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拍品专文
So much information can be conveyed with just one line, and the slightest change in that line can create a totally different meaning.
—Keith Haring
On May 12, 1981, a few days after his 23rd birthday, Keith Haring organized a one-night exhibition of his newest work at Club 57, a downtown artists’ nightclub-gallery in the basement of the Polish Catholic Church on 57 St. Mark’s Place. In preparation for this event, a tour de force showcasing the young artist’s mastery of line and ever-transmuting archetypal symbols, Haring covered the walls with pinned-up drawings he had completed within days of the exhibition. These intimately scaled works were executed with metallic and black marker on colored plexiglass, clear acetate, or sheets of black vinyl cut from rolls obtained on Canal Street. Haring’s preference for plastic, vinyl, and other industrial materials during this period prefigured the oversized vinyl tarpaulins he would show in his first one-person gallery exhibition, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982.
A deceptively humble drawing on black vinyl, purchased from Haring shortly after the Club 57 exhibition, Untitled embodied the fluid line, telegraphic expediency and iconographic ambiguity that characterizes the artist’s work throughout his tragically brief career. Its rectangular outline, designating all within its perimeter as a “Haring,” highlights a primal gathering of five bovine-canine hybrids and a frenetic human figure. Though the scene appears as depthless as a television screen, and the horizon line is limited to two mere dashes of the pen, there is an exhilarant intricacy in the way Haring has staggered and interlocked all beings into a space-defying space. He was a fastidious composer, acutely aware of the conceptual harmonies and patterning that resonate within a drawing or painting. The artist admits, “So much information can be conveyed with just one line, and the slightest change in that line can create a totally different meaning” (K. Haring, interview with Barry Blinderman, “Keith Haring’s Subterranean Signatures,” Arts, September 1981). His bold outlining and reduced, stylized forms tap into the same graphic energy that drove prehistoric cave art, Assyrian reliefs, Aztec frescoes, Gauguin’s flattened shapes with clear contours, or, more recently, Roy Lichtenstein’s declarative line.
As in Egyptian art, the central figure’s head and torso are presented frontally while the legs are seen in profile. The six rays emanating from the head, so tightly interwoven into the cosmic cluster of dots, could as easily represent distress as astonishment or intense concentration. We might view the figure, whose face is covered by handless arms, as a shaman channeling the energy of the surrounding animals into a ritualistic boogie that curiously resembles the Kazatsky, a Russian squatting dance. Haring himself was wary of ascribing particular meanings to his work and was so deeply embroiled in the “b-boying,” rap, and graffiti emerging from the South Bronx at the time that he might have scoffed at such elevated references.
Haring believed in the transformative power of line and succeeded in sharing his fluent lexicon of images with audiences never before reached by a contemporary artist. The beauty and genius of his work lies in the virtually inexhaustible possibility of meanings he conveyed through the most minimal means; his legacy is a wondrous graphical realm so strangely resembling our own.
—Keith Haring
On May 12, 1981, a few days after his 23rd birthday, Keith Haring organized a one-night exhibition of his newest work at Club 57, a downtown artists’ nightclub-gallery in the basement of the Polish Catholic Church on 57 St. Mark’s Place. In preparation for this event, a tour de force showcasing the young artist’s mastery of line and ever-transmuting archetypal symbols, Haring covered the walls with pinned-up drawings he had completed within days of the exhibition. These intimately scaled works were executed with metallic and black marker on colored plexiglass, clear acetate, or sheets of black vinyl cut from rolls obtained on Canal Street. Haring’s preference for plastic, vinyl, and other industrial materials during this period prefigured the oversized vinyl tarpaulins he would show in his first one-person gallery exhibition, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982.
A deceptively humble drawing on black vinyl, purchased from Haring shortly after the Club 57 exhibition, Untitled embodied the fluid line, telegraphic expediency and iconographic ambiguity that characterizes the artist’s work throughout his tragically brief career. Its rectangular outline, designating all within its perimeter as a “Haring,” highlights a primal gathering of five bovine-canine hybrids and a frenetic human figure. Though the scene appears as depthless as a television screen, and the horizon line is limited to two mere dashes of the pen, there is an exhilarant intricacy in the way Haring has staggered and interlocked all beings into a space-defying space. He was a fastidious composer, acutely aware of the conceptual harmonies and patterning that resonate within a drawing or painting. The artist admits, “So much information can be conveyed with just one line, and the slightest change in that line can create a totally different meaning” (K. Haring, interview with Barry Blinderman, “Keith Haring’s Subterranean Signatures,” Arts, September 1981). His bold outlining and reduced, stylized forms tap into the same graphic energy that drove prehistoric cave art, Assyrian reliefs, Aztec frescoes, Gauguin’s flattened shapes with clear contours, or, more recently, Roy Lichtenstein’s declarative line.
As in Egyptian art, the central figure’s head and torso are presented frontally while the legs are seen in profile. The six rays emanating from the head, so tightly interwoven into the cosmic cluster of dots, could as easily represent distress as astonishment or intense concentration. We might view the figure, whose face is covered by handless arms, as a shaman channeling the energy of the surrounding animals into a ritualistic boogie that curiously resembles the Kazatsky, a Russian squatting dance. Haring himself was wary of ascribing particular meanings to his work and was so deeply embroiled in the “b-boying,” rap, and graffiti emerging from the South Bronx at the time that he might have scoffed at such elevated references.
Haring believed in the transformative power of line and succeeded in sharing his fluent lexicon of images with audiences never before reached by a contemporary artist. The beauty and genius of his work lies in the virtually inexhaustible possibility of meanings he conveyed through the most minimal means; his legacy is a wondrous graphical realm so strangely resembling our own.