Keith Haring Before the End of the World

Forty years ago, New York was almost the opposite of what it is today. Though the city had mostly pulled back from the brink of breakdown brought on by White Flight, bankruptcy, etc., by the early 1980s, whole neighborhoods still seemed to have collapsed. Little did I know at the time that, as bad as it was, the city had become a kind of canvas. Graffiti — the art movement of the day — filled the empty spaces. Walls, subway cars, you name it: Everything was covered with magic marker and spray cans. Most of it was tags, cryptic nicknames, and street numbers done hastily with spray cans and magic marker.

This was when Keith Haring’s work first appeared. And in this context, it seemed clever, upbeat, and lively. But to consider it art was different — it seemed to be trite, dashed off, sort of like the doodles that one might find in the margins of an art school notebook: radiant babies, Mickey Mice, and countless cookie-cutter figures. A recent visit to Keith Haring at the Brant Foundation, which focuses on his work from between 1980 and 1983, gave me an opportunity to recognize the dismissiveness of my youth. There really is more than meets the eye. 

Included in this exhibition are Haring’s signature glyphic figures on reproductive ancient clay pottery, biblical images of golden calves being worshiped, and human sacrifices (perhaps condemned prisoners?) stretching up to a UFO laser-beaming everything from nuclear power plants and the Pyramids to big-brained dolphins. A pair of laughing dogs sitting back-to-back (dog-to-god?) is a vessel inhabited by multiple humanoids, each on their own mysterious mission. In a later piece, the same dogs are free of their human hosts.

His work, which once seemed playful and energetic to me, now appears dark and possibly prophetic: images of overcrowdedness, torture, a general lack of human identity, unthinking obedience to higher powers. Overall, the subjects show no expression of empathy or grief, only a solitary image of vacant, wide-eyed glee. On the other hand, perhaps I’ve become prejudiced by an age defined by everything from recently declassified documents indicating the existence of UFOs to the rise of the mindless MAGA cult.

Haring’s free-handed yet perfectly fonted and justified style blows right through desktop publishing; it feels prescient now, in light of the upcoming AI cataclysm, a Nostradamus-by-emojis. Which isn’t to say that Haring is necessarily unique — consider the work of people like Mark Kostabi, Jeff Koons, and so many others, and you can see a hint of the apocalyptic there too.

One could spend a while searching through Haring’s many meanings or trying to locate his rightful place in the Pop Art-Andy Warhol Universe. But I will forever think of him as a young man in the still-empty landscape of Manhattan in the early 1980s, so removed from what it is today. It’s difficult to imagine him arising from any other time or place. 

Keith Haring continues at the Brant Foundation (421 East 6th Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through May 31. The exhibition was curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer.

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