Against All Odds: Keith Haring in the Rubell Family Collection
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.
Cedar Lewisohn, a curator at Tate Modern gallery in London, U.K. has written an insightful study of the international phenomena known as graffiti and street art. Street Art is, by my estimation, far more substantive than such publications as the already profiled Stencil Graffiti or Graffiti NYC. Lewisohn’s book attempts to theorize the differences between graffiti and the new, emerging forms it inspires, which he refers to as ‘street art’ proper. Furthermore, Lewisohn’s text comprises an attempt, which has already been seen in Tristan Manco’s Stencil Graffiti, to formulate a canon of street artists.
This book was released to coincide with a Lewisohn-curated Street Art exhibition held at the Tate Modern from 23 May – 25 August 2008. I am often skeptical of the relevance of graffiti or street art gallery exhibitions because I believe the loss of the ‘street’ setting empties such works of much of their essence. Lewisohn’s show was accompanied by a walking tour lead by a number of practicing street artists, thus returning the street to the academic discourse on the cultural form. In Street Art, the author makes calls for academic and high-art institutions to recognize street art and in particular he requests that museums begin including such works in their collections. While Lewisohn’s arguments are more nuanced and articulate than the simplistic griping about lack of recognition done by Hugo Martinez in Graffiti NYC, the call for graffiti to appear museums still sounds problematic to me. The transposition from street to gallery for a work of art creates for it a radical change of status, because graffiti/street art is not simply imagery and its street setting is of critical importance to its value.
Graffiti and Street art (its questionable whether or not people who are not hip to the scene differentiate between the two the way Lewisohn does) normally exist in a tension between the street artists and the city officials who believe that nothing can improve upon the appearance of an unadorned concrete wall. Spectators play in the balance, choosing their level of engagement with the art as they move through the city, and making evaluations as they proceed. Combining a gallery exhibition of street art with a walking tour is perhaps a strategy for attempting to reconcile the transposition of street art into the gallery, with the original experience of viewing such art in the street.
As has already been stated, Lewisohn’s book operates in a manner different from many other street art texts, and this is first evidenced in the images he uses. While Stencil Graffiti and Graffiti NYC often displayed closely cropped images (with some exceptions) of street art, Street Art often displays a work of graffiti surrounded by a number of other markings, tags, stickers, etc. The images in the book display the hypergraphic reality that works of street art exist in. They are seldom discreet graphic objects and are almost always on a surface with a myriad of other ‘works’ of similar art.
Another aspect to Lewisohn’s text that makes it an interesting book in the graffiti art literature is its construction of a history for the craft. Lewisohn operates along two lines of history, the first is with regards to the art, which he grounds in NYC graffiti of the 1970s and 1980s as well as practices by the “high-art” artists who used the street as a showplace, including Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Fekner, and some others. Lewisohn reaches as far back as Brassai, a photographer of mid-20th-century streetlife and his photos of children’s scratchings on the sides of Parisian buildings. Lewisohn’s history of the art draws on both folk and fine art traditions, radical politics, and desires for illegal thrills, which lead into his descriptions of the most reputable contemporary practitioners of street art. Street Art, for Lewisohn, is the culmination of the convergence of all of these traditions. The canon of contemporary street artists includes Blek Le Rat, Banksy, Judith Supine, Lady Pink, Shepard Fairey, and Miss Van. The author's prehistory of street is varied and comprehensive and it is fitting that Lewisohn's list of currently relevant artists is also varied in terms of location, style, motivations, and materials.
The other history Lewisohn presents is that of the documentation and theory about graffiti and street art. Lewisohn includes discussions with Henry Chalfant (author of early books about graffiti and director of the 1984 graffiti documentary film, Style Wars
). He also includes photographs and discussions with Martha Cooper who produced the 1988 book Subway Art
a seminal photobook of the era of NYC subway graffiti. Numerous references are made throughout the book to seminal writings on the art form, including Norman Mailer’s text The Faith of Graffiti
, and French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of NYC tagging in Symbolic Exchange and Death
. Interspersed with Lewisohn’s profiles of the most reputable members of the international street artist scene are some notes considering specific cultural influences such as punk culture or the formative art-school environment. Lewisohn’s text and innovative 2008 exhibition has placed himself as a recent figure in the field of graffiti research, and his book is as much about the history of graffiti history as it is about the emerging street art scene. It should also go without saying but this Tate publication is filled with full colour images of examples of the art Lewisohn finds to be such a vital form of modern expression.
