Powerful Babies: Keith Haring’s Impact on Artists Today, installation view, Spritmuseum, Stockholm. (clockwise from bottom left) Joakim Ojanen. Sensitive Artist, 2015; ceramic sculpture; 26 x 12.6 x 7.9 in. (66 x 32 x 20 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and Galleri Thomassen, Gothenburg. Raul de Nieves. It’s My Party and I’ll Cry If I Want To, 2013; mixed media; 46.1 x 25.9 in. (117 x 66 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and LOYAL, Stockholm. Misaki Kawai. Smash Master, 2010; acrylic on canvas; 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 122 cm); Courtesy of the Artist and LOYAL, Stockholm. Steven Evans. Dancing Was Our Pagan Rite (for K.H.), 2015; paint and vinyl lettering on wall; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: A. Rompel.

In his essay for the exhibition catalog, Arning makes two often-missed but brilliant points. First, to judge any one of Haring’s pieces as a discrete object is to miss the point, because the art object is a statement of its time. Haring’s work encapsulates a specific time in NYC’s youth-art-clubbing-activist-gay culture, and to fully appreciate it, one must consider the totality of that scene, in which art extended beyond the object and mixed with the realm of the everyday. (In addition to his paintings, Haring put his iconic line drawings on T-shirts, buttons, posters, billboards, and in magazines; in 1986, he opened the Pop Shop, a commercial venture that sold his images as everyday, affordable items.) Second, Arning points out that Haring’s oeuvre is easily contextualized in our present age of of Relational Aesthetics, which makes it difficult to comprehend the prejudice against the work during Haring’s life. Arning and Herron took the totality of Haring’s history, narrative, and methods, and used them as a framework for selecting the twenty-two artists in this exhibition.

Haring’s legacy is present in two ways: the literal and the memetic. The literal handles the ways in which artists have continued Haring’s strategy of physical expression, be that on a painting or a T-shirt. The memetic deals with the ways in which artists have absorbed and then pushed beyond Haring’s relational view of life-as-art-as-life. Powerful Babies focuses on the literal aspect, as it’s the more obvious of the two. However, some of the strongest works in the show take Haring’s relational strategy and fold it onto itself.

Klara Lidén. Untitled (from the series Poster Painting), 2011; posters and glue; 72.8 x 94.1 x 11.8 in. (185 x 239 x 30 cm). Courtesy of the Artist and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Photo: Moderna Museet/Prallan Allsten.

Klara Lidén untitled 2011 work (from the series Poster Painting) achieves this through a double critique of public space and the art object. The work is an extension of two previous but separate actions in which the artist had wheat-pasted blank white paper over street advertisements, and another in which—in a single night—the artist removed all of the billboard posters in Stockholm. For the untitled piece, Lidén collected flyers and poster advertisements and pasted them into a four-inch layer of mass advertising, with the top layer being blank. By laminating advertisements in to an art object, she negates the function of advertising, and in doing so invigorates the viewer’s consciousness of a ubiquitous presence. The object is simultaneously a fragment of culture and an embodiment of the greater narrative of advertising.

Jaimie Warren. You Are Not Alone: Self-Portrait as Michael Jackson in a Recreation of the Genealogical Trees of the Dominican Order, 2014 (video still); single-channel video. Courtesy of the Artist.

Jaimie Warren’s video You Are Not Alone: Self-Portrait as Michael Jackson in a Recreation of the Genealogical Trees of the Dominican Order (2014) offers a setting for an 1980s-MTV-style music video within an early Renaissance painting. Warren takes the messianic lead as Michael Jackson, and along with around thirty-five pop-culture friends, performs her way through a few songs until a final conflict with Freddy Krueger occurs. Locating contemporary nostalgia within “proper” art, the artist makes plain our collective social projections of the past, and the result is a mesmerizing and hilarious deconstruction of cultural value.

Allen Grubesic. I DIDN’T DO IT, 2015; one pair of shoes. Courtesy of the Artist and Pi Artworks, Istanbul/London.

Allen Grubesic furthers the conceptual framework around commercial identity and art with I DIDN’T DO IT (2015). Two identical five-foot-wide black canvases, with the title printed in white capitals, are hung in a column. On a shelf below sits a pair of white leather Nikes, but in place of the trademarked swoosh there is the image of Magritte’s infamous non-pipe. The substitution of Nike’s icon with iconic art becomes an artistic intervention into reclaiming identity. By using Magritte’s image, Grubesic layers the humor of “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” onto Nike’s identity-ethos and renders the object back to a mere shoe. With the “I” in “I didn’t do it,” the artist takes the negation of “Just do it” beyond the generic and makes it personal, and by doing so, he inverts the critique of the artist’s role in branding an identity.

Powerful Babies: Keith Haring’s Impact on Artists Today, installation view, Spritmuseum, Stockholm. (from top to bottom) Michael Alans. Hypnotic World, 2014; mixed media; 91 x 117 cm. Courtesy of the Artist. Steven Evans. Dancing Was Our Pagan Rite (for K.H.), 2015; paint and vinyl lettering on wall; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: A. Rompel.

Haring was able to create a paradigm shift in the art world by pushing the boundaries of what should be considered art, and in the process he opened the role of the artist. The 1980s may seem open and accepting because of Haring’s personal successes, but for those who remember, the art world was not hospitable to artists making work that was too street, too activist, too commercial, too populist, or to artists who were openly gay. Many of the artists who engaged in these pursuits were ignored. Haring’s achievements weren’t without struggle, but his struggle helped broaden the scope for diversity in art, as well as what could be considered art. Powerful Babies reminds us of the impact of Haring’s work and connects his legacy to art making today.

Powerful Babies: Keith Haring’s Impact on Artists Today is on view through April 3, 2016, at the Spritmuseum in Stockholm.

Tseng Kwong Chi. New York, New York (World Trade Center), 1979, from the East Meets West series; gelatin silver print, printed 2014; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York

Tseng was born in Hong Kong in 1950. His father had served in the Nationalist army in the war against China’s Communist revolutionaries and later fled to escape the new regime. When Tseng was a teenager, his family immigrated to Canada. He went on to complete his art education in Paris and then moved to New York City in 1978.[1] This international upbringing no doubt informed the project for which the artist is probably best known, East Meets West (1979–1984), later called the Expeditionary Series. In all of the self-portraits that compose this series, Tseng photographs himself standing in front of major landmarks in the Western world, including Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, Disneyland, and the World Trade Towers.

Tseng Kwong Chi. Niagara Falls, New York, 1984, from the East Meets West series; vintage gelatin silver print; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia.

In every setting, the artist adopts the same persona of a visiting Chinese Communist government official. He wears a Mao-style suit, mirrored sunglasses, and an ID badge. Many of the images feature him holding the release cable for his camera, revealing the self-sufficiency of the project. Tseng examines the experience of being caught within the tropes of Asian identity that are rampant in U.S. culture: the outsider, the tourist, the Communist, the obsessive documentarian. The time invested in the project and the repetition of the gesture speak to how common this must have been for Tseng in the late ’70s and early ’80s in the United States. The potency of these portraits’ humor is not in their incredulity or exaggeration, but rather how descriptive they are of being Asian under the Western gaze.

Tseng Kwong Chi. Art After Midnight, New York, 1985; vintage gelatin silver print; 36 x 36 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York.

Much of East Meets West is set in New York City, where Tseng was a documentarian of the ’80s Lower East Side art scene, serving as eager witness, archivist, and attendee to many a nightclub opening, art exhibition, and posh social gathering. Dozens of Polaroids and party photos are on display, many of which are composed as sets for each event. All of these works testify to Tseng’s earned “insiderness” within an exclusive and dynamic moment in New York City art society. He took portraits of his artist friends in their studios or home spaces, capturing the heat and mythos surrounding figures like Haring, Basquiat, and Warhol. He was also the most prolific documentarian of Haring’s graffiti practice across the city, with tens of thousands of images of Haring’s early work credited to him.

Tseng Kwong Chi. William F. Buckley Jr., 1981, from the Moral Majority series; gelatin silver print, printed 2014; 10 x 10 in. Courtesy of Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York

Other extremes of the ’80s drew Tseng’s attention as well. The 1981 Moral Majority series documents a range of far-right conservative political figures posing in front of a crumpled American flag. In a trip to Washington, D.C., Tseng dressed himself in a seersucker suit and feigned his sympathy for conservative causes, convincing men like William F. Buckley Jr. and Jerry Falwell to pose in front of the wrinkled prop, assuring them it was meant to look like it was “blowing in the wind.”[2] This was no small feat for the times, especially when you consider the vehemence with which moral-majority leaders denounced the homosexuality and gay activism that were thriving in the New York City arts community Tseng was a part of. This is a core strength in the artist’s practice: a deft utilization of his perceived position as an outsider in order to gain access and record opposite poles of the Reagan-era culture wars. Tseng’s manipulation of his performed identity enabled him to document the excesses and hypocrisies of American culture.

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing For the Camera is on view at the Grey Art Gallery of New York University through July 11, 2015.

[1],  [2] http://www.creativephotography.org/study-research/educators/tseng-kwong-chi

Keith Haring. A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988; acrylic on canvas; 120 x 120 x 120 in. Courtesy of de Young Museum San Francisco. Collection of the Keith Haring Foundation. © 2014, Keith Haring Foundation.

Keith Haring: The Political Line is a packed survey of work by the late artist—Haring passed away in 1990 from AIDS-related complications—organized by guest curator Dieter Buchhart and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco’s founding curator of photography and chief administrative curator, Julian Cox. The over 100 works in the exhibitions are grouped around political issues such as “Mass Media and Technology” and “Capitalism and Consumption,” pulling the viewer through the exhibition and broadly situating each packed room of works. Included, too, are various ephemera, Polaroid photographs, and drawings extracted from New York subway stations that historicize and contextualize Haring’s practice and motives, adding to the monumentality of the exhibition and demonstrating just how prolific and seemingly indefatigable Haring was in his thirty-one years of life.

Read the full article here.

Keith Haring. Unfinished Painting, 1989; acrylic on canvas; 39 x 39 in. (100 x 100 cm). Courtesy of Keith Haring Foundation

Cohosted by Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centquatre in Paris, The Political Line is one of the largest retrospectives of Keith Haring’s work. Spanning his career from 1978 to his untimely death in 1990, it comprises over two hundred works on paper and an impressive series of sculptures.

For Haring, making art was a public performance; its outcome was accessible to all and its content was topical. As a tribute to the activism in his art, The Political Line is thematically divided by the recurring subjects he addressed: social justice, excessive state control, abuses of capitalism, racism, religious dogma, the threat of nuclear war, and the vices of mass media. His final campaign, which was for safe sex among gay men, began in 1988 when he was diagnosed with HIV.

Haring’s works are defined by a frantic and impulsive energy that repeats itself in figurative outlines and gestures that loop into one another. These forms create a sense of urgency in the same way that bold or capital letters do when used in text. Universal signs and symbols are placed within a new context, provocatively revitalized by a hard-hitting vigor. A barking dog is humanized as the evil leader of the pack; a crawling baby radiates innocence; snakes and spaceships suggest apocalyptic hell, and green rivers of envy denounce the supremacy of the dollar.

Haring’s use of caricatured figures and ironic humor in his early works gives these critiques an optimism suggestive of a rebellious, youthful energy. But his later works reveal a growing despondency taking over his idealism. Although the sharpness of his critique never lightens, his  visual language suggests a shift toward darker commentary. Monstrous creatures spewing consumer commodities or a bleeding globe, as seen in Michael Stewart–USA for Africa (1985), become more common than witty collages of newspaper cutouts and homoerotic studies.

Keith Haring. Michael Stewart–USA for Africa, 1985; enamel and acrylic on canvas; 116 x 145 in. (295 x 367 cm). Courtesy of Keith Haring Foundation

The exhibition serves as a retrospective of political thought in America and its active subversion through the 1980s, as witnessed and animated in the streets, in clubs, and  in subways. Perhaps it is a timely reminder, a way to question today’s economic recession and political unrest, the sentiments behind the Arab Spring or the Occupy movements?

While Centquatre hosts monumental works, including the twenty-five-foot-high Ten Commandments (1985), a stark personal take on the depravity of religious faith and lifestyle depicted on arched panels, the themed sections at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris end with Unfinished Painting (1989). Replete with the iconic drips and loops that he claimed reflected an unrestrained form within a defined space, the painting signals an abrupt ending to a frantic energy, leaving the visitor with a mixed sense of guilt and dismay.

Keith Haring: The Political Line is on view at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at Centquatre through August 18, 2013.

Kanika Anand is an art historian and curator based in New Delhi and Grenoble. Having worked with contemporary art galleries and projects for five years, she is currently a participant in the Curatorial Program at the École du Magasin, Grenoble, France (2012–13).