BARRY BLINDERMAN

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More than forty years have passed since a 22-year-old Keith Haring created his first chalk drawings on the matte black paper that covered expired advertisement panels in NYC subway stations. Done right in front of mystified straphangers, often at peak hours, these drawings comprised a heroic, uncommissioned public art project of a scale and duration that New Yorkers had never seen before and are unlikely to see again. It is clear to me that Haring’s acrobatic characters have been etched indelibly in the collective mind whenever I run into young people in Los Angeles wearing newly minted Haring t-shirts, not necessarily aware of the identity behind the iconic imagery. Fame far beyond the reaches of the artworld is fame of the highest order.

 

Timothy Leary called Keith Haring a “performing philosopher—humanizing, personalizing, illustrating the great pagan mysteries of our race.” Drawing the engagement of a crowd was as crucial to Haring as drawing his mythopoetic symbols on walls and paper, and his performative impulse was shared by his comrade and collaborator Tseng Kwong Chi, whom he met in 1979. Kwong Chi was immersed in conceptual performance from the start, whether crashing a Metropolitan Museum costume gala wearing a Mao uniform and photographing himself with celebrities, or capturing his suited image in front of famous tourist monuments. 

 

While officially documenting nearly every public work and subway drawing by Haring, traveling with him across the globe from 1982 until 1989, the year before both artists’ deaths from AIDS, Kwong Chi had the opportunity to expand his East Meets West self-portrait series. These three-foot-square black and white photographs featured the artist posing expressionless in his Chinese worker’s suit and mirrored sunglasses in front of historic monuments, his vintage Rolleiflex’s remote cable release grasped tightly as if he were about to detonate a bomb. Photos shot during these trips with Keith include the statue of Christ in Rio de Janeiro, the colossal Buddha in Kamakura, the towering wine bottle in Bordeaux, Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, and the Eiffel Tower, among others. In contrast to Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series’ use of projected backgrounds, it was critical to Kwong Chi’s strategy to experience the “aura” of actual iconic places. 

 

I met Keith and Kwong Chi in 1981 at Club 57, a hangout for artist-performers in a church basement on St Mark’s Place. My interview with Keith conducted that summer was published in Arts magazine’s September issue, his first feature in an international monthly. Concurrently, he participated in The Anxious Figure, an exhibition I curated as director of Semaphore Gallery in SoHo. Semaphore began representing Kwong Chi in 1983 and exhibited selections from his East Meets West photographs in spring 1984. Shortly after that, my partner James and I decided to open a second gallery, in the East Village. We rented a compact, gated storefront with two large windows on the corner of 10th Street and Avenue B and began redesigning the interior in anticipation of opening in October. 

 

While I was deciding which artist(s) could best launch this nascent space, Art in Transit, a profusely illustrated book on Keith Haring’s subway station drawings as photographed by Kwong Chi, was released. The two artists and I agreed to stage a joint exhibition celebrating the auspicious alignment of the publication and the inauguration of Semaphore East. The gallery funded the fabrication of eleven lightboxes housing oversized large color transparencies of Kwong Chi’s subway station photographs, picked from the thousands of Haring drawings he documented. 

 

A few days before the show’s opening on October 3, just as we finished painting the freshly hung drywall white, Keith came by to check out the space and asked us to repaint the entire interior flat black. I knew immediately what he had in mind and was thrilled despite the extra work involved. After painting the walls, we installed the light boxes at different heights on the walls, following Kwong Chi’s design plan. The night before the opening, Keith entered the door armed with a big boombox, two packs of white chalk, and several joints. Kwong Chi stood by while Keith moved swiftly along the walls from one lightbox to another, enveloping them with drawings of oversized dancing dogs, giant-headed humanoids, dolphin hybrids and bat-men, all to the pulsating beat of the soul, funk, and rap music cassettes he’d brought along. 

 

I had watched Keith in action just once before and was absolutely mesmerized by the speed, sureness, and grace of his line as each figure emerged before my eyes. He stopped only to take a toke, sip a Coke, and move the ladder he used to reach the uppermost areas. In a few hours he had covered nearly every square inch of gallery wall, filling in any empty spaces with smaller characters and his trademark curvilinear rays signifying both motion and sound. With utter nonchalance, he surveyed his mural and Kwong Chi’s backlit photos of the famed chalked subway ad panels, and before I even knew it, he had picked up the remaining chalk sticks, grabbed the boombox, and the two were out the front door. A mural composed only of chalk dust, with no advance planning whatsoever, had materialized as if out of thin air. I could not wait to unveil this collaborative masterwork, one of a few large indoor murals Haring had done in New York at the time. 

 

The next evening’s crowd was jubilant, packed like sardines in the gallery and spilling out onto the sidewalk for a block or so. It’s amazing that the chalk wasn’t smeared. In the wake of all the excitement, I was flummoxed that the exhibition received no reviews in the coming weeks and months. It seemed that Haring’s immense popularity had engendered a critical backlash among artworld purists. All that remains of the installation are the lightboxes and the photographic documentation by Ivan Dalla Tana. I often muse that I should have suspended our exhibition program, preserved the project and kept it open indefinitely, but in retrospect it makes sense that the mural existed for only three weeks, about the maximum time any of the subway drawings remained intact before either being covered by an ad or stolen.