Graffiti, art, and the imprint of Gen X

It will be hard not to make this post too personal, but I’ll try.  Keith Haring was an inspiring artist at a time when graffiti was still considered an eyesore and not an art form, a time that I have a lot of nostalgia for. I’m guessing that I might well have run into Keith Haring either on a dance floor (gay clubs were the only ones to play even remotely good dance music in the early 80s, and as Cameo says “we don’t have the time for psychological romance”) or in a mosh pit, and those desperate and proud moments were key formative times for a young suburban kid who wanted to know what all the fuss was about when it came to the energy of the big city and the attitude of contemporary art. That said, I visited Haring’s exhibit (along with Paolo Buggiani‘s work) in Firenze, and wow.

Thoughts:

• Buggiani doesn’t get enough credit for saving Haring’s work, and hearing the story of how accidentally that happened sent goosebumps down my spine. Haring’s initial laboratory as he called it combined performance and production in a way that fed off many of the other movements of the time, including rap and punk, but without Buggiani’s forethought we would be missing several of his best pieces. Haring might have been okay with that, as he was clearly invested in the transitory nature of what he was doing, but the rest of us would not have been… 
• Haring’s work so clearly captured us Gen Xers. We had watched the powerful student movements become glorified moments of excess, usually continuing the privileges of being white, middle-class, male, and straight, and our big fear was always to not be a sell-out like those clowns. Haring took those anxieties on directly, in the piece on the left as well as the one below.
• The directly confrontational nature of his work just makes me smile. Feels so punk rock…with which of course I have an unhealthy relationship…
• His ability to turn the street poetry of graffiti into something that translates to museum space is powerful of course, but some of the pieces we saw I had not seen, and they were much more ephemeral. Snow on cars that was painted, knowing it would disappear, the white chalk on unused advertising space, assuming it would be tossed, fire pieces with Paolo Buggiani – artists are supposed to be obsessed with legacy, and his legacy consisted as much in the performance as in the piece…
• There’s a lot going on with urban iconography and mythos as well. New York is just coming out of the Times Square rough times, not yet becoming the gentrified paradise that chased most of the interesting people out, and the idea of embracing the city for what it was was not popular. The five boroughs were sort of shitholes, but that’s made them interesting, and that’s why so many interesting folks went there to create. A mythology arises, one that encompasses a lot of formative, originary tales that may or may not be complete bullshit. That’s the point, of course…
• He’s also proudly performing his own sexual identity, and his tribe has been oppressed for a long time. His celebration of being gay – despite Stonewall happening many years before – marks the beginning of a proud movement, one not stopped by tragedy.
• He died of AIDs, of course.  We have lost so many talented folks to AIDS. I think that ACT UP will always be an inspiration to me because of the quality and inventiveness of their advocacy and protest. I lost at least two friends to AIDS, and I remember the horror and fear of the time, while the Reagan administration fiddled…
• The fact that Firenze hosted this makes sense, with all the international art students here thirsting for inspiration and conversation. I have no idea what Botticelli might have thought of Haring’s work, but I hope that he would have enjoyed the energy. I am fairly certain that Caravaggio would have been thoroughly invested…