Mark Coetzee (ed)
2008
287 pages
Keith Haring was one of the major artstars of the downtown NYC art scene of the 1980s.
He achieved renown when he was quite young for his cartoony drawings and paintings which featured an idiosyncratic set of symbols such as the barking dog:
and his best known symbol, the radiating baby:
Haring’s work was the point of convergence for a number of clear influences, including Andy Warhol’s pop, NYC graffiti, abstract expressionism, and semiotic theory. Although Haring was not really a part of the NYC graffiti subculture, he is known as one of a small number of artists who emerged out of graffiti practice, as he drew his forms over sheets of black construction paper that were placed by the transit people in blank subway-station advertising space.
Against All Odds is a catalog for an exhibition of works of art by NYC 1980s artstar Keith Haring. All of the works featured in the exhibition were from the Rubell family, Don and Mara Rubell, who were great collectors of recent American art. The exhibition was held at the Palm Springs Art Museum, in Palm Springs California, from November 8, 2008 to january 19, 2009 (click here to see some of the images shown), and was curated by Mark Coetzee, then the head curator for that gallery. This catalog shows how closely Coetzee worked with the Rubell family as it includes a detailed interview between the curator and his benefactors, and it also demonstrates how close the Rubell’s were with Haring, as they express an intimate knowledge of the artist that includes many personal anecdotes. They also describe owning a scroll that features all of the different symbols Haring uses in his art. Coetzee also includes Jason Rubell’s (Don and Mara’s son) interview with Haring, recorded a few weeks before Haring died of complications from AIDS in early 1990 where the artist described his philosophies towards his art.
Coetzee’s catalogue also includes an essay about Haring by Robert Hobbs, a visiting professor of art history at Yale University. Hobbs essay compares Haring to the French artist Fernand Leger in their aesthetics and their populist approaches to art. Hobbs makes some, to me, uncomfortable observations regarding Haring’s subway drawings that sets it as street art that transcends graffiti, because it compels the viewer to contemplate its meaning... unlike street art which is, according to Hobbs, intended for the admiration of other graffiti artists. Of course, all graffiti/street art has the potential to provide a viewer with things to think about, so do television commercials or the architecture of public housing or highway interchanges or anything else “cultural”. This kind of observation which reserves for “high art” the capability of setting the viewer into a contemplative state is a pitfall of art-world people who are already committed to the eternal contemplation of high-status objects themselves. Ignoring Hobbs remarks about graffiti, however, is not difficult, and his main points about Haring, Leger and semiotic theory are quite interesting.
Coetzee's catalog contains full page colour images of all the works featured in the exhibition. Many of the works are self-referential and include photographs of the infant or child Haring. This book also includes images by those artists most closely associated with Haring, including works by Warhol and Haring's fellow 1980s NYC art-star graffiti transcendentalist, Jean-Michel Basquait. The English text in this book is accompanied by a parallel Spanish translation, and the book ends thorough bibliography of written works about Haring as well as an exhibition history of the artist.
No comments:
Post a Comment