Can We Finally Take Keith Haring Out of His Time Capsule?

At the Brooklyn Museum’s current retrospective of Keith Haring’s early work, titled Keith Haring: 1978–1982, you can view what may be the earliest video of the artist at work. In Haring Paints Himself into a Corner, Haring literally paints himself into a corner as music by the cult band Devo blares in the background. Friend and fellow artist Kenny Scharf remembers seeing the film being made and Haring painting lines “to the beat of the music, almost like a dance.” It sounds almost like an artsy version of That ‘70s Show, complete with period soundtrack. But, as Jade Dellinger has remarked, Devo’s first album, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, “became a rallying call and a conduit for the like-minded to meet” in that year of 1978. Haring is so much a part of his time and, because of his advocacy and death, the frightened, confused, early AIDS era, the temptation to take him out of the time capsule and gently return him is often irresistible. By looking at the early Haring, however, Keith Haring: 1978–1982 shows how the artist and his spirit live on today. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Can We Finally Take Keith Haring Out of His Time Capsule?"

[Image: Keith Haring (American, 1958–1990). Flyer for Des Refusés at Westbeth Painters Space, New York City, February 10, 1981 (detail). Acrylic and ink on paper. Collection Keith Haring Foundation. © Keith Haring Foundation.]

[Many thanks to the Brooklyn Museum for the image above and for other press materials related to the exhibition Keith Haring: 1978–1982, which runs through July 8, 2012.]

Cutting Session

What sets black portraiture apart from the rest of portraiture as a genre? In Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Richard J. Powell argues that the difference lies “in the artistic contract between the portrayer and the portrayed: conscious or unconscious negotiations that invest black subjects with social capital… invariably linked to the subject’s sense of self—an awareness that through self-adornment, self-composure, and self-imaging upsets the representational paradigm and creates something pictorially exceptional.” What makes black portraits “exceptional,” in other words, is the way that the subjects “clothe” themselves psychologically to produce a “self” to be portrayed and understood by another. Romare Bearden’s collage titled Pittsburgh Memory (above, from 1964) embodies this building up of self from parts that Powell sees at the heart of the “subject-dominated portraits” of black subjects versus the larger history of portraiture in which the artist’s vision dominates. Powell riffs off the idea of collage and makes use of the phrase “cutting a figure” to capture “the sense of pride and exhibitionism implicit in this expression,” which are “often qualified by race, class, and historical circumstances.” What a white audience may view as immodesty, a black audience may view as self-expression. Powell cuts apart the different subgenres of portraiture to reassemble in the end a clearer picture of the power of portraiture to give a voice to the voiceless.

In the chapter titled simply, “Interlocutors,” Powell traces how early black portraiture dealt with the issue of slavery and the continued control of the white population over image making. The “thematic current that flows throughout these works, intentional and subconscious,” Powell writes, “is freedom: both personal, bodily emancipation and sovereignty in a more abstract, metaphysical sense.” Nathaniel Jocelyn’s Cinque (above, from 1840) neatly encapsulates this freedom-centered dynamic. When a group of Africans from Sierra Leone faced trial in the Amistad case recounted in the 1997 film, abolitionists commissioned Jocelyn to paint a portrait of the slaves’ leader, Sengbe Pieh, whose name was mispronounced as Joseph Cinque. Jocelyn shows Sengbe with startling humanity. “Looking more like a Greco-Roman divinity than a brutish marauder, and with a staff that invokes the insignia of an ancient shepherd or wanderer,” Powell writes of Cinque, “this representation contradicts the prevailing perception of Cinque and his fellow Africans as savages and instead embraces a republican ideal, an allegorical representation of Christian proselytizing, and a symbol of black activism.” Powell then moves from Sengbe’s passive role in propagandizing against slavery to the active roles of activists such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Both Douglass and Truth used their personal appearances as weapons in the fight against slavery. Rumors that the exceptionally tall Truth was actually a man compelled her to bare her breasts in public to silence critics, which drew even greater sympathy to her cause as both a black and a woman. In Douglass’ case, Powell notes, the sexual dimension aided his cause differently. “[T]he hypnotic power that [Douglass] and certain other black men had over spectators” created “a potency that combined race, gender, and sexuality to achieve psychological dominion over cultural perception and social stratification,” Powell asserts. Thanks to photography and paintings, Douglass and Truth spread the word of freedom through the power of portraiture.

In a fascinating and daring leap, Powell abruptly turns his attention to the case of Donyale Luna, the first internationally acclaimed African-American fashion model. Almost completely forgotten today, Luna’s “Nefertiti-like face” appeared in magazines and on television regularly in the mid to late 1960s. Much of that forgetting comes from how unforgettable Donyale once was in the fashion world. “Contesting the prevailing white/male/artist-dominated production of acquiescent black images,” Powell writes, “Luna’s aggressive figure cuts through the racial and gender hierarchies, imposes its own aesthetic will, and prevails.” American magazines actually banned Richard Avedon’s 1966 photograph of Luna in a dress by Paco Rabanne (above) for this very aggression. In this section, Powell gives convincing weight to the sometimes lightweight world of high fashion modeling as a real barometer of social attitudes and the role of portraiture in revealing those views. Donyale stepped outside the boundaries of modeling to pall around with the likes of Miles Davis and Andy Warhol, write and act in plays, and even appear in films by Warhol, Federico Fellini, and Carmelo Bene. Even Dali doodled on Donyale during an encounter in 1966. Sadly, drug abuse led to Luna’s early death in 1979, just as models such as Iman and Grace Jones began to follow her unconventional path. In tracing the trajectory of Luna’s rise and fall, Powell prepares the ground for a later discussion of how in the 1980s, blacks were suddenly omnipresent in American media, from The Cosby Show to Michael Jordan’s endorsement blitzkrieg. Jean-Michael Basquiat comes to embody the “black bohemia” of the 1980s art scene. After the height of Gatorade’s “Like Mike,” however, comes the low of the 1990s rap generation, who “for better or worse, revealed a nihilism and avarice that, while present within any socioeconomic grouping, had not previously been seen so broadly or explicitly in an African-American context.” Tupak Shakur and others come to represent “the unheralded but irrefutable demise of a representative blackness as it had been known,” Powell laments. The strength and freedom of Douglass, Luna, et al. disappears into the void of materialism and anarchy of “thug culture.”

For Powell, the 1970s represent a “golden age” of black portraiture, in which “attention-grabbing hair-styles, along with clothing made of leather, polyester, and cotton with African-style prints, became the primary means by which African-Americans announced themselves anew, challenged the white status quo, and probed the more extroverted sides of their personality.” No artist got as down and funky in a fine arts way as Barkley L. Hendricks. Hendricks recognized that young African-Americans formed a sense of “blackness” from clothing and attitude. In a 1977 self-portrait titled Brilliantly Endowed, Hendricks painted himself nude except for some jewelry, striped socks, Converse sneakers, and an applejack cap perched on his head to emphasize the role in how clothes made the man, even when it was just the accessories. Later travels to Africa impressed on Hendricks the role of a specific black “attitude” via clothing in black cultural survival. During one of those trips, Hendricks encountered the singer and activist Fela, whom he painted posthumously in 2002 in Fela: Amen, Amen, Amen… (above). “Hendricks’ Fela employs his art as a creative offense,” Powell writes, “and his body as a jump-suited defense against moral hypocrisy, political corruption, and, above all, social invisibility.”

The decorative background of Hendricks’ portrait of Fela draws immediate comparisons to the iconic hip-hop portraits of Kehinde Wiley. In Wiley’s “Passing/Posing” paintings, however, Powell sees not the subject-centered portraiture of Hendricks but, instead, “Tupac Shakur-like ‘thug fiction’ where macho self-deception and hip-hop ‘fronting’ cut straight into the heart of representational matters.” Sadly, the subject center no longer holds in black portraiture for Powell, one of the many symptoms of a larger identity void that plagues not only African-Americans and America as a whole. “Through self-fashioning, provocative role-play, and other insignia,” Powell concludes, “peoples of African descent and their artistic delineators have slashed away at the fixed boundaries imposed upon black bodies in the public, predominantly Euro-American arena.” Like Jean-Paul Goude’s four-part portrait of Grace Jones (above, from 1978), the idea of the black portrait remains a fluid, ever-changing work in progress. Powell’s approach to the subject mimics that of a great jazz musician taking themes from here and there to create a new, personal composition full of individual flavor. Young jazz musicians looking to challenge the established lions would enter “cutting sessions” in which no mercy was shown. (Charlie Parker recalled having a cymbal thrown at him on his first attempt.) In Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Richard J. Powell enters the lion’s den of art history to do battle with the long legacy of portraiture and succeeds in emerging with a new vision of the black portrait as a valuable tool for self-fashioning in the past and, hopefully, for the future.

[Many thanks to the University of Chicago Press for providing me with a review copy of Richard J. Powell’s Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture.]

For the Love of Pete

If you were to take all the things that I dislike about the contemporary art world and compress them into one single person, that person would be Damien Hirst. Born June 7, 1965, Hirst took his long career of self-promotion and sensationalism to the mountaintop with his For The Love of God (above, from 2007). Hirst’s mother reportedly asked her son, as many of us have, “For the love of God, what are you going to do next?” In reply, Hirst attached 8,601 diamonds and one pear-shaped, pink diamond to a platinum cast over an actual human skull, leaving only the original teeth exposed. A former friend of Hirst, John LeKay claimed that Hirst plagarized his 1993 crystal-covered skull, only to have his claim ignored by the glamour-obsessed media. Hirst asked for $100 million for his skull. When no buyer materialized, Hirst allegedly “bought” it himself with a coalition of moneyed associates rather than face the ignominy of his publicity coup turning into a fiasco. As much as people try to save Hirst by weaving elaborate meanings for his works, usually centering around death, all I can see is greed.

Hirst’s death credentials hark back to his signature work, the 14-foot tiger shark embalmed in formaldehyde that he dubbed The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (above, from 1991). Hirst’s shark always strikes me as more a feat of taxidermy than of art. Actually, it’s not even that great a feat of taxidermy, as the shark began to decay within the display and had to be replaced. But even before Hirst “jumped the shark,” powerhouse art dealers such as Charles Saatchi financially backed anything Hirst did sight unseen. In a vicious circle of influence, Saatchi’s name bolstered Hirst’s as Hirst’s growing stature then reflected back on Saatchi. The cautionary tale named Jean-Michel Basquiat from the overheated contemporary New York art market of the 1980s may be revisited some day through Hirst for the overcommercialized and ruthlessly capitalistic art market of the 1990s and early twenty-first century.

In the courtyard of the Lever House on posh Park Avenue in New York stands Hirst’s statue The Virgin Mother (above, erected in 2005). Standing almost 34 feet tall, the flayed Virgin Mary with her partially exposed womb displaying a fetal baby Jesus dismays passersby daily. Of all the art skirting religious subjects over the past decade and drawing condemnation, I find it amazing that, at least to my recollection, nobody’s ever taken offense at this sculpture. Personally, I don’t find it offensive as a religious image, but rather as a dehumanizing comment on the human body. Hirst here displays the female body as pure meat, just as he had halved sheep and cows years before in his previous grotesque displays of death. Do the people of Lever House really enjoy this? Or do they enjoy the idea of a name artist such as Hirst decorating their courtyard, blinding them to even this graphic display? Apparently money talks, and in this case screams, to the point that people will accept just about anything if they think it’s trendy. Hirst’s art is a textbook case of people buying art based on a name and not on any pleasure, sensual or intellectual, they derive from it.

Deal With the Devil

“More than any other artist, Damien [Hirst] has used the art market as a medium,” says Jeffrey Deitch in Calvin Tomkins’ article "A Fool for Art: Jeffrey Deitch and Art-Market Exuberance" in the November 12, 2007 issue of The New Yorker. “You could dismiss this as over-the-top commercial, but he’s achieved a lot of cultural influence and power by using the market so cleverly. He’s using the power of the money to enhance the impact of his imagery and his art.” (Hirst’s infamous publicity stunt posing as art titled For the Love of God appears above.) Hirst’s name rises to the top of the current crop of “hot” artists for active buyers, which includes artists such as Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, and Takashi Murakami. Tomkins article serves as an enlightening if depressing glimpse into the current art market, where marketing seems to rule over art-making.

Another sad fact related by the article is the lack of American buyers for much top-level art. “We’ve never analyzed an art market in this new world, with China, Russia, and parts of the Middle East involved,” says an analyst. Such internationalism would be great if it meant that the works were being disseminated to museums worldwide, but instead it’s just the next phase of the separation between those who see art as an investment and those who see it as cultural food for the soul. Just as Greece and Italy today clamor for the return of their cultural heritage, one day Europe and America may look longingly overseas towards the works sold off today.

“The art world used to be a community, but now it’s an industry,” Deitch says later. “We live in an increasingly culture-based economy, and the value of art is in synch with other tangible assets now, like real estate.” Perhaps it’s this loss of art as a cultural, communal entity that seems the saddest. I’m not so naïve to think that art hasn’t always been a business, but part of that business always addressed the world around it in a deeper sense. Starting with the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, art simultaneously delved deeper into popular culture and away from its own historical roots, leading to today’s total divorce from “big message” art in the name of “big marketing” art, ala Hirst.

Deitch’s comparison of the current art market to the real estate market seems ominous to most Americans considering the current housing market bust after a long boom, and may actually be prophetic of a day when buyers seeking to “flip” a painting for bigger prices suddenly find themselves the owner of an overpriced Basquiat that nobody wants, including themselves. Deitch himself seems to have an actual love for art, admiring at one point the charms of a Courbet recently brought to market, but the utter soullessness of many of his competitors in the field paints a bleak picture for everyone who loves to look at art.

Who’s Next?

The Art Newspaper currently has an article about the latest trends in museum acquisitions. New media, such as film, video, and mixed media, are all on the rise, reflecting new technologies available to the modern artist. Old media, and I mean really old media, such as Greek and Roman antiquities, is on the downslide, mostly from the recent controversies over the home countries trying to reclaim their stolen heritage. But what really interested me about the article was their listing of the two hottest artists museums are pursuing, one name familiar and one name not: Jasper Johns and Kehinde Wiley.

Perhaps more than any other modern artist, Johns’ art suffers in reproduction. You really need to see the American flags, maps, and other encaustic works personally to appreciate the textures. Personally, I find the battle between Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for “best living American artist” in the minds of museum acquisition directors fascinating. Rauschenberg’s appeal has always eluded me, probably from my own lack of understanding, but Calvin Tomkins’ Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg provided a lot of insight into Rauschenberg’s work as well as his changing relationship with Johns.

I honestly had never heard of Kehinde Wiley, and really wonder why not. Fortunately, through the miracle of Google, no artist is more than a few clicks away today. Like any good modern artist, Wiley has his own homepage. Unlike most modern artists, however, Wiley freely steals from the past, specifically the Renaissance style, to present his own urban, hip hop imagery. The incongruity between the two styles, one classically artistic and one modernly commonplace, reinvents the people in Wiley’s work and allows a new audience to see hip hop in a new light. (I confess to little to no knowledge of hip hop culture. I don’t “roll like that,” he said in an old and Caucasian voice.)

Wiley’s Passing/Posing (St. Clement of Padua) (at the top of this post) transforms a circa 1970s Houston Astros’ jersey-wearing African-American man into a religious icon not only by his pose but also by the colors of the painting, blending the familiar festish for “old school” sports uniforms with the warm light of Renaissance saints. The halo-like sunburst around the figure’s head echoes the sunburst on the Astros jersey, an imaginative repurposing of modern design to mimic Renaissance iconography. (More paintings are available here from a 2005 Brooklyn Museum exhibit of Wiley’s work.)

Wiley’s Passing/Posing (Assumption) (above) draws parallels between the baggy clothing popular in hip hop style with the robes and monkish cowls of Renaissance saints. This figure could easily be a modern-day St. Francis of Assisi, but with the flowing vines and pink flowers of bucolic nature acting as a contrast to the youth’s darker urban reality. Perhaps this is an assumption into the afterlife, with the natural imagery providing a peace that most African-American youth never know today.

Wiley’s work disrupts many of the common assumptions mainstream culture has of hip hop culture and African-American youth. I believe that, unlike the art of many other African-Americans who have quickly risen to fame (Jean-Michel Basquiat comes quickest to mind), Wiley’s works have the staying power to become valued permanent acquisitions.