In May 2013 the app publishing company Art Intelligence released Art Intelligence: Keith Haring, a decidedly comprehensive and dynamic app designed exclusively for iPad 2.  The program’s introduction screen, in an essay entitled The Politics of Dancing, notes that Haring was a follower of the Warholian tenents of mass-production. This was first evidenced in the early 1980s in ephemeral chalk drawings in New York City subways in which he employed the black paper used to cover old advertisements as canvases for his iconic visual vocabulary.  Today the wide availability of Haring watches, coffee mugs, and even cleaning supplies speaks to this same interest—perhaps then to be able to download a piece of Keith Haring is the logical next step.  Haring opened his Pop Shop in 1986 making his iconography available to the denizens of downtown Manhattan, but now not even geography can preclude the digital consumer from getting a piece of Keith.

The app’s “curator” Bridget L. Goodbody describes Art Intelligence: Keith Haring as a “visual Wikipedia on steroids,” and she has a point: the energy of the 1980s art scene is reanimated through a virtual library of photography, video, and artwork that the user is invited to explore.  The app successful skirts the line between accessibility and political and art historical investment; clearly designed for adults, the descriptions are often wordy and sometimes academic, though younger users could appreciate the app equally for its incredibly comprehensive catalog of artworks and archival photos.  In this way, the app mimics the accessibility of the artist’s own work—Haring created a collaborative mural project with public schools in Chicago in 1989, and his famous 1986 “Crack is Wack” mural was designed for children, painted on a Harlem handball court.  His later focus on socio-political themes such as AIDS prevention and Apartheid in Africa birthed (sometimes pornographic) works obviously designed for adults, but his cartoonish visual vocabulary has always lent itself to young fans.

A virtual gallery of Keith Haring’s art is presented through detailed high-resolution reproductions.  Organized chronologically, the user is invited to browse a massive selection of the artist’s paintings, sculptures, and murals.  These works are then searchable via the “Timeline” tab, which is divided into the broad categories of “life,” “art,” and “world” providing a social and historical context for the artist’s work. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of how Haring and his art were at the forefront of public consciousness, each artistic milestone can be clicked on for more information. For instance, in 1985 Brooke Shields posed nude for photographer Richard Avedon with a Haring-painted pink heart.  The caption for the image reads: “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Keith.”  Haring was at the forefront of a scene that dominated downtown Manhattan, and his ties to major players in fashion and music, in relation to his cartoonish subway drawings, created an instantly recognizable visual iconography.  Also in 1985, Haring produced his Free South Africa poster for the concert where Dionne Warwick, Diana Ross and Hall and Oates sang “We Are the World;” a video of the performance is available via YouTube on the app.

The “Connections” tab is organized by themes such as “art,” “birth,” “Africa” or “AIDS.”  The user can maximize each image to see a short blurb: I stumbled upon a 1987 episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show entitled “Lets Talk about AIDS.”  The “Resources” tab includes links to a selection of film, music, and literature that the creators feel is somehow relevant to Haring’s work.  Toni Morrison’s Beloved is listed for purchase alongside Paris is Burning, a 1990 documentary about ‘80s drag ball culture in New York City, and Duran Duran’s 1982 album Rio.  These choices are thoughtful, and while many address a historical relationship, a work such as Beloved (set 100 years before Haring’s birth at the end of the American Civil War) speaks instead to the artist’s commitment to visual representation of marginalized groups, a trope which is often schematized in Haring’s early work, which shows dogs, human figures and aliens in the same scene.  Perhaps the least useful portion of the program, at least currently, is the “Conversations” tab, which touts itself as “a forum to express your ideas to fellow art geeks.”  In this early iteration there are few conversations to be had, though in our era of digital anonymity and polemical web boards the prospect of sparking debates and sharing experiences is encouraging.  Fittingly, Art Intelligence: Keith Haring has a feeling of dynamism that recalls Haring’s own playfulness, as well as his simultaneous emphasis on stylistic consistency alongside innovation.

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March 16 to July 8, 2012
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York (718) 638-5000

This exhibition of Haring’s early work focuses on the artist’s emergence as part of the New York underground, chronicling his evolution from SVA student and club-kid to the year of his SoHo debut at the prestigious Tony Shafrazi gallery.  Keith Haring: 1978-1982 is the first survey of its kind dedicated to the artist’s beginnings, and offers an in-depth look into his evolving process with some striking, never before seen works.

The exhibition aims to trace what curator Raphaela Platow calls the artist’s visual vocabulary—namely his dynamic figures, swirling forms, phallic objects, and instantly recognizable line drawings.  Interestingly, his early work features a more literal manipulation of language, specifically his use of cutting, pasting and collage of found text to create new meanings.  A selection of these experiments from 1980 is on display, and one untitled text collage from 1980 reads: POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE.  These works were reproduced using a Xerox machine and pasted around New York City, an early example of Haring’s interest in making art accessible to the masses.  This same experimentation with language is evidenced in Haring’s SVA-era films on display, Phonics (1980) and Lick Fat Boys (1979).  For these videos, Haring and his friends manipulate and rearrange phonemes (“art fat lick” “boys lick fat”) to produce similar effects of his collages through oral recitation.  These remixed language pieces are complimented by a collection of 25 red gouache-painted shapes with which Haring experimented to create abstract forms.  In limiting himself to this specific geometric vocabulary, the figures form a sort of visual alphabet, their shape hinting at Haring’s later, more figurative work.

The exhibition features many small-scale works on paper, produced rapidly for friends and often ripped out of notebooks.  A standout here is a series of works titled Manhattan Penis Drawings for Ken Hicks (1978).  Haring had a knack for skirting the line between boyish play and social commentary and his phallic renderings of New York architecture are an excellent example of these slips in identification.  Haring’s more deliberate political works – many produced after the artist reached international heights of fame – are all but absent from the show.  While it wasn’t until the later years of his life that he enlisted imagery promoting safe sex, his early drawings on display are not without his playfully sexual forms.  His line drawing of the twin towers subbed out in favor of two erect penises subtly suggests the interplay between economy, masculine power and gay sex.

The beginnings of the Haring’a large-scale ink drawings are displayed in the exhibition’s first galleries and showcase the artist’s facility with line, realized here in brushed sumi ink.  Perhaps most captivating when viewed in series, these early experiments with scale feature Haring’s signature drips, a testament to the artist’s confidence and looseness of production.  Interested equally in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, Jean Dubuffet, and Pre-Columbian design, Haring’s forms speak to a fascination with the gesture as well as a desire to produce forms embedded in his subconscious, seeking always to paint spontaneously and without hesitation.  A journal entry from 1978 reads: “when I can unify my movements so that I can paint consistently at a very high rate of speed on a very spontaneous, natural, spiritual level; then perhaps I will have exhausted the possibilities of the kind of ‘body- involvement’ painting I am currently involved in.”  This notion of performance imbedded in Haring’s works speaks to his emphasis on process: his movements studied and automatic like those of a dancer.

Haring’s early career also saw him as a downtown impresario and fixture in the gay club scene, and his role as a social connector and curator is evident throughout the exhibition.  It was Keith Haring who brought together then emerging artists Madonna, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Club 57 and the Mudd Club, where he curated the 4th floor gallery.  Vitrines containing documentary photographs are displayed alongside a projected slideshow of Haring’s subway chalk drawings, photographed in situ by his friend and collaborator Tsend Kwong Chi. The sceney snapshots on display consist mainly of black and white images taken by photographer Joseph Szkodzinski of Haring and his friends partying in downtown nightclubs.   Equal parts nostalgic and uplifting, this portion of the exhibition accounts for the pulsating eighties soundtrack audible in the rest of galleries.

The show closes with a collection of Haring’s much anticipated chalk subway art, drawn on the black paper used to cover old advertisements in the stations. The majority of these drawings are new additions to the exhibition, on loan from a mysterious private collection.  The delicate chalk renderings showcase the artist’s signature gesture, and are presented encased in glass shadowboxes, an effect that amplifies their ephemeral fragility.  The simple figures speak to Haring’s commitment to bringing art out of the gallery and into the streets.  Thanks to his more than fifty public artworks, many of which are still displayed around New York City, we can now have his work in both places.

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Twenty-one years since the Contemporary Arts Center fought, and beat, obscenity charges stemming from images in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, the City of Cincinnati and its arts community want you to know that times have changed and they’ve moved on. But not everyone is convinced.  “The chilling effect that manifested itself directly after the trial continues today” observes Jerry Stein, a 38 year veteran of art reporting for the Cincinnati Post and witness for the defense during the 1990 trial. “You may not get art directors and curators to admit that, but anyone who suggests that they don’t consider the ramifications of the police showing up at a gallery, is in denial.”   As a metropolis that has historically maintained a tense relationship with anything cutting edge or socially progressive, one might think that the current artistic milieu emphasizes landscapes, still lifes, and above all else: safety.  But contrary to Stein’s remarks, the reality of the situation seems far different. When it comes to big name, even contentious artists, lately, Cincinnati is awash in them.

In just the past year, the Contemporary Arts Center has welcomed exhibitions by Pat Steir and Marilyn Minter; Selection from the Coleccion la Jumex;  and Shepard Fairey’s retrospective exhibition, Supply and Demand, which courted  minor controversy over the content of murals placed around the city. Perhaps the CAC’s biggest coup is the February debut of Keith Haring: 1978 -1982.  Organized in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Wien, this exhibition pulls together an array of rarely seen drawings, collage, flyers, and short films; among the most compelling are some of Haring’s earliest. Works from 1978 and 1979 illustrate a marked fascination with the all-over approach of Tobey and Pollock, and these pieces – nearly all untitled — present a young man invested in the exploration of art’s formal problems.  A selection from his journal highlights Haring’s interest in the way shape reads as isolated form or part of larger groups, and this examination gives rise to works such as 1979’s Untitled, a substantial ink and acrylic piece that echoes de Kooning’s 1950 masterwork Excavation.  As good as these initial pictures are, by 1980 there is a perceptible decline in quality. The lone holdout is Matrix, a 1983 ink on paper opus that fuses figuration and all over pattern into a seamless work in excess of 35 feet.  But as his style matures, Haring’s interest in compositional strategy wanes, and while his desire to circumvent the New York power structure and bring art into the public sphere is admirable, ultimately visual sophistication is sacrificed to get there.

Also on view, Rosson Crow’s Myth of the American Motorcycle brings together seven paintings specially commissioned for the CAC.  Her ambitious, loose depictions of neon signs, choppers, and biker bars, struggle under the weight of their size.  To handle this, Crow has devised a single effective compositional tactic: images that emphasize the horizontal, girded by overblown vertical drips and strokes of enamel paint.  It works, but when Crow deviates from the formula, as in The Boneyard and Motorbike Junkyard, the paintings grind to halt. Crippled by a shift in format and without the horizon of the canvas to guide her; Crow is out of her depth.  Densely packed around the edges, or jumbled in the center of the support, these paintings idle lifelessly.  Relevant as these shows might be, the Contemporary Arts Center isn’t the only venue featuring that which is new. The Cincinnati Art Museum has been getting in on the action with a show by Kara Walker and,  at present,  The Way We Are Now: Selections from the 21 c Collection.

Based in Louisville, Kentucky, 21c bills itself as the only museum – in actuality a boutique hotel – dedicated solely to the art of the 21st Century. Putting aside the thorny issue of a public museum validating the collection of a for profit hotel, the exhibition is a free-for-all of recent work that leans heavily on photography and sculpture.  A standout, and one of the few examples of painting in the show, is a group of small works by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry.  Intimate oil on linen portraits, The Evidence of Things Not Seen features images of men arrested during the 1956 Montgomery bus boycotts.  A layer of transparent silk printed with the photographs of the 1956 mug shots hovers inches above the surface, creating haunting ghost images and a complex pictorial space.

The inclusion of part of the 21c collection in the museum atrium also yields some unintentionally awkward moments; in particular the juxtaposition of Kehinde Wileys’s The Prophet and The King II (part of the 21c collection) with the comparably sized and framed A Venetian Woman by John Singer Sargent (part of CAM’s permanent collection).  Rather than highlight Wiley’s connection to tradition, his limited formal vocabulary is brought into sharp relief by the painting’s proximity to the Sargent.  Wiley’s overreliance on flat pattern, lack of varied surface incident, and complete disinterest in conveying any sort of credible space is glaring.  Not only are these two not in the same league, they’re not even playing the same sport.  The Prophet and The King II may not be much good, but at least it’s new.

So how does one rectify Cincinnati’s current embrace of all things contemporary with Stein’s comments? “The evidence is in what you show”, claims the seasoned critic.  “Over the past twenty years I cannot pinpoint a single significant exhibition that equals the visual power and directness of The Perfect Moment.”  And in this respect, Stein might be on to something.  The Cincinnati Art Museum may have exhibited Kara Walker, but Harpers’ Pictorial history of the Civil War (Annotated) rates among her tamest and least interesting work to date.  Shepard Fairey’s Supply and Demand certainly brought massive attendance for the CAC in 2010, but his calculated politics, bland imagery, and empty sloganeering parody the posture of a confrontational artist.  Meanwhile, Rosson Crow is big for being, well, big, and while Keith Haring’s ubiquitous use of the phallus may ruffle a few feathers, his sincere embrace of the stance of the artist as activist hardly defies the values of Midwestern America.  These shows may draw large numbers from the general public, but for the discerning viewer, there’s little challenge to taste.  It’s possible that over the past twenty years, artists have simply set their sights lower (Stein admits as much), and major institutions, obsessed with the bottom line, are more interested in ticket sales than visual stimulation. While contemporary art may now be all the rage, when it comes to quality, Cincinnati might have further to go than it thinks.

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