3 Discussion Questions, 3 Student Reponses 2 other Assignemnets

HUM106: Experience of Modern Art

Week 10 Discussion

Preparation

Many people consider graffiti, which is characterized by logos (initials or nicknames) and tags (signatures), as vandalism. At the same time, many major artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet (see Figures 16.7 and 17.8 of your text), have used graffiti-like marks in their work. Keith Haring (1958–1990) was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti-like work grew out of the New York City street culture of the 1980s. Many consider him to be the undisputed king of the genre. 

To prepare for this discussion post, in your text:

· Read Chapter 25, “Haring and Basquiat,” page 687.

· View the Untitled Haring artwork featured above and in Figure 25.31, page 687.

Please respond to the following in a post of 150 to 200 words: 

Why is Keith Haring specifically, and graffiti-art in general, important to modern art? 

· Consider the following quote about Haring as you gather your thoughts: “Haring was best known for his graffiti-inspired drawings, which he first made in subway stations and later exhibited in museums” (1).

In a post of 60 to 75 words, please respond to at least one other post. Choose to respond to those who have few or no responses.

Sources

1. Biography. 2014. Keith Haring Biography. para. 1. https://www.biography.com/artist/keith-haring

Part 2: Student Response (Respond to Student)

Marsha Blunt 

RE: Week 10 Discussion

· 5

Good day everyone,

Per our text, Keith Haring was the first to bring recognition to graffiti as a form of art. He was the catalyst for many people in the art world to recognize graffiti as a form of art. As I have stated before I am not a learned art lover or connoisseur of great art but I know what it visually pleasing to me. Although I don't find Haring's art visually pleasing to me, I respect his work. Keith Haring showed the world what his version of art was by sharing some parts of his sexuality, his health struggles, and religious beliefs. In my opinion, art is the expression of the artist's thoughts, beliefs, desires, and fears. When an artist expresses themselves in their work, you either hate it or love it, but they always deserve respect for their work. Keith Haring, opened the door for graffiti artists to go mainstream, one such artist was Basquiat.

Bottom of Form

Haring and Basquiat Page 687

The dean of the art-school graffiti artists was Keith Haring (1958–90), who, with his School of Visual Arts preparation and love of working in public spaces, served as the all-important link between the subway world of self-taught graffiti “writers” and the younger “mainstream” artists responsive to the omnipresent, abrasive form of popular expression. At the same time that he made his presence felt in all the graffiti and cartoon forums, Haring was also traveling throughout New York City’s subway system and leaving his artistic calling card on virtually every train platform. The ubiquitous format for his impromptu exhibitions was the black panel from which an advertising poster had been removed, providing a surface somewhat like that of a schoolroom blackboard. After 1980, Haring made thousands of chalk drawings “in transit,” always quick, simple, strong, and direct, for the activity carried with it the risk of arrest for defacement of public property. He developed a distinctive vocabulary of cartoon figures—radiant child, barking dog, flying saucer, praying man—intermingled with universally readable signs like the cross, the halo, the pyramid, the heart, and the dollar, all rendered with such cheerfulness and generosity that their statements could be neither dismissed nor mistaken ( fig. 25.31 ). While in his commercial work Haring seemed to prefer drawing with black sumi ink or Magic Marker on paper, oaktag, fiberglass, or vinyl tarpaulin, he remained ready to unleash his prodigious capacity for graphic invention on almost any kind of surface, including those provided by pottery vases or plaster casts of such clichéd icons as Botticelli’s Venus. On these, as well as on vast outdoor walls, he sometimes collaborated with genuine graffiti writers, most of whom otherwise preferred the moving, subterranean environment of the New York subway trains.

25.31

Keith Haring, Untitled, “Keith Haring One Man Show” exhibition installation, 1982. Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York.

Although Haring garnered considerable respect in Europe, his contribution remained underappreciated in American museum circles during his lifetime. He aspired to have his work compared and exhibited with De Kooning and Matisse, but his populist and political activities seemed to work against art world recognition. Haring was politically active, creating posters and donating art for AIDS organizations in particular. In 1986 he opened the Pop Shop, which developed his project of bringing art to the masses who rarely ventured into SoHo galleries. At the Pop Shop, Haring sold low-cost merchandise such as pins and T-shirts with his signature motifs. The Pop Shop is still in operation. In 1997, seven years after his death from AIDS, Haring received a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A key figure in the transformation of graffiti into painting in the 1980s was the Brooklyn-born Haitian-Hispanic artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88). A high-school dropout at seventeen, Basquiat was probably the most meteoric star among all the talents associated with graffiti. Like the other successful graffitists-turned-painters, Basquiat never actually “bombed” trains. Rather, while more or less living on the streets in Lower Manhattan, he formed a partnership with a friend named Al Diaz and began Magic Marking poetic messages, illustrated with odd symbols, all over the city. The pair signed their work SAMO© (standing for “same old shit”). Basquiat’s tag reveals something of the frustration he felt as a black artist trying to assert his art within the context of a predominantly white gallery system. In the summer of 1980, SAMO© exhibited at the Times Square Show, a group exhibition produced by the artists’ collective CoLab, praised for creating an environment within an abandoned building on 42nd Street that mirrored the eclectic decay found in the city streets around it (see page  701 ). Basquiat, along with Haring and others, contributed works that attracted favorable critical attention. Shortly thereafter, Basquiat struck out on his own, and his drawing soon revealed something more than graphic street smarts—what appeared to be a devotion to Picasso’s Guernica (see  fig. 11.21 ).

Basquiat’s color-infused art is characteristically peopled by schematic figures with large, flattened, African-mask faces set against fields vigorously activated by such graffiti elements as words and phrases, arrows and grids, crowns, rockets, and skyscrapers. As in the work of Polke and Salle, the compositional force of Basquiat’s work lies not in its fidelity to expected rules of composition, but rather in the poetic juxtaposition—sometimes abrasive, sometimes soothing—of a variety of images, signs, and symbols. Quite apart from his compelling sense of drawing, color, and composition, Basquiat seemed to be able to balance the contradictory demands expected of a young African-American in the art world of the early 1980s. His figural style suggested the simulated primitivism of much Neo-Expressionism, while his biography contributed further to the presumed authenticity of the work: the veil of irony that had slipped over much art of the 1980s seemed to fall away in the case of Basquiat, who allowed critics and dealers to believe that he was from a poor family. Basquiat was, in fact, the child of well-educated, middle-class Puerto Rican and Haitian parents. Even so, Basquiat’s background was still far from the norm in the New York gallery scene, which presented the work of mostly white, male artists to a wealthy, white clientele. Politics aside, the rhythmic dirge of Grillo ( fig. 25.32 ) demonstrates that the artist was adept at coordinating graphic power with textual filigree to provide elements of formal