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All Of It with Alison Stewart
The Legacy of Keith Haring (Full Bio)
00:29:49
We conclude this month's Full Bio series about artist Keith Haring.
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- [00:00]
Uncle
I' ma put you on, nephew.
- [00:01]
Nephew
All right, unc.
- [00:02]
Alison Stewart
Welcome to McDonald's.
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Brad Gooch
Can I take your order, miss?
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Uncle
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back. Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This this is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography. To get a fuller understanding of the subject, we are discussing the life and line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. We've talked about Herring's upbringing in rural Pennsylvania, the incubator that Pittsburgh turned out to be, and his graffiti drawing in New York. Today we've arrived at Keith Haring, the star. In his late 20s, he was partying with Madonna and Grace with boyfriends as long as they didn't get in the way of his career. And what a career it was. He painted the Berlin Wall. He painted a mural called Tuttamundo in Pisa. He painted an 88 foot tall mural next to a children's hospital in Paris so the kids would have something to look at. He had a great affinity for kids. He often worked with city kids around New York to get more kids into art. And if you wanted a Keith Haring design of your own in 1986, you could get it at the pop shop at 292 Lafayette Street. His distinctive style, grace buttons, T shirts and sneakers. He thought the art world was a bit elitist and that everyone should be able to own a Keith Haring if they wanted. Despite his fame and fortune, Herring felt the pull of activism. He created logos for the anti apartheid movement in South Africa and the Silence Equals Death series to raise awareness around AIDS. On August 10, 1989, Keith Haring gave an interview to Rolling Stone and announced to the world that he had contracted the disease. Here he is speaking in an MTV News interview about why he went public with his diagnosis.
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Nephew
More and more, the more it became to personally affect my life, the more it became necessary to really deal with it and to talk about it more. I think the thing that was the turning point in deciding to talk about it to the extent that I talked about it in the recent Rolling Stone interview, was the fact of having it and starting and admitting, having to decide to admit to the public that I was sick because partly from out of frustration from watching the way other public figures have dealt with it. I mean, from Rock Hudson to Liberace to Whatever. Most of the way that people in public have dealt with it has been to sort of, sort of admit that they have it, but to sort of not really want to talk about it so that. So that you sort of become malleable and become able to let the media make you into whatever image they want to so that they can sort of perpetrate this image of sort of shame and guilt and perpetrate this idea that it is almost some kind of, you know, payback or something. And by being silent about it, you let them manipulate it the way they will manipulate anything that they can and project the image that they want to project. And I think that at a certain point that I realized, I mean, I realized a while ago that at a certain point was going to have to talk about it just because I think. I mean, because of the way that I've dealt with all other political issues and social issues in my own work and in my life. I mean, because for me, the same reason that I dealt with politics my work was because my work and all art really is about life.
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Alison Stewart
Keith Haring left behind a world of work. The value of his pieces has increased 148% between 2017 and 2022. A recent piece went for $6 million. And it all started with a gallery owner. An unusual choice, as you'll hear from Brad Gooch.
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Interviewer
Keith Haring chose to work with. I never get his name last. His last name. Right. Tony Shafrazi.
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Brad Gooch
Yeah, you got it.
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Interviewer
Yay. He had quite a reputation. He defaced us. Picasso. He went on to become a big gallery owner. I believe it's since closed. What did Keith like about having Tony represent him?
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Brad Gooch
Well, yeah, Tony Shazi was an interesting choice. The. I mentioned before the Keith was interested in getting around the gallery system. And one thing that happened because of the subway project is this is where all the buzz begins about Keith Haring. So that he doesn't really need to go take his slides around and try to get a dealer and a show. The so what he. When he has in the first one man show with Tony Shafrazi in SoHo. And I think part of his attraction was probably was Tony Shafrazi's outsider status. I mean, Keith never agreed with or was sympathetic with Tony's having spray painted Picasso's Guernica during the Vietnam War with a message that somehow, you know, it was a kind of an activist protest gesture on Shafrazi's part, who at that point was a young artist also. And. But I think. And therefore, I mean, he was kind of Anathema to the art world. The and was wasn't allowed in the Museum of Art for a long time. Museum of Modern Art for a while. So you know Keith's going with him is already kind of shows. You know what Lane he wanted to be in. The other was that Frozen had this big gallery and it was the. The biggest. It was a new gallery at the like highest ceilings. It was the biggest gallery in soho at that moment. And Keith was attracted to that and he was as simple as that too. So he had. So the scale of it he liked and he liked that it was. It was just beginning and that he could have some of his friends would also be in the gallery. Kenny Scharf was represented by Tony Shafrazi. So that kind of community clubhouse was always important to Herring. So I think all those things work together. But. But Tony Shafrazi had. I mean it wasn't a one way relationship. He had a number of important influences on Keith Haring. I mean certainly he had sophisticated connections and was able to sell his work and bring in certain people to see his work. But. But Kenny also was sort of pushing in the beginning. He was pushing Keith to why don't you do paintings? Keith said I hate paintings. I don't want to do paintings. It's too old fashioned. You know, I don't like canvas, all this thing. But it leads Keith finally to. He notices this plastic tarps that Con Edison is using to cover their construction sites in the street. And he says oh, I could paint on those. So he starts this is before the first show in the gallery of the Shafrazi Gallery, painting paintings on this plastic tarp. And that allows him to kind of return to painting. And Shafrazi I said one of these was in the Carnegie Museum of Art. So it, that. That's the kind of thing. It happens again later with sculpture that, that. That Shafrazi knows there's a little cutout Keith had done of. Of a dog one of his imagery and on his desk and he painted it red. And Tony picks it up and he said did you ever think about blowing this up to 30ft to a big scale? And Keith said well I can't do that. I can't do sculpture. I don't know how to do sculpture. No. And then Tony sets him up with Lippincott which is an important fabricator who was doing Calder and different artists at the time, Claes Oldenburg. And Keith makes sculpture. So a lot of important moments in his life also have to do with this collaboration with Tony Shafrazi. Who is an unorthodox dealer but successful. And I mean he did the Basquiat Warhol show in gallery which was so hated at the time and is now so loved and was shown in Paris.
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Interviewer
Keith Haring's first big show. It was a big media event. CBS News covered was wall to wall people who came. What was it like?
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Brad Gooch
Yeah, well, it was interesting. I mean he just brought in. So not only was the art fresh, but he, he brought in a new demographic in a way to the, to the, to the art world. So there were hundreds of these kids who had been doing graffiti and subway art. And so they came to the show. There were established artists, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Francesco Clementi. There were kids important group for Keith. He had made coloring books. So there are kids coloring on their coloring books. Keith had realized his wish and had a black DJ lover that at that time, Wanda Bose. And Wanda Bose was spinning music for this event. And in the basement in Black Light were all his collaborations with LA2. I know Charles Osgood was actually the announcer for that segment and on the news. And at the end he said that the show had sold out for $250,000. Not bad for a 24 year old kid from Kutztown, Pennsylvania. That kind of odd voice. But so, so, so that also establishes Keith Haring and, and his influence. I mean there's an influence in the surface of his work, you know, but there's also the beginning of an influence of, of breaking down these sorts of distinctions between high art and low art, public art, comic art, street art, political art, and creating more of the world that we live in today.
- [11:37]
Interviewer
My guest is Brad Gooch. We're talking about Radiant the life and line of Keith Haring. It's our choice for full bio. The Rubells were big buyers of his work. He became obsessed with Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol became obsessed with him. He's living a very different life than he did growing up in Kutztown. In acquiring the fame and fortune, did it change him? And the big question, did he sell out?
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Brad Gooch
I didn't know that was a big question still. But it turns out it is. The. In some way, nothing changed him. I think I noticed when I was reading his journal entries and I spent a lot of time at the foundation and this book took six years to write. The foundation, the Herring foundation is in Keith's old studio on Broadway and going through these early journals and reading his late teenage journals with him and Susie in Pittsburgh and about how he wanted to be an artist and what kind of artist he wanted to be was this sort of like crazily ambitious, naive utopian view. And I just thought how sweet to see an artist as a young man. It's like portrait of the artist as a young man. But then when I came more to the end and was reading some journal entries, there was also a 22 hour interview with Keith near the end of his life done by John Gruen that I listened to. And then I realized it's the same voice. I mean, you just hear the same idealism. The ambition is still outsized, but now it's happened. So it's, you know, sounds. Oh yeah, of course, why not? The. So in that way there was a, you know, there's something that. That didn't change about him. But obviously he kept. I mean his life got much bigger in terms of this kind of fame and celebrity and his infatuation with other famous and celebrated people in a Warholian fashion.
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Interviewer
Madonna is in and out of his life very much.
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Brad Gooch
Sleeping on the couch on Broome street and singing at his first party of life, which are birthday parties he gave to himself every year. First one was done at Paradise Garage black and Latin dance floor downtown. So the party, no, the distinction between gallery show and party is blurred by him. And finally then later in the decade he opens a pop shop downtown and here then he makes this blurring that nobody has really done yet. No artist of that time opens a shop and. And even Warhol was nervous about this, that people wouldn't see Herring as a fine artist. They wouldn't take him seriously. Now, I mean, Jeffrey Deitch said that Keith invented the new genre which was the art product or art merchandise. What he wants to do is have a place where he can. Can sell art at price points available to all those kids who came to the show. So at Pop Shop he's selling T shirts that he thinks of as prints and pins and later in the decade, safe sex condom cases. So he. That's the point of Pop Shop. But he. But. And the place itself was immersively painted by him. Leo Castelli, who did a show of the sculpture, said that the art shop, that Pop Shop was itself a work of art. Which is true that the ceiling now hangs over the lobby in the New York Historical Society. But Keith got tremendous pushback for this because of the idea that there was a distinction between fine art, high art and anything else. And the leading critic, critic cynic about Keith Haring's work at the time was Robert Hughes, who was the art critic At Time magazine. And he had been sort of targeting Herring and Basquiat for a while. I mean he wrote about Keith Boring and John Michelle Basket Case. He said that Haring was a disco decorator. So there was a shadow of homophobia also I think to this resistance to Herring at the time. There was racism as Herring pointed out when he called Basquiat the Eddie Murphy of art.
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Interviewer
Oh, that's great.
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Brad Gooch
And you know, from especially East Village artists spray painted capitalist and sellout on. On Pop Shop. I mean actually Pop Shop never made any money. I don't know that it was intended to make money. He then did an annex in Tokyo.
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Interviewer
But that was a big disaster.
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Brad Gooch
86.
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Interviewer
Yeah, 86 is when he opened on Lafayette and then they went over to Tokyo and then Tokyo because of Tokyo law.
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Brad Gooch
Yeah, I mean the, this is like the. That there still is a naivete around Keith Haring, I think. So he didn't want to. He didn't want to do business with corporations in Japan or with big department stores. He wanted to do what he had done in New York. No, she's open his little Peewee Herman style store. But there are problems. I mean, first of all, he was also had a high degree of control over what he did and quality control. So he wanted everything to. He wanted to control the product, have it shipped to Japan. This was raising costs. And also he was used to fake herrings. There were a lot of rip offs of. Of Keith Haring. And in Japan though, it became another level which is these, which is department stores and corporations that had wanted to collaborate with him then just punished him by. By doing really state of the art kind of reproductions of Herring T shirts and things and selling them at a tenth of the cost on the corner. So, you know, a lot of these. For some reason, everything about Tokyo backfired for Keith and it was a low point for him because he. Tokyo was his sort of second city. And he had always. Father had been stationed in. In Japan when he was in the military. And he'd grown up with this through all these stories of Japan. He loved calligraphy, basically saw himself as a calligrapher where his line expressed his personality. And he loved, you know, Japan as it was in the 80s with all this anime and toys. It. So all of this. No, it was a great disappointment for him, you know, and it dovetailed with a time in his history and the history of the time of the AIDS crisis. Really, really exploding during those years.
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Interviewer
My guest is Brad Gooch. We're talking about Radiant the life and line of Keith Haring. It's our choice for full bio. He traveled the world just creating murals all over the place. Could you give us an example of a few places where you would see a Keith Haring around the world?
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Brad Gooch
Well, sure. You can see crack is whack, which he did in New York on the east side highway coming down town in I think 180s. So that was when there was actually a studio assistant of his became addicted to crack, which was this fast moving version of cocaine, almost, you know, instantly addictive. And so he did this crack as whack mural in a neighborhood that was especially being hit by drug dealers at the time. That is still there in Pisa. He did, six months before he died, a large mural called Tudomundo, which is on the side of a Roman Catholic church actually in Pisa. And you know, is now. Is now a draw, I mean a destination. There's the Leaning Tower and there's the Keith Haring mural. So he was always. Do you know the problem? They restored a lot of these have to be restored. There was so one was restored recently in Amsterdam that he had done on the side of a book building you. That he did in Barcelona. And AIDS activist warning kind of. He did these warning murals. There's always a. Where there is often with Herring a political activism or artivism kind of messaging.
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Interviewer
Yeah. I want to ask you, when did he begin to take on political and moral issues?
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Brad Gooch
Well, again, always he was, when he was 12 years old, he was at the first Earth Day celebration on the campus of Kutztown University. And he, he took, you know, Three Mile island, happened near Kutztown, this nuclear near disintegration. And so he took on anti nuclear proliferation early on. That was one of his themes, certainly racism, apartheid, gay liberation, later AIDS activism. He was very active during the two Reagan campaigns of 80 and 84 and the second one turning over his downtown subway gallery to get out the vote and to anti Reagan cartoons. So he, you know, he was always, he wrote in his SVA journal the message is the message. And that was a response to Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message. And basically, you know, he wasn't ironic as an artist and he also wasn't, you know, fussy about what surface he was working on. He was very interested in message and in communication. And one of the best shows of Herring's work after his death, I think was in San Francisco Museum of Art. It was called the political Line. So he was often using his line to get people to be aware of safe sex for Instance, I mean different, different causes.
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Interviewer
When did Keith Haring become an activist for aids?
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Brad Gooch
Well, in some sense, I mean he was, he was always aware of AIDS and, and has some messaging about it and certainly the safe sex. But in, in 1988 in Tokyo again he discovers these red spots on him which turned out to be kaposi sarcoma, which was an opportunistic cancer, one of the many under the umbrella of aids. He comes back to New York and is unofficially diagnosed. He always suspected he was as being HIV positive. And, and interestingly then he, I mean I was, I was very interested in this part of the book, having been around at the time. I mean the peop. Many people died of aids, but people could die very differently. They aids, I mean, both medically and in terms of their attitude. And Keith from the beginning again had his own process. And he almost immediately comes out, does a sort of rock star move in Rolling Stone magazine and a big interview and he comes out as a pwa, a person with aids. And this is when Rock Hudson was sick with AIDS and was denying it, when Donald Trump's lawyer Roy Cohn practically came back from the grave to say we had kidney cancer or he had pneumonia. Obituaries at the time rarely gave AIDS as the cause of death. Long term companions rarely were noted. And so Keith goes against that and that encourages people, I think. And so he then also turns his art over often. He did Silence Equals Death paintings, he did posters. He then was also very active in ACT up, the organization the. Larry Kramer had started, the main, the main activist political organization at the time. And Peter Staley, who was the treasurer of ACT up, told me that he used to go to Keith's studio and Keith would give him these brown paper bags full of cash, like $10,000 of cash. And Peter would go and put, put it in the ACT UP account in Citibank on LaGuardia Place. And, and also Peter told me that in 1989 a third of the receipts of ACT UP were covered by Keith Haring, which no one knew that part was under, under the radar. But he was very much, you know, with whatever he had and directly activist on the issue. And also, I mean inspiring, inspiring as coming out as, as a pwa, but also he didn't melt away in terms of his work. And he did more and more and more and more art and traveled to more and more and more places. So I mentioned the mural in PISA that he did about six months before his death, three weeks before he dies, he does the Last Judgment triptych I mentioned in Yoko Ono's apartment and is never in the hospital. And he only has really three. Three weeks where he's in his bed and. And on his deathbed, is drawing his radiant babies until it becomes too frustrating and he can't finish it. I think Kenny Scharf has the last of those drawings. So. So in many ways, he rose to the occasion and inspired people.
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Interviewer
I was going to ask you, what can people learn from Keith Haring's unfortunately short life?
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Brad Gooch
Well, I think he had a kind of, you know, use whatever you have thing. I mean, he said, you use whatever comes along. And I think that kind of. I find that attitude sort of great. I mean, and. And it explains his own DIY sort of response to life. And he just. He. He would be working on whatever surface was available. He. I mentioned he was active during, especially the second Reagan election of 1984, which was a landslide and seemed predetermined. And. And who was Keith Haring but a guy with some chalk, but it didn't stop him. And he and Jenny Holzer did these trucks get out the boat trucks and things. So I think just the way in which he sort of sponged up whatever was available around him and then spun it into something else, and his desire to always kind of enhance people's lives visually and otherwise, I think all of this is. Is. Is something that you can personally be inspired by. I mean, he wasn't. He wasn't waiting around for inspiration and he wasn't waiting for anyone to give him permission. That was something that Kenny Scharf told me about sva, like, you couldn't open a broom closet where there wasn't something by Keith Herron or the way that he met him painting himself into that corner. He didn't have a license to do it. He didn't ask the dean. And so that quality is always encouraging.
- [29:17]
Interviewer
Brad Gooch is the author of the Life and Line of Keith Haring. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us, Brad.
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Brad Gooch
No, this was great. I enjoyed our conversation. Thanks.
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Alison Stewart
Full Bio is engineered by Jason Isaac, post production by Jordan Loft, and written by me. You can catch the whole Full Bio conversation in our podcast feed this weekend. And a note, we should point out that a Keith Haring mural is in the middle of a controversy right now in New York City. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation announced that it may demolish the Tony Dapolito Recreation center in the West Virginia about two blocks away from our studios here at wnyc. The mural, which was on a wall surrounding the pool was painted by Keith Haring in the summer of 1987. It has yet to be decided by NYC Parks, but it is said it is in talks with the Keith Haring foundation about quote unquote options.
- [30:13]
Uncle
I'm gonna put you on, nephew.
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Nephew
All right, unc.
- [30:15]
Alison Stewart
Welcome to McDonald's.
- [30:16]
Brad Gooch
Can I take your order, miss?
- [30:17]
Uncle
I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wraps. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back.
- [30:28]
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