We’ve heard it before—a picture is worth a thousand
words. If one can capture an idea
or a feeling completely and powerfully with a simple image, suddenly, a
movement is born. During the
beginning of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the early 80s and 90s, artists
banded together to create art in order to muster a feeling of protest and
camaraderie. The more the public knows
and cares about the deadly reality of AIDS, the greater the numbers of those
marching and demanding a cure.
Public art, graffiti, and activist art emerged as rallying
points during the terrifying decades of the beginning of HIV/AIDS. It seemed that the only way to be heard
was to force images into a person’s everyday life: to paint subway walls with
protest symbols, and paste Xeroxed posters on sidewalks.
According to Will Travers, founder and executive
director of the cultural and political resistance website lokashakti.org (http://www.lokashakti.org/), art is a logical way to unite people, and to
spread a message. “It seems
like using art as a medium for protest is particularly effective because it's
accessible to so many different kinds of people. Street art even more so.
Just looking at something forces you to have a reaction,” said Travers. Travers’ organization promotes social
awareness by posting information about protest rallies and social justice
issues that are happening now, around the world, along with a separate blog
about protest art http://www.protestart.org/ . It’s like social networking for
activism, the goal being to be ‘in the know’ and prepared to join a cause as
quickly as Google maps on can load the directions to the start of a march or
location of a demonstration.
However,
in the early 80s and 90s, there was no Internet to spread the word about
protests or local activism. At a
time when HIV/AIDS activism desperately needed unity, artists struggled to
connect their art with the public. It was not as simple as creating a Twitter account and
getting a large number of followers; getting the word out required a unique
persistence.
Keith
Haring was among the artists who changed the way art was distributed and digested. For those just getting up on Haring, he was a young, gay
artist in the time of ACT UP and Paradise Garage — which was a warehouse that
hosted DJ dance parties primarily for the gay community. He is known for his bold figures — the
‘radiant baby,’ the dog, and the UFO — and for his prevalence in street art.
According to the Keith Haring Foundation website, in
an interview with Rolling Stone in 1989 (http://www.haring.com/archives/interviews/index.html), Haring talked about his experience creating
chalk drawings in subways. “It was
this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and
violence,” said Haring. “The subway pictures became a media thing, and the
images started going out into the rest of the world via magazines and
television.”
 |
| Keith Haring: 1978–1982 at Brooklyn Museum |
A picture of one of the chalk drawings Haring did
with his artist friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, another pioneer of symbolic
graffiti in the 80s and 90s, was recently featured among pieces at the Keith
Haring exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum.
I had a chance to check out this
amazing exhibition, which was the first large-scale
exhibition to explore his early career.
By drawing where he was not
allowed, and forcing the public to confront whatever was put in front of them,
Haring and other activist artists made the public aware of important issues.
Haring also clipped headlines from newspapers,
arranged them in ridiculous ways, and then posted them on the streets. “The
idea was that people would be stopped in their tracks, not knowing whether it
was real or not… so they had to confront it and somehow deal with it,” said
Haring in the Rolling Stone interview.
Here’s a picture that I took of those newspaper
clippings, again at the Brooklyn Museum:
 |
| Keith Haring: 1978–1982 at Brooklyn Museum |
But Haring
did not just do street art. He used his talent to promote other artist friends,
and raise awareness about issues important to him.
Haring
made this painting in 1988 to promote safe sex. The image is bold and explicit, depicting two men jerking
each other off, but as is the general
idea of protest art and graffiti: get in touch with your audience by bringing
the art to the people, even if the images are alarming.
Other artists continue this legacy today when
approaching current political and social issues. Molly Crabapple is one such contemporary artist (http://mollycrabapple.com/). She
makes protest art for Occupy Wall Street, among other artistic endeavors. “I don’t really believe in putting
things in boxes, I think things should be pervasive everywhere,” said
Crabapple. She went on to talk
about the importance of creating a visual language—repeated and powerful
symbols that come to represent a movement. This was the same for Haring, as Julia Gruen, executive
director of the Keith Haring Foundation, stated to me as we traded emails. “He
developed a visual language and alphabet based in part on semiotics, influenced
by comics and graffiti, and synthesized those disparate influences into a
vocabulary at once unique and yet somehow readable as part of a collective
unconscious.” The Keith Haring
Foundation — a foundation Haring created
— was establised to ensure that his philanthropy would continue, and
that his images would be used for appropriate causes. Gruen served as Haring’s own assistant from 1984 until his
death from AIDS in 1990.
Similar to the work that the Keith Haring
Foundation continues to do to support AIDS research and other worthy causes,
the west coast based Alliance Health Project also supports AIDS research by
holding a big art auction in San Francisco every year called Art For AIDS (http://artforaids.org/ ). According
to dk haas, artist and organizer of the event, Art For AIDS “was started by
some artists who were either themselves infected or knew of other people who
were affected by the disease.” The
Alliance Health Project was among the first in the country to offer anonymous
testing for HIV, and continues to offer health support for the LGBTQ community.
It’s just another way art connects to activism. Whether its raising funds for research,
or getting the word out by way of an image, art is essential to unity and
progress. “I’ve been saying for a long time that contemporary art was very not
engaged with the outside world, and I think that with political people of the
last few years, not being engaged, and just sticking with your galleries has
become a cop out,” said Molly Crabapple.
Here’s an image to leave you with, done by Haring
in collaboration with ACT UP. It’s
an image of the pink triangle, which has visual significance outside of the
AIDS crisis; the pink triangle was used by Nazis in World War II to identify
homosexuals, and then again used by ACT UP as a protest against the negative
stigma of AIDS. Here it is
superimposed by images of the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” and
ACT UP’s motto: “Silence = Death.” His art is telling us that if we don’t talk about being gay,
safe sex, and finding a cure, the consequence will be tragic.
 | |
| Silence = Death, 1989, Copyright Keith Haring Foundation |
Here is a
link to the Keith Haring Foundation website, where a lot of Haring’s work is
archived digitally: http://www.haring.com/cgi-bin/art_search_lrg.cgi?id=00604&search=safe%20sex&start=40
Having completed its run at Brooklyn Museum, Haring’s
‘radiant babies’ and more will travel to Santiago, Chile (8/20 - 9/29); Udine,
Italy (9/2 – 2/15/13); and Paris, France (4/19 – 8/18/2013). Keith Haring is also included an
upcoming group show at New York’s New Museum entitled “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery, 1969–1989”
(9/19 – 1/6/2013). New Museum 212-219-1222.
--Virginia Marshall
GET DOWN Youth Blogger
@vrosemarshall
virginiarosemarshall@college.harvard.edu
