GLR May-June 2024

BOOKS

How Not to Become a Commodity

B RAD GOOCH is an accom plished memoirist, novelist, and biographer of such literary fig ures as Rumi, Flannery O’Con nor, and Frank O’Hara. His latest book is a compelling analysis of the remarkable legacy of artist Keith Haring. Gooch was a contemporary of Haring when the latter was alive; they inhabited

view, all the while trying to avoid getting arrested. Under these circumstances, his minimalist images of zapping spaceships, pulsing TV’s, barking dogs, crawling ba bies, leaping porpoises, and smiling faces developed in quality and complexity. It is estimated that over the next five years, he created over 5,000 chalk drawings (all un signed) throughout New York City’s bor

J OHN R. K ILLACKY

RADIANT The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch Harper. 512 pages, $42.

oughs. Photographer Tseng Kwong Chi documented many of his underground performances. Eventually, some of these draw ings were digitized for a Time Square electronic billboard show. An early review of Haring’s work in Artforum (1981) was quite insightful: “The Radiant Child on the button is Haring’s Tag. It is a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it’s al ways been there. The greatest thing is to come up with some thing so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb.” His first one-person gallery show took place in 1982. A year later, he was featured in the Whitney Museum biennial. Invitations soon followed from institutions in Europe, Australia,

the same queer scene in 1980s New York. Much has been writ ten about Haring from an art history perspective, but Gooch adds to the corpus with this sensitive and engaging portrait of his life and his legacy as an artist. Gooch was given full access to Haring’s archives, and he interviewed more than 200 people. The result is a compendium of vivid, first-person narratives that provide an insider’s perspective on the artist’s life. Because he focuses on friends and colleagues, Gooch delivers less aca demic “artspeak” than entertaining backstories about the artist’s inspirations and frustrations. Growing up in Kutztown, PA, with middle-class parents and

three sisters, Haring describes himself as a “little nerd.” Even as a young child, he often doodled abstract cartoons with his father, an engineer. In middle school, he had a paper route and was briefly a “Jesus freak.” He became a hippie in high school and began experimenting with drugs. After graduating, he briefly went to Pittsburgh to study art, but soon headed for New York City, in 1978. Gallery assistant, busboy, and club door man were some of his early jobs as he attended the School of the Visual Arts for two semesters. Attracted to the emerging graffiti scene, Haring began drawing images of crawling children and barking dogs on outdoor walls and in public spaces. He also posted Xeroxed agitprop broad sheets—a strategy inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up methods. He found a

Keith Haring painting the Palladium Backdrop, 1985. Bernard Gotfryd photo.

and Japan. In 1983, Haring befriended Andy Warhol, an artist whom he greatly admired and emulated. They spoke on the phone regularly, often partied together at night, collaborated, and traded artworks. When Warhol died, Haring stated: “What ever I’ve done would not be possible without Andy.” As demand for Haring’s work increased, he expanded his output to ink drawings, woodcut prints, paintings on tarpaulins and wood, aluminum sculptures, theatrical sets, and costumes, as well as largescale outdoor sculptures for playgrounds and murals for inner city walls, clubs, and children’s hospitals. Har ing was determined to make his art accessible to a wide audi ence, outside of the elitist, insular domain of curators, galleries,

kindred community in the burgeoning club scene in the East Village. Gooch details the gonzo performances, installations, and experimental videos that Haring participated in with friends—among them Kenny Scharf, Madonna, Ann Magnu son, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—at such venues as Club 57 and the Mudd Club. Haring’s public profile rose enormously after he began drawing with white chalk on the blank advertising panels on subway station walls. He’d jump off a train and sketch in full John R. Killacky is the author of Because Art: Commentary, Critique, & Conversation.

May–June 2024

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