by Jerome de Noirmont Gallery
Three years after organizing the exhibitions
Keith Haring – Made in France at the Musee Maillol and Keith Haring – 12
sculptures at the gallery, Jerome de Noirmont is pleased to present a Keith
Haring exhibition entitled sex Show, from September 19 to November 16, that
through a dozen canvases and some forty drawings, will highlight the crucial
importance of sex and sexuality in the artist’s life and work.
Thirty years have already gone by since the
sexual liberation of the seventies. Boundaries have been breached, values have
shattered and showing sex is increasingly permissible. Yet even today, Jeff
Koons’s work, books and films by Virginie Despentes and Catherine Breillat, and
the confessions of Catherine Millet continue to be on everyone’s lips. So sex
is not always free from the taboos that hem it in.
Throughout his life, from when he began in the
late seventies up to his death in 1990, Keith Haring produced work that was
both intense and explicit around sex and sexuality.
In 1978, at the height of the sexual
revolution, Keith Haring arrived in New York
and attended the School
of Visual Arts .
Frequenting the backrooms and public baths where the gay community hung out,
the sex that haunted his nights soon became the fruit and the main inspiration
of his research. Strongly marked by the atmosphere that reigned in the city,
full of teeming life, carefree sex, brilliant colors and communal
effervescence, Keith Haring was quickly noticed for the realism of his
perception of the body and sexuality. The erotic figures that he developed then
resonated as the translation of the confidence necessary to any union acting on
the loss, within that union, of the individuality of each of them. Throughout
his entire career, the way he portrays the male genitals reveals both
unceasing, voracious and submerging desire, and is an allegory for nirvana. Sex
also appears in full realism as a guarantee of the durability of human relations
and as the symbol of reconciliation, union and harmony between different
entities.
But sex, symbol of the regeneration and
transmission of life, soon becomes the vector of death when it appears in the
early eighties as the specter of AIDS, that Keith Haring was to die of in 1990.
This duality affects Keith Haring’s work and marks it deeply. So his works are
denoted by a defiance, a warning, a certain violence sometimes that disturbs
the onlooker and bears witness to the dichotomy the artist was in as regards
his work.
Unlike many homosexual artists who have long
sought to maintain the clandestine, invisible character of their sexuality, in
his own artistic expression Keith Haring found the means of affirming his pride
in being gay through the very explicit homo-erotic character of his works.
Keith Haring’s determination to fully incorporate his homosexuality as one of
the indissoluble facets of his art – in spite of the homophobia and oppression
that many of his predecessors had suffered throughout history – was the
component triggering a huge movement in which artists no longer held back from
positively expressing their homosexuality in their art.
Painfully,
Keith Haring, attacked by the AIDS virus, had in his own life to accept that
sex and love could be associated with the idea of illness and death. Yet far
from giving his artistic expression a fatalistic character, up to his death in
1990 Keith Haring redoubled his efforts to bear witness to the value and
richness of life, love and sex, and become aware of the importance of time and
the urgency of his work. Generations of kids growing up now have the advantage of knowing
that it [AIDS] is out there. Before it existed, it is something you never would
have though about, that you could associate love or blood, or sperm, with the
carriers of death. […] The only good thing to come out is that it has put this
real intensity to the time, that forces people to really rethink why they’re
here and why they’re alive, and to appreciate every second‘.1 Illness then lead Keith Haring to become a militant in
associations such as Act Up. In parallel, he devoted himself ever more
actively, in his art, to AIDS prevention, as in his painting Safe Sex, to the
need for information, fighting against silence and ignorance, and increasing
performances throughout the world.
Each of
Keith Haring’s works witnesses a new aestheticism reaffirming the pre-eminence
of the dogmatic truths around which is based a universally intelligible
statement radically upsetting prejudices all too comfortably established. This
is because it sometimes means a rejection of any “unsuitable” representation,
whose indecency goes beyond our own norms, perhaps through egotism or more
likely due to fear of the unknown. This is precisely what Keith Haring wanted
to highlight in some of the works being shown in this exhibition. While he was
still a student at New York ’s
SVA, he rapidly developed work that he himself defined as totally phallic2.
From
his first years in New York ,
Keith Haring in fact incorporated the universal language of sex into what he
created through contact with the graffiti artists he mixed with: I at once felt at ease with this art-form. Graffiti was the most
beautiful thing I’d ever seen3. His artistic language
soon took shape. From 1980, Keith Haring created an independent, universal
vocabulary. I created non-verbal symbols, signs that could have different
interpretations according to the moment. It was by playing tag that
Keith Haring gave birth to the “Radiant Child” and to the “Dog” character
already expressing the wealth of a language that could be universally
understood, based on an exchange of energy, in which things, people and animals
are irradiated and irradiate in their turn, thus surrounding themselves with a
halo of energy.
Through that language, all of the works shown
in this exhibition provide an account of the reaction against the hypocrisy
that has long governed discussion on sex. In his imagination, establishing
himself between popular art that had already highlighted soft and other
pornography, and the more explicit nature of some graffiti, Keith Haring
combined with the phallic representation all of the system of symbols that
could be in his sphere. The generating power of sex would appear to be the
place of origin where the life, warmth, energy, light and strength essential to
the balance of human structures and to world order. But in these works he also
painted a universe of perpetual dissatisfaction, unquenchable torment and
carnal yearnings going well beyond the simple representation of the sexual act.
This
was because for Keith Haring where there is no mystery, there is no propaganda.
This phrase assumes its full weight through works presented in ,Sex Show. Keith
Haring stages his visual appetite whose voracity can result in the use of
bright colors in an architecture and execution with a baroque look, as in the
painting Untitled (For Bobby), 1984, or in his drawings such as Untitled
10-Aug-83, by the frenzy and power of movement that gives the work
its entire force, audacity and clarity. Every work seems to hold an instant and
subjective truth that onlookers make their own the instant they immerse
themselves in it. Keith Haring thus plunges us into the rediscovery of self
and, paradoxically, into images sometimes threatening, in the rediscovery of
sincere and pure truths.
From
these works emerges in reality the frenzy of a submerged desire for discussion
and the quest for a passionate relationship marked by a frenetic turbulence of
mind and body. Uncontrollable urges with threatening aspects emerge from many
pieces. Keith Haring builds a mystic, cosmic and orgasmic communication, a
union through a nebulous disquiet projecting its representation of a universe
where all is only excrement, sperm, sex, anarchy, bloody cruelty and where the
one certainty will be the vanity of all and the value of nothing. But above and
beyond that representation, the feeling of an infinite distress makes us treat
the works as a real call holding the onlooker in concert with the love of life,
as in Untitled 4-Apr-1984 where
sex spurts out life.
Keith Haring’s work proffers both threats,
calls for order, cries from the heart and calls for deliverance. Life and
death, Eros and Thanatos, insouciance and warning are intermingled to bring
forth all the complexity of human relations where relations of force,
seduction, attraction, desire, degradation, self-destruction and self
development run cheek by jowl. It is an unremitting fight for life and against
all the threats that may harm and alter. A fight against illness and for the
freedom of minds and bodies. A true Hymn to Life. And to Love.
Footnotes
1.
Keith Haring sic.
2.
Keith Haring in “Keith Haring – The Authorized Biography” by
John Gruen
3.
Keith Haring in “Keith Haring – The Authorized Biography” by
John Gruen
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