to the inevitable, and in 1988 he discovered two Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions on his body. Yet he continued to work incessantly, and a new content emerged: He made a painting based on the “Silence = Death” poster created by a collective and then donated to ACT UP. This painting accompanied dark works about the greed of American industry. Although Haring and Dubose were no longer a couple, when Juan became sick with AIDS and ended up in St. Luke’s Hospital, Keith visited him there and arranged for access to AZT (then being misprescribed as a stand-alone therapy) and a television set, but Dubose died the next day. In Barcelona, Haring created his first AIDS mural, with a trademark snake’s head and a syringe.

By 1989, Haring had fewer than 20 T-cells. AZT was making him anemic and not helping. He was on the drugs of the moment: DDI, Bactrim, and alfa-interferon. At this point, Haring joined ACT UP and, in an unusual act for celebrities at that time, agreed to come out publicly as a person with AIDS when he signed a direct-mail fundraising letter for the organization. The letter netted $70,000, in addition to the cash donations he made to ACT UP and his gift of a fundraising poster that read “Ignorance = Fear.” He also paid for buses to the Montreal AIDS Conference and for an ACT UP action in Washington, D.C., and can be seen in Jim Hubbard’s documentary on the group, United in Anger: A History of ACT UP. Haring’s openness about being infected and his decision to join the collective fight-back resulted in news of his diagnosis being discussed in a Rolling Stone interview, followed by a notice in “Page Six,” the gossip column of the New York Post.

Radiant’s final chapter, which depicts the end of Haring’s life, is rich, emotional, and compelling, and also features the best writing in the book. Since Haring was a highly energetic and productive person as well as someone with a lot of money and social resources, the record of his final days is a kind of clichéd dream of dying fully: He traveled around the world, took his friends and parents on high-end trips, partied, created artwork for poor communities and private wealth. He relied on and thanked friends and supporters, and he made art for as long as he could.

Gooch’s book helps to fill in the crater that is the untold story of the queer art movement after Andy Warhol and before Rent—one of the largest gaps in LGBTQ art-political history and in the story of the city itself. While a number of biographies are appearing or in the works, a much larger and more sweeping public history needs to be amassed of the thousands of men and women who made art in social and geographic proximity from 1979 to 1995: who they were to each other and what they discovered. Hidden in that collectivity of mostly unrecognized and underrecognized people is the foundation of art, advertising, questions of truth versus commerce, and sexual-political thinking upon which our contemporary moments of crisis and revelation are created. The mass-death experience of the risk-taking young had consequences that remain to be unearthed, within our archives and within ourselves.