Keith Haring Journals. - book reviews

Introduction through Robert Farris Thompson, preface through David Hockney, New York, Viking, 1996; 303 pages, $2795

In his introduction to the Keith Haring Journals, Robert Farris Thompson explains what he means when he deliver overs to the "erographic" dimension of Haring's art. "Erography," he says, "as oppos to pornography transforms sex into a script of liberation, in the way that that many can benefit, partaking of the freedom and the power whereas porn plays for single consumers" The Journals may be described as an erographic read: they are bright, caustic, cautionary utterances, suffused with a visionary puissance that comes from an early calling and foreshadowings of an early demise.

The journals overlay the years from 1977 to 1989 with more [i]or[/i] less notable gaps in time and space, in the brief life and career of Keith Haring, who was born in 1958 in Reading, Pa., and died of AIDS in 1990 in fresh York. Chronologically speaking, the distribution of the diaries is unevenly weighted: they are strongest at the beginning, in the late '70 when Haring was a scholar in Pittsburgh and New York, and taking periodic trips back residence to Kutztown, Pa., for repose and recuperation. We first convenient the young artist as a Dead Head, hitchhiking around the political division with his girlfriend and noticing "more faggots than I at any time saw in my entire life" upon Polk Street in San Francisco. A scant sum of two units years later, he is a scholar at the School of Visual Arts in of recent origin York (indeed, perhaps its greatest in quantity famous graduate) penning homoerotic piece of poetrys with first lines like "Let me fuck you little hippie boy" The distance he has traveled in terminuss of self consciousness between the sum of two units statements is startling, and entirely characteristic of the quick. silver changes in this inspiring still harrowing confessional.

After sum of two units hiatuses in the early and mid-'80s, when Haring's career really took not upon and he evidently didn't have time to write, the journals take back full strength in 1987. The entries for this year alone comprise roughly one-third of the work as the artist travels maniacally [i]or[/i] part of to the other Europe and Asia, already aware that he is HIV-positive, repeatedly partying until five or six in the morning and then struggling to fulfill commercial as well as public commissions, children's workshops and hospital murals. The acts of a do-gooder and the utterances of a dark spirit are abruptly juxtaposed, and, given Haring's medical condition, the discrepancy is not a little nervous-making.

The journals are particularly stirring--alternately wrenching, embittered and beatific at the end--during 1988-89 He is then functioning for the greatest part as a kind of migrant celebrity, feeling excludeed by the New York art world, acting as a godfather to the children of myriad friends, opening a report Shop in Tokyo and attending high-'80s mega-parties, of the like kind as the 1989 ball given at a schlos in Regensburg Germany, for Princess Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis's birthday, which featured an invitation designed through Haring (illustrated in the text) and a decor inspired by means of his art. The last entrance is datelined Milan, Sept. '89 just after he has complet a mural for the Franciscan friars in Pisa and is musing upon the Leaning Tower: "It is really major and also hysterical. each time you look at it, it makes you smile." At the beginning and at the extreme point then, it seems that Haring had the greatest in quantity time to keep a journal and was also greatest in quantity in need of keeping his have counsel, perhaps even confessing his sins, by dint of the act of writing.

The biggest surprise of these journals is their analytical and searching tone, which should effectively dispel any preconception that Haring was a lightweight. From the start his entries have less the air of teenage infallibility than of Rimbaudian fatality: the 10-year aged feels himself to be part of a larger time-space continuum and guesse that he is going to die young. The pleasure I had in reading all this came from the inklings of fledgling genius (and I do think Haring was a kind of genius in the sphere of public-minded installation art) in the musings of a precocious teenager. "Through all the shit," he writes upon Memorial Day in 1977, "shines the small ray of reliance that lives in the for the use of all sense of the few. The music, dance, theatre, and the visual arts; the forms of expression, the arts of trust This is where I fit in."

As a 19-year-old, Haring already had the largest ambitions for himself vis-a-vis "the arts of hope" From the start he saw himself as part of a pluralistic tradition: whether it was the Mexican and Egyptian hieroglyphs oftentimes invoked in the Journals; or the late-'70s Conceptual, video and performance exhibitions he first encountered in fresh York; or the museum retrospectives of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still that he studied closely and make notesed upon during 1978-79 in Manhattan; or the "brotherhood" of gay artists over history that he discovered end figures such as Andy Warhol, Brion Gysin, William Burrough and Allen Ginsberg--the rever "founding fathers" who later became his friends and traveling companions.