KEITH HARING

Image credit: Graham Denholm

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Meg Slater: I'm Meg Slater. I'm curator of International Exhibitions at the NGV. 

 

Ted Gott: And I'm Ted Gott senior creator of International Art, here at NGV. 

 

Meg Slater: And I worked on the Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines exhibition, which was curated by a guest curator Dieter Buchhart, and Ted has researched and written an amazing view on Haring’s time, he has specifically his work on the 1984 short-lived Water Window mural. 

 

Ted Gott: Yeah. I also worked with Lisa Sullivan, who's at the Geelong Art Gallery. 

 

Meg Slater: And of course you worked on yeah, you've worked on many other- 

 

Ted Gott: Yeah we prepared a heritage report for the Richmond Council to save the Collingwood mural. Well, it captured an immediacy and a vibrancy at the time when the art world was changing. It broke down doors. It brought, as that old cliche, it brought the art of the street into the gallery. Or what for me is important about his art, is just his incredible painterly and draftsmanly skills.

 

Day one, it’s the first time he'd ever used a cherry picker, and he'd never painted on a surface this big before 

 

Meg Slater: Or on glass…

 

Teg Gott: or on glass, and on day one he did without any preparatory drawings, he just created nine designs, two metres wide and seven metres high. Perfectly, in absolute symmetry and precision and perspective, allowing for the fact that on day two, he would come back and fill in the negative areas that he had left with a layer of black and a layer of red. That is, that is Leonardo da Vinci - genius. And when you see videos of him drawing, that is what stands out. He just starts from one end and just goes. And when he painted that he never got down off the cherry picker, he did not stand back and look to see where he was at. He was painting two inches in front of his face, but his mind could do that and the same thing with the Collingwood mural. He did that on a ladder and a cherry picker; never once got down to look at what he was doing. Only on one occasion the kids asked him what was the finished design going to be, and then he gets down off the cherry picker and he draws a foots long caterpillar snake saying this is what it's going to be.

 

Meg Slater: Amazing! 

 

Ted Gott: Well, there was a very lively art scene here called the Roar studio, which operated out of premises in Fitzroy. And he met with the Roar artists and um they hung out with him. There's one artist in particular, Mark Schaller, uh, who sort of chaperoned Keith around. He showed him where to buy the right paints and paint this in Collingwood mural. He went out with him zapping the streets because there were lots of graffiti works done in Melbourne at the dead of night. While he was here.

 

Meg Slater: But I think Haring was a real - I mean, I can't really speak to the time as much, Ted - but am I right in saying that Haring was a bit of a hero for a lot of local artists here? 

 

Ted Gott: Oh, yes absolutely! 

 

Meg Slater: Word had come back of his, you know, his sort of like grassroots to sort of, you know, gallery representation success in New York and he was a real sort of, you know, yeah, as I mentioned hero for a lot of artists here. But I think his choice of where he made his art is really important. Even his choice of a space like the Water Wall, it's somewhere- it's a surface that you don't have to come into the building to see, but you could also see from within the building, and passers by could see the work. And that always remained very important to him even when he did gain gallery representation and he started to sort of rise through the ranks of the New York art world and and just internationally. He continued to make public murals. It was sort of the core of his practice and I think that's really important to think about. He could have stopped doing that, but he didn't. And I think his reasons for doing that are reflected in why he set up his foundation. It has social and political aims. It works with disenfranchised groups. It works with queer community groups, um, you know, the ethos has always been there and I think that's really admirable for someone who gained such quick success within the art world. And also just what he's done for the queer community and his legacy within the queer community. It's just astounding.

 

Ted Gott: He also wanted always to work with children. So when he was here, he requested a project that would involve a school, so that's how the Collingwood mural came about. And he interacted with them a lot. He had his little boom box playing rap music, the boom box decorated by Kenny Scharf. And the kids were doing dancing, and he would get down and dance with them and chat to them. So he was very interested in mentoring and inspiring younger people, always.

 

Meg Slater: What he was producing, he occupied quite a special space in that he was sort of touching so many parts of the art but that public practice, that sort of dual public practice and then practice in more formal gallery spaces. It's sad to think of, you know, it sort of, it makes you quite emotional to think of where he would have continued to go, just because his output was so prolific in the short time that he was working. It's quite astounding. He made art to live, really,  and for us as well. 

 

Ted Gott: Exactly. And one of his goals was to make art part of daily public love and his murals worldwide were part of that. So that was an enormous loss. But also, as his art developed, it did become more political. And so we lost one of the great advocates fighting for not only gay rights, but the messages of safe sex at the time of HIV/AIDS crisis, but he was also creating artwork that was criticizing the market of the dollar economy. He was criticizing the rise of computer technology and the threat that that would pose to civilization, which is now coming true. He was making works about apartheid and racial prejudice. He was really bringing to the fore incredible dialogue.

 

Meg Slater: His- I think one thing that interestingly has lived on in ways that I think he might not appreciate him as much as others is he had this very distinctive iconography, very distinctive line that has been in some cases appropriated by sort of commercial sources. But also, there's been an interesting use of his art that I think, you know, with the artist no longer present, what would he think of these uses, particularly in commercial spaces? So I think it's, yeah, he was very ahead of his time in terms of the issues that he was addressing in his work. He was very open- not only as a gay man making art about his experiences as a queer person, but uh, yeah, just about all of these issues that he came into contact with through the incredibly diverse circles that he mixed in. And even that Collingwood mural, the um, the caterpillar with the computer head and the people beneath it. It's a very fun looking image, but it does have a more sort of sinister undertone in that it's this sort of computer impending computer age crushing all of us below. 

 

Ted Gott: The mural had been just fading away, and there was a lot of discussion about whether it should be just painted over or demolished, or whether it should be rescued. There were conflicting sides. Some people wanted it to be repainted, which I think would have been a disaster because then it's not a Keith Haring mural anymore. It's someone else over the top of Keith Haring. There were lots of public discussions. There were some considerable public fights from the camps who wanted it repainted and the camps who didn’t. 

 

Meg Slater: Oh, really? 

 

Ted Gott: It wasn't fading, but in fact, there was a leaching out of a white substance. We were able to apply poultices to it and remove this white matter. And suddenly the vibrant colours were back and they just did a little bit of in-filling, but it was miraculous. So they were able to rejuvenate the mural without repainting it. Really, there was 10 years of discussion that before was rescued. Now Meg tells me it's been graffitied. 

 

Meg Slater: Not every person on the street is going to respect that this is one of the last surviving murals by Keith Haring. And it's interesting to consider, you know, what the artist would have wanted in terms of how these works are displayed. I don't think Haring would have wanted to have a giant piece of perspex up in front of it, but unfortunately, you know, what- where to from here? And I think that process of rediscovery is really exciting, it's a bittersweet. It shouldn't have to be this way but it is. And it's also really exciting to see people, you know, getting this recognition. Um and increasingly they're being more spaces for these practitioners within contemporary practice. So I think that's really exciting.

 

Ted Gott: I think that's one of the tragedies of just the human condition; that history has forgotten so quickly. As new generation comes forth and they actually have no idea of what came before them. So, they need to be constantly reminded and educated. And it’s a constant battle in the wider worlds to fight for our acceptance on all levels.