Wednesday, August 28, 2024
1982
I recently went over to the Walker to take in their Keith Haring exhibition. It has been heavy on me ever since.
If you don't recognize Haring's name, you probably recognize his art, which was mostly a few simple line drawings in various permutations in a way that really works to express emotion. Haring arrived in New York from Kutztown, Pennsylvania in 1978, He settled into the Lower East Side and started his career in a very public way-- by posting his work in the subway. By 1982, he began to participate in exhibitions, and not long after that he was wealthy and famous (relatively). His work was always public: murals, the subway pieces, affordable things from a "Pop Shop" he opened in SoHo, collaborations with people like dancer Bill T. Jones.
In 1990 he died of complications of AIDS. A lot of people did.
The thing about dying young is that your work necessarily becomes about a singular time and place, and Haring's insect in amber was New York-- and specifically, Manhattan-- in the early to mid-1980's. The city was violent, rough, and relatively cheap for young people. There were places to dance and make a mess.
I remember that place. I first went to New York without my family in 1982. I went up from college with Nancy, Sutton and Matt. Nancy was from a small city in Indiana, and grew up in a house with a cornfield behind it. Sutton was a Dallas sophisticate, and Matt was a kid from Northern Virginia, like a lot of students at William and Mary. We stayed with Nancy's cousin who was squatting in a vacant apartment building in the Lower East Side. He took us to the Pyramid Club, on Avenue A. I saw drag performers for the first time, and stayed out all night, and danced, and sat in a cafe and watched a man order nothing but hot water with a lemon. I learned more than I did at school.
After that, I kept going back, and there are such memories: cheeseburgers at the Old Town; my girlfriend reacting to a guy grabbing her ass while she was chopping vegetables by turning and holding the tip of the knife to his neck even as a single drop of blood emerged; talking to firemen at 2 am as they sat in front of their truck; more dancing, the music, the rats, the light, the sirens.
It's all gone and different now. Nancy is a professor in Ithaca, Sutton is back in Texas with a husband and a bunch of grown kids, I'm whatever it is that I am, and Matt is dead. Of AIDS.
Simple line drawings? Yeah, not so simple.
