I’m sure that most people will be familiar with the art of Keith Haring: his bright and colourful style is difficult to escape at times. I have seen it all around Cambridge – emblazoned on jumpers, rucksacks, and even t-shirts. However, his paintings seem to have devolved into kitsch; his pop-style is commonly appropriated and copied for advertisements or for GCSE Art projects. People are familiar with the dancing figures, jumping dogs, subway graffiti; they are familiar with all its camp value.

What is often overlooked is Haring’s more overtly homoerotic work: his activist posters. Haring was openly gay, something he commonly addressed in paint. Part of the thriving New York art scene in the 1980s, he hung around with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Madonna. He befriended Andy Warhol, who had paved the way for Haring, both in his art and his public image. “He was the person who made it possible for everything that I did to exist”, Haring recalled. “His endorsement of what I was doing gave it credibility.” Warhol, however, was often more ambiguous about his sexuality; he crafted a complex, contradictory persona. Nonetheless, he created reams of erotic photographs and drawings. The first works he ever submitted to a gallery were homoerotic drawings of male nudes but they were rejected for being openly gay. Many famous works – portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor – drew on gay culture. Over time, these subtleties have been lost on many; Warhol’s canvases are now merely camp and commercially aesthetic. 

With Haring, as soon as you look past the famous pieces, it is hard to avoid a celebration of queerness. Haring frequented the gay clubs and saunas of the burgeoning New York gay scene, portraying gay sex throughout his oeuvre. Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks, a series of drawings made before he achieved success, reimagines the skyscrapers of New York as monumental phalluses; The Great White Way is a 14ft phallic canvas covered in images mixing religion, sex, and destruction. He did much more than this, actively engaging with political issues. Haring printed posters for an anti-nuclear rally in 1982, dealt with apartheid and the crack cocaine epidemic in his paintings. A recent touring exhibition – Keith Haring: The Political Line – dealt with these themes (the catalogue is available in the UL). Unavoidable here is his engagement with the AIDS epidemic.

First identified in 1981 and labelled AIDS the following year (with another proposed name being Gay Related Immunodeficiency or GRID), New York was quickly devastated, in particular its gay scene. Haring was a huge advocate of safe sex, creating posters and developing a comedic character, Debbie Dick, to encourage use of condoms in sexual intercourse. In explaining this, Haring said, “I wanted to make something that communicated the message with a sense of humour. The whole subject is so morbid and anti-humour.” One might not associate Haring’s inescapably joyful style with such a morbid topic but it is precisely this juxtaposition which lends his work such power and subversive potential.

On multiple occasions Haring worked with ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, a major activist group who often used art and visual culture as part of their campaign. He adopted their slogan, ‘SILENCE = DEATH’, sadly Orwellian in sentiment. He also adopted their logo, a bright, pink triangle, itself a derivation of the sign the Nazis used to identify homosexuals. One such work includes three anonymous yellow men imitating the three wise monkeys: they see, hear, speak no evil; their silence leads to death. Personally, I find that his most powerful works are a collection of drawings done in 1988, in which AIDS is represented as a sperm with devil horns, emerging from an egg, a test tube, a junkies arm. There are traces of paranoia in Haring’s attitudes, with his labelling AIDS as a government conspiracy at one point, yet he still saw his own infection as inevitable from the early eighties. Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988; he died of AIDS-related complications in 1990.

Keith Haring was a wonderful and incredibly intelligent artist who sadly, died far too young. Thankfully, his work lives on. But in being subsumed within the mainstream, and thereby into the modern canon of art, much of his radical work has been pushed to one side. Haring’s artwork is too often reduced to comic characters, bright colours, and bold outlines. This happens far too often: we overlook interesting, radical, queer depth and focus on pristine, aesthetic surface. Dig a little deeper, look a little closer, and it is amazing what you might find.

@LouisShankar