He was standing by the stack of Kellogg's Corn Flakes boxes, staring ahead, eyes glazed, face pock-marked and wan, mouth slightly open. Later he was around the corner, with his shock of white hair and a Macy's shopping bag. And then he was in another room, with two women, one big and one small, who were standing obediently nearby and listening as he mumbled incoherently.
The Andy Warhol impersonator kept popping up everywhere on opening night at the Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Walt Disney exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum.
You couldn't miss him. In fact, at first glance he looked so much like Warhol that you had to do a double-take just to make sure you had history straight. Because Warhol, the pop artist and pop icon who came to fame in the early Sixties with his paintings of Campbell's Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, is dead, of course.
But then, so is Walt Disney. And so is Keith Haring, the pop artist who came to fame in the early Eighties as a graffiti artist in New York City and went on to become a mainstay of the international art scene through the rest of the decade until he died of complications from AIDS last year.
For a show full of the dead, last Friday night's opening was awfully lively. More than 1,500 people attended that night, and the exhibition has been attracting record crowds since then.
People at the opening were participating in a passion play Warhol would have loved. Dressed up and posing, they were protecting their territory and defending their domain through both attitude and appearance. They would glance at a painting or a print, then glance around to see if anyone had glanced at their glancing. They wanted to be part of that whole crazy world where knowing how to look is as important as what's being looked at.
Luckily, they couldn't have been looking at a much better exhibition. Although the Haring/Warhol/Disney show may be a little short on first-rate work by Keith Haring, the artist comes off looking surprisingly good. And the show as a whole bubbles with a kind of importance, and with an energy inspired by a vision rarely seen in Phoenix. It works both as history and as idea.
Put together by Bruce Kurtz, the museum's curator of twentieth century art, the exhibition is tight without being restrictive. It puts the art and artists into a context--that of mentors and student--but leaves room for the viewer to question the validity and the success of that relationship.
"The original concept for this exhibition came from the fact that Haring's dual heroes were Andy Warhol and Walt Disney," says Kurtz. With Haring's death, the exhibit now seems to have a dual purpose. Not only does it place Haring in an art historical context with his heroes, but it is also an ode to Haring, celebrating his contribution to art and his commitment to causes he considered important.
It's hard to imagine an art more celebratory, more joyful than that of Keith Haring. It's art based on the line, but a line that is wacky and wicked at the same time. It careens around the surfaces of his paintings and drawings and ends up producing a horror vacuii of hits and near misses and a lot of explosions. It's as if he were playing pinball with his paint.
Two painted columns in the show, for example, are full of collision after collision. Paint drips and then swerves off only to hit again as it comes around the next corner. And hidden in all these lines are figures--men with holes on their bodies, flying angels, mutated monsters.
That Haring died so young (at age 31) and so tragically only makes the joy in his work more poignant. Every Haring piece is an exercise in both energy and optimism, even when he's dealing with the most depressing or serious of topics.
He can be condemning apartheid in South Africa, crack abuse or homophobia, and you still find yourself smiling, overcome with the nervous, taut tension of his graphic line. His study for "Free South Africa," for instance, has a large black figure on a leash held by a small white figure with an X on its chest. And the big figure is delivering a solid whack with his foot to his supposed master.
The spareness of the line makes the image work. Everything has been reduced to its simplest and most communicative form. And the drawing, for all its seriousness, isn't morose. It's full of an energy that implies action. In Haring's world, even life's tragedies never seem too horrible, or at least they don't seem reason enough for giving up hope or for giving in.
It's that exuberance, that simple childlike pleasure in life, that makes Haring a direct descendant of Disney. Haring's work, like Disney's, is pervaded by positivism. Like Disney, Haring is a populist and a believer. He wants to make people happy. He loves life. And like Disney, he really doesn't have an identity of his own that stands separate from his work or his images.
When you think Disney, you don't see good ol' Uncle Walt, you see Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. And when you think of Haring, you see barking dogs, like those on the Florida Humane Society billboard in the show, and crawling babies, not a balding man with flap ears and round glasses.
Andy Warhol, on the other hand, stands as a unique persona distinct from the art he created. A Walt Disney or Keith Haring impersonator wouldn't have gotten nearly the attention the Andy one did at the opening. In fact, no one would have noticed.
On an obvious level, maybe that's because none of Warhol's images seems his own--the images either look, or are, borrowed. Warhol's art, unlike Haring's and Disney's, is one of detachment and re-analysis. Disney created Mickey Mouse, and Haring created Crawling Baby. But Warhol created nothing--he just reinvented things.
With Disney and Haring, it's their objects that are the popular culture, not the artists themselves. With Warhol, it's different. He is the subject of his object. He is popular culture.
Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Grace Kelly--all represented in the exhibit--filled American popular culture before Warhol. He didn't give them to us. He just gave them to us in ways we had never seen before. It's interesting that Warhol was such a hero of Keith Haring, because in this group show, Warhol can seem a little bit like the odd man out. You can see the visual influence of Disney on Warhol. The grouping of the animation cels (single drawings photographed separately and then put together to create movement) foreshadows the repetition in Warhol. And the slightly off primary and secondary colors of Warhol have their origin in Disney and other American comic strips.
But Warhol has no apparent spiritual or philosophical kinship with Disney. And when it comes right down to it, the same can be said of the connection between Warhol and Haring.
The explanatory panel posted at the entrance to the show states that Disney, Warhol, and Haring share four primary characteristics: "fascination with entertainment and entertainer, collaboration with other image makers, the use of mass production to make quantities of their image, and an uncanny ability to use mass media as an integral part of their art."
Warhol, however, takes those characteristics in a completely different direction from the other two. He uses them against us or, at least, to critique us. It's as if he were holding up popular culture and all its accumulated images like a mirror, but a carnival-house mirror, full of irony and twists and distortion, and then asking us to take a look at ourselves all over again and figure out what it means. And he leaves you wondering whether those images and art in general have any meaning at all. He's pop's answer to Nietzsche.
That may not make Haring Jesus, but it does put him in a completely different camp.
It's obvious, however, from the many images that Haring produced of Warhol that Haring had a real admiration for him, not only as an artist, but also as an icon. That status as pop icon, though, is the gulf that separates Warhol from Haring and distinguishes their approach to art. Warhol is the enlightened but detached manipulator; you always sense his distance from his art. You're the one who has to give his image meaning.
Haring, on the other hand, is the passionate participant. He incorporates every part of himself into his art. If Warhol can't be called the philosophical father of Haring, he at least showed Haring a world of possibilities. He made Haring realize that art could appeal both to the masses and to the artistic elite. Haring may have missed the satire--the detached bewilderment of Warhol's media exploitation--but, then again, maybe it's good that he did.
The art world and the public probably didn't need another Warhol clone, a cynic for a new generation.
Keith Haring made an impact because he was fresh, not cynical. His work is so up-front, so direct, so honest and so pleased with itself that it can make you a little nervous. It's hard to believe that anyone can be so convinced of the ability of art to convey a message of joy and of hope, or so seemingly innocent in an art world given over to consumerism, skepticism and exploitation. It's as if Haring believed his art could be everywhere, that it could make people happy and that it could make them change, and so that's what happened.
Haring's act of faith may seem childlike, and as a result, it's easy to at first see his work as childish, especially against the sophisticated detachment of Warhol. But the great thing about this show is that it proves Haring can stand his ground against Warhol, one of the most important and influential artists of our century. Haring's admiration of Warhol didn't make him a lackey or a subordinate. Not only did Haring find a style of his own, he found a sustaining philosophy of his own--a philosophy of hope and regeneration that is increasingly rare.
In the final analysis, Andy Warhol will go down in history as the greater, more influential artist of the two. His irony and lack of belief are the flesh and blood of most contemporary thought in the arts. But, in the end, you get the feeling that Haring wasn't really interested in the competition. He created his own niche and his own vision, and he did it with style and a commendable dedication to leaving the world a better place than he found it. Haring didn't impersonate. He didn't copy. Admiration didn't give way to all-out hero worship.
As the opening wound down, the Warhol impersonator was in a wheelchair, slumping, muttering in some monotone, followed by a faithful entourage of stone-faced groupies and eager onlookers. Behind them was a grouping of three large triangular drawings, dated 1990, obviously done only days before Haring died. Those drawings were crazy, they were exuberant. They were full of masterful mazelike passages in black and white. They made you glad to be alive.
"Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Walt Disney" will be at the Phoenix Art Museum through May 12. For further details, see ART EXHIBITS listing in Thrills.
It's that exuberance, that simple childlike pleasure in life, that makes Haring a direct descendant of Disney.
It's as if he were playing pinball with his paint.
Haring's act of faith may seem childlike, even childish, especially against the sophisticated detachment of Warhol.
