Keith Haring. Journals. Part One

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Keith Haring
Journals
Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson
Foreword by David Hockney

Penguin Books Classics, 464 pages. 2010

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One

[Original Version: January 2019 - New Version: April 2019]

Fig. 1) The American edition of Keith Haring’s Journals, published by Penguin Classic in a Deluxe Edition in 2010.

The memoirs of a cult artist

Often, the publication of the texts written by contemporary artists has as main purpose that of helping in the grasping of their art. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority of readers of the Journals by Keith Haring (1958-1990) bought them with the prevailing desire to better understand the painter and his art, so popular in our age, and not to study their literary merits. I myself bought the Journals in the elegant Penguin Books edition of 2010 at the bookstore of the Albertina  Museum in Vienna, immediately after admiring his works and with the impressions in my eyes of the exhibition "Keith Haring The Alphabet" (held between March 16 and June 24, 2018). 

However, this - in my opinion - is not the right perspective to review a text belonging to art literature. At the centre there should be the writing itself, with its positive and negative characteristics. The US art historian Robert Farris Thompson (1932-), now professor emeritus at Yale and author of many works on African and African-American art, wrote in 1996 a very good introduction to the Journals, their style, their structure and the differences compared to the memoirs of other contemporary artists, first of all those of Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Thompson (whose introduction is present in all versions in the many other languages ​​published until today) fully took up the idea that the personality of the artists is also revealed in their communication strategies, and that their relationship with writing is worthy of study and attention. I will therefore try to adhere scrupulously to the centrality of the study of the text itself, even if obviously I am well aware that Keith Haring has become an iconic figure of many battles (from the fight against AIDS to that against racism) and that his art is now universally known and praised for a figurative language accessible to the general public. It follows that, whenever we talk about Haring, it seems difficult to escape the temptation to celebrate a myth.

Fig. 2) The Italian edition of the Journals by Keith Haring, published in 2001 by Arnoldo Mondadori and reprinted in 2007 and 2012. On the cover: Keith Haring, Untitled, 1983.

Even his memoirs have recorded a universal success. In addition to English (first published in 1996), versions were published also in German (1997), Italian and Spanish (2001), Korean (2010), Chinese and French (2012) and Czech (2013). Interestingly - as mentioned - all of them were introduced by the same critical contribution by Robert Farris Thompson, without being supplemented (or replaced) by introductions of other scholars for the different national editions. Consulting the Keith Haring Foundation website (http://www.haring.com), I was also not able to identify other studies that were specifically dedicated to the Journals [1]. Obviously, some good press reviews were published when the text was released [2] and the curators of the exhibitions did not fail to quote Keith's sentences contained in the text to document their thesis on the artist; yet a more systematic study is still missing. Obviously, my attempt will never be sufficient to fill this void. I hope that a text that has been so numerously read and appreciated (the Internet is full of personal comments) and whose content - at the time of writing this post - is even available in full on two websites [3], may one day find the interest of other scholars who wish to analyse other interpretive perspectives.

The role of the Journals in the art literature of the late twentieth century

The text of Keith Haring’s memoirs was published for the first time in English in 1996, six years after the premature death of the artist, by the aforementioned Keith Haring Foundation. Keith, who died in 1990 at the age of 32, has left his notebooks written in pen, laid out in a very orderly manner and often decorated with his drawings. “It is clear from Keith Haring’s comments in his journals that he expected they would ultimately be read by others. He left dozens of handwritten notebooks, with line drawings, containing a wide range of material - from extended thoughts on work in progress to minimal notations, sketches, quotes, and reading lists. Sometimes the writing concentrated on his work, other times on relationships and the events of his daily life” [4].

As it often happens, we are therefore dealing with texts that were not yet ready for publication, but were 'enhanced' for that purpose by the heirs or the foundations that guard the materials. Contrary to the memoirs of Marina Abramović - written by the Serbian artist together with the journalist and biographer James Kaplan - or to the conversations of Jeff Koons with the art critic and historian Norman Rosenthal, where every word counted, because it was weighed and agreed by a professional writer with the artist, here a lot of material was simply the result of a rash and perhaps not yet completed draft; in short, it had the advantage of freshness and immediacy and the disadvantage of discontinuity. If anything - studying the numerous original pages, which were posted on the web by the Brooklyn Museum (http://keithharing.tumblr.com/) - the edition of the Journals is missing is the reproduction of the drawings on the notebooks, as they would testify to the figurative world of the artist, when he was writing. Instead, they have been replaced by the editor with a rich array of ‘standard’ black and white images (78 photos) in line with the most known figurative style of the painter. Please let me take note that some drawings in the notebooks - expression of his spontaneity - are clearly inspired by comics and stylistically very different from the language developed by Haring for his art; I think we can perhaps draw from this the conclusion that Haring's different 'traditional' iconography, which is generally regarded as a ‘spontaneous' figuration, was actually the result of an intentional codification and therefore an abstraction process. It is not by chance that Haring's art has been often described as a ‘real’ language (it was the main thesis of the Vienna exhibition).

In addition to presenting the events of the life of the artist from his personal point of view, the Journals also documented an important phase of American art of the 1980s, when in the East Village of New York, one of the boroughs of Manhattan known for its rebellious vitality, a new kind of art was born, inspired by the world of graffiti and image stylization. In addition to Keith Haring, that environment included also Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Kenny Scharf (1958-) (both are mentioned several times in the Journals). Texts on art criticism by these three artists were also included by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz in their monumental anthology Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings [5]. In short, this triad played an important role not only in the artistic production of the East Village, but also in their documentation with relevant written texts.

Nevertheless, I would immediately add that Haring and his associates lived in a historical phase in which the documentation of the artistic path of the artists was delivered through many forms of expression, and not only through writing: for example, the film Downtown 81, filmed in 1981 by Edo Bertoglio (1951-) with Basquiat's first-person participation as an actor, narrated in a fictional form a day in the life of the black artist in the East Village and was a poetic form of autobiography. Fifteen years later (in 1996), the painter and director Julian Schnabel (1951-) made a successful film on Basquiat, thus inaugurating a successful career as a filmmaker and reinforcing the artist's cinematographic myth. It is not excluded that even Haring - who had no fear of relying on commercial circuits to sell objects that reproduced his art at a very low price - would have one day chosen the big screen as a means of communication.

The Journals allow us to reconstruct the interweaving of personal relationships (of friendships and enmities) between New York artists of the time. The simple consultation of the excellent analytical index present in the Penguin Classic edition of 2010 allows us to navigate across Keith's references. Among the artists mentioned here, the most frequently quoted was George Condo (1957-), a prominent figure in the East Village of the 1980s, followed by Andy Warhol. Then there were Francesco Clemente (1952-) and Julian Schnabel (already mentioned for the film on Basquiat), basically contemporaries to Haring. He also had many frequentations with writers, especially with William Burroughs (1914-1997), who was also a painter, and with protagonists of the showbiz, first of all Grace Jones (1948-).

A discontinuous text

It was said that the texts of the Journals are characterized by some evident discontinuity. This is true with reference to two specific aspects. Firstly, Haring failed to write for some (long) time intervals; in the second instance, the style of the writings of the early years was really different from that of the later stages. In fact, at the beginning, Keith was a young man still in his study years, wondering about basic but truly fundamental aesthetic issues and showing clear preferences and aversions. His life was, in many ways, still that of an adolescent among adolescents. He began his studies (he attended the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh between 1976 and 1978) with the aim of focusing on what Americans call commercial art (after all, what was called applied arts in the previous century), but then decided to dedicate himself to visual art (after all, a very broad concept of fine arts) at the School of Visual Arts in New York between 1978 and 1980. The true legacy of the early years of his studies was the idea of ​​using materials and commercial techniques to spread his pictures. The Journals testify to the crossing of the culture of graffiti with the creativity of an artist who was developing consolidated aesthetic preferences, for example in terms of shape and color.

Haring did not finish his studies, but already in 1980 he experienced an amazing success, of planetary level. After a pause between 1981 and 1986 (which were, however, in artistic terms, some of his most productive years), the Journals resumed in the form of travel memoirs of a now well-established artist, travelling frantically between America, Europe and Asia. The editors wrote: “As his career took off and his life became increasingly complex he wrote less frequently - often in the peaceful sanctuary of airplanes - and there are substantial chronological gaps as a result. In some instances material he wrote for other purposes has been inserted to aid in continuity” [6].

Robert Farris Thompson’s introduction

According to the author of the introductory text, the Journals show a true spiritual odyssey which opened with the dreams of a young American in Kutztown, the village where the family was living, and ended five months before his death, in Italy, in Pisa, where Haring completed the mural on the external wall of the back of the courtyard of the church of Sant'Antonio Abate. “From Pittsburgh to Pisa an American spiritual odyssey unfolds, a document of the life and mind of an artist who symbolized America in the eighties to the world. Thousands wore his T-shirts, millions knew his style. He was probably one of the few artists of our time who could cross the Atlantic on a jet and see his art included in both in-flight movies. (…) The text, in short, is a mirror of an extraordinary life: creativity, thought, and the vernacular, jousting in the crucible of contemporary time” [7].

The American scholar compared Haring's memoirs to those of Andy Warhol (whom Keith considered as his master) to reach the conclusion that the former were much more immediate and spontaneous. Of Warhol's journals he wrote: “The latter’s testament is a fascinating compound, fat as a telephone book, essentially involving celebrity action and precisely noted cab and restaurant tabs, as if Warhol were writing half for posterity and half for the IRS” [8]. On Keith’s memoirs, he stated instead: “The journals of Keith Haring are richer. Reflection, self-assessment, and evidence of growth crowd out the mere diaristic. Rarely would you get a page in Warhol like this: «Usually the people who are the most generous are people who have the least to give. I learned this first-hand as a newspaper carrier when I was 12 years old. The biggest tips came from the poorest people. I was surprised by this, but I learned it as a lesson.»” [9].

Fig. 3) Andy Warhol’s Diaries, published by Warner Books in 1989

The Journals - Thompson wrote - presented themselves in two different “formations”; he used that technically unprecise term “to honor the buildup of insight and experience” [10].  The first phase, according to the critic, saw the prevailing of research: in the text it would be clearly recognizable an element of youth romanticism. It is no coincidence that Thompson tried to trace, along two pages of his introduction, a comparison between the Journals and the letters of the British poet John Keats (1795-1821) to friends and family. These references to romanticism might seem like simple fabulations of an immature young man. The critic showed instead that “the power behind the questing was Haring’s strong and vivid taste” [11]. Keith was not only a street graffiti artist: one of the characteristics of the years of training was the comparison with the art of the previous generations. He deeply loved Mark Rothko (1903-1970), at least as much as he rejected the geometries of Frank Stella (1936-).

From the years of New York, Haring began to put together aspects that would become characteristic of his art: issues of political and social life, the use of public spaces (in the early years especially advertising spaces in subway stations) and processing of a linear language of hieroglyphic 'flavour'. Citing his colleague Jonathan Fineberg, Thompson explained that, in this phase of full youth, “Haring created icons of mass culture to which everyone could relate” [12]. And he added “Haring’s records reveal that, in a strong mixture of Keats, artistic biography, retrospective exhibitions, and many, many other sources, he worked out his own philosophic take on line, form, and color” [13].

The planetary success of this new language - made possible by the photographic and video documentation of his graffiti - upset the life of the twenty-two, to the point that Haring, overwhelmed by requests from all over the world, could no longer write. It has already been said that, with the exception of a few pages from the Brussels airport in 1982, nothing can be read of the years that marked his affirmation, led him to abandon his studies and projected himself into an international dimension, between the United States, Europe and Asia. The writing of the Journals only resumed in the summer of 1986, when Keith again felt the need to document his life as an artist. Thompson wrote that, on that occasion, Haring read again the pages of previous years and discovered that they were not “pretentious and self-important” [14]; to the contrary, those early programmatic texts revealed much about his art after a few years.

The introduction cannot but stress how such a rapid and extensive success inevitably brought with it a few elements of incoherence. “Naive, sophisticated, sexy, puritanical, confident, troubled, a man of the people who, at the end, had his last apartment designed in the style of the Ritz - the contradictions in the final sections of his Journals become acute” [15].  Among the inconsistencies that the Journals brought out clearly, there was the tension between his almost compulsive sexuality and the theme of innocence, which was expressed in the continuous recall to childhood in the paintings. We will talk about all this in the second and third part of the post.

Finally, the essay by Robert Farris Thompson offered two further aesthetic reflections, which extend to both phases of the Journals. The first was on the relationship between Haring and the art of his century, the second on the art of Haring and dance (the American scholar, besides an art critic, was the author of many works on dance in the African-American world). On the first theme, I have already referred to his hostility against Stella (one could also add that against A.R. Penck (1939-2017). To the contrary, his unconditional love went to Pierre Alechinski (1927-) and the CoBra movement, to Fernand Léger (especially in the phase between 1942 and 1955), Jean Debouffet (1901-1985), Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) and Niki de Saint-Phalle (1930-2002). Léger's lesson was fundamental for Haring - Thompson wrote - in order of understanding the ways in which to separate colour and design. Finally, one would not understand Keith's iconography if one did not consider the impact that the dances that animated his nightlife had on him, from breakdance to electric boogie.

The brief Forewords by David Hockney and Shepard Fairey

In the first edition of 1996 the introduction of Farris Thompson was, in turn, preceded by a brief introduction (of a single page) by David Hockney (1937-). In reality it was a simple testimony, in truth a bit special, because it was completely disconnected from the memoirs. I sincerely believe that it was inserted by the publisher in the book as a 'hallmark' for readers who were not yet convinced of Haring's greatness: one of the giants of contemporary art was taking stance in his favour. To be precise, the Journals were originally printed only in 500 copies in 1996, a very low number for a publishing house like the Penguin group; the success has however been so prompt and overwhelming that a Penguin Classics edition was produced as early as 1997. In the foreword, Hockney said of “having met Keith Haring a few times at the beginning of his career thanks to my friend Henry Geldzahler” [16]. The fact, however, was not mentioned in the Journals, where the name Hockney was cited only once and in a very indirect way, during a commercial negotiation in Düsseldorf [17].

Fig. 4) Six editions of Keith Haring's Journals. From top to left clockwise: (1) German edition, translated by Wolfgang Krege and published in 1997 by S. Fischer in Frankfurt am Main. (2) Spanish edition, translated by Zoraida de Torre and published in 2001 by Galaxia Gutenberg in Barcelona. (3) Korean edition, translated by Chu-hŏn Kang and printed by the publisher Mango Media in 2010 in Seoul. (4) Chinese edition, translated by Zhang Lingxin and published in 2012 by the publisher Marco Polo in Beijing. (5) French edition, translated by Stéphanie Alkofer and published in 2012 by Flammarion in Paris. (6) Czech edition, translated by Ladislav Nagy and published by Kniha Zlín to Zlín in Prague in 2013.

In the 2010 Penguin Classics edition, Hockney's text was replaced by a four-page premise by Shepard Fairey (1970-), a well-established American street artist (also one of the artists closest to left-wing American protest movements, including the Occupy movement). In this case too, it was the testimony of an artist who had nothing to do with the Journals (where his name never appears). Fairey talked about Haring as a model who showed him how street art could have aesthetic qualities; moreover, Haring also displayed that art can be made disseminated through instruments that are widely used by the public, such as t-shirts and record covers [18].

Certainly, Shepard Fairey's pages are more political than Hockney's and claim for Haring the role of “a champion of social justice and a believer in the interconnectedness of humanity” [19]. Quite interestingly, the author - wanting to praise Keith – used twice the term 'populism' in a positive meaning, to indicate an aesthetic philosophy that addressed the broader layers of the population, having no fear of using commercial circuits (the proliferation of gadgets) to spread the art among the greatest number of people possible. Fairey dwelled on the fact that in the Journals the principle that art must be addressed to all (and that citizens have the right to art) was affirmed. Accumulating money, however, was not in itself diabolical, because it could allow to achieve objectives that the artist would otherwise not achieve. Obviously, it must be said that Fairey’s text preceded by a few years the election of Donald Trump and the spread of the term populism as a form of illiberal democracy; I doubt he would use the same word today to express his praise of Haring.

End of Part One

Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] The only exception is a text by Brooks Adams published on Art in America. 84, no. 10, (1996), which I unfortunately failed to consult.

[2] Scherer, Hans - Turm bei Vollmond. Ein Maler der Ordnung: Keith Haring in seinen Tagebüchern [Tower at full moon. A painter of order: Keith Haring in his diaries], in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 27, 1997 

See: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezension-sachbuch-turm-bei-vollmond-11313117.html.

[3] See: http://issuu-download.tiny-tools.com/pages.php?doc_id=151010201444-9b9db420ef1c1cefd1c0ca8c955b1692 e https://full-english-books.net/english-books/full-book-keith-haring-journals-read-online.

[4] Haring, Keith – Journals, Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson, Foreword by David Hockney, Penguin Books Classics, 464 pages. Quotatio at page ix.

[5] Haring is present in Stiles and Selz's anthology with a Statement published in 1984 in Flash Art (a text from a period not covered by the Journals).

[6] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. ix.

[7] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), pp. xvi-xvii.

[8] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xvii.

[9] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), pp. xvii-xviii.

[10] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xviii.

[11] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), pp. xviii-xix.

[12] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xix.

[13] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xx.

[14] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xxii.

[15] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xxiii.

[16] Haring, Keith - Diari, Traduzione di Giovanni Amadasi e Giuliana Picco, Premessa di David Hockney, Introduzione di Robert Farris Thompson, Milano, Mondadori, 2001, 345 pages. Quotation at page V.

[17] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. 168.

[18] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xi.

[19] Haring, Keith – Journals, (quoted), p. xi.