In Conversation with Brad Gooch

Author of Radiant The Life and Line of Keith Haring
Septiembre 11, 2024
In Conversation with Brad Gooch

Alex: Brad, thank you for joining us and your contribution to the canon of Keith Haring books and resources.What made you choose to write about Keith Haring? Was there one particular aspect that kind of intrigued you or was it a collection of ideas that made Haring and his art an interesting subject matter to explore? 


Brad: Yes, I think mainly because I was there in New York. I was living in the East Village in 1978 when Keith arrived aged 20 to go to School of Visual Arts. He was living on first avenue in First Street and I was mostly on Bleecker and Bowery. So part of it was that I was crossing paths with his work, crossing paths with him at certain times and the combination always made me want to write about Keith Haring. I mean, for a while I was thinking of writing a novel and I also wanted to capture that period. Keith was such an emblematic artist at the time and such a social and public artist that he was kind of a fulcrum for everything that was going on. 


Alex: For you, did it feel like the movement and these kinds of artworks and artists would go on to become what they've become? Was that, there a sense of that at all?


Brad: Not necessarily, I mean, however there wasn't the opposite either. I think there was certainly a sense that we were living in an eventful time. And it was so eventful that there wasn't too much time to think about history and legacy in that sense. There were a lot of younger artists working at that moment. There were galleries exploding everywhere so the distinction between different artists and which artists would endure didn't seem that clear at all. And, at that time, the place of street art, public art, graffiti, all of that was very undervalued and seen as outside the establishment, outside of the museum world. Keith Haring never had a museum show during his lifetime in America, for example, yet he did in Europe. In the 90s, curiously enough, it seemed that both Haring and Basquiat sort of faded and there was some sense that the party was over now and that they had been part of a scene rather than our history which has since changed, One thing that I was aware of was that you could no longer take for granted that everyone knew what the Mudd Club was or Club 57 or all these places that existed back then and, for me, there was a sense of really filling in the historical backdrop in the book. Over the years, the attitude towards Haring and Basquiat has greatly changed. 

“I think the artists who really kind of represent something major from that time influence artists now in many ways. There are a lot of ways in which Haring seems very much one of us and very much like the art makes more sense now than it did then. But at the time, it was just part of so much sensory, pleasant sensory, overload.”

Alex: I guess at the time, there's so much noise going on that sediment needs to settle for the art to stand out. And then obviously over the years of it being appreciated, reaching a wider audience, probably allows a bit of distance, both emotionally and in terms of time for people to allow it to kind of breathe and become what it is. Do you think there was a sense of overwhelm with how the volume of works that were produced in a way? 


Brad: There is always a sense of overwhelm with Keith Haring. The first review of a little show was by Roberta Smith in the New York Times and she said it was like he wants to cover the whole world with his art -  and she was kind of exhausted by it. Keith was going for a kind of immersion and that can be overwhelming, especially at the time. He went through so many different kinds of periods and with artists like that the legibility and the quality of the work can go up and down. 


With all that, you're having to process. I talk, at the end of the book, when I interviewed Anne Tempkin, who's the curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, and she was saying one aspect that she thought was that with a certain kind of radical art it takes about 30 years before people really see it for what it is. So like with Monet’s Water Lilies, all of a sudden in the 1950s, it was like an alarm clock went off and everyone thought they were wonderful. 

“Keith Haring is now at that 30 year mark and there is a way in which you see that the work has endured and matters and still seems fresh and still has a lot to say.”

The first time I had that experience,  I'd already started the biography, and went to a show at Tate Liverpool which was a retrospective of Haring. It was kind of the first time that I'd seen the work without the paparazzi which was kind of like the soundtrack from the period. All of a sudden you have these 30 foot drawings on the wall that are amazing. I mean, the scale, to see the scale in person is often revelatory with Keith. And just to see that work on museum walls in such a context - the work seems very much made for it.


Alex: I think there's a really lovely kind of contrast between starting with the subway drawings, these kind of small, neat works, and moving to these huge monumentally scaled pieces. Is there a particular period of his output that you feel more drawn to? Or do you think there's a particular style or period that speaks to you more? 


Brad: All the early things certainly speak to me. The subway works always and forever. I think he did 5,000 of these works over five years. It was one of the largest public art projects ever accomplished. And we have a record of them too. I mean, they were fragile and evanescent because they were on these matte boards that were used for subway advertisements. So in a short period of a few weeks, he would draw and chalk on these and they are well documented by his friend Tseng Kwong Chi who would take photographs


A few people cut them out, which Keith disapproved of, but we're also in a way grateful to them because you can still see a few of them in private collections. All of the Subway Drawings are so immediate, so virtuosistic in this way in which Keith was pulling them off and the speed in which they were done is great. He thought that they were the best thing that he had done. There's a way in which all of Keith Haring comes together in that project because his idea of art for everybody is completely there. That's why he was drawing in a subway, he wasn't selling works.


With these works he hits on his kind of alphabet, I mean the crawling baby, the barking dog, the UFO, the nuclear reactors, the black and white figures and different kinds of erotic and political poses. All of this has a kind of rawness to it in those early works that is striking and draws me to them. And similarly, the late work, after he's diagnosed as HIV positive and becomes very much a public sort of PWA (Person With AIDS), is very strong. Some of it is strong in its activism, which was certainly an important ingredient of Keith Haring or “Artivism” even, as his friends call it. For example, the Silence = Death paintings as well as other paintings that he was doing and showing safe sex. 


Keith had also been in Europe and had been sponging these sorts of influences from,for example, Alechinsky during different phases of his life. So instead of being on the streets of New York, he was in a lot of museums and galleries in Europe. And I think that in some of those late paintings like Red Room, which is such an amazing painting, where he's really referencing and having dialogue with Picasso, Matisse and Frank Stella. 

Keith was always very ambitious and when you look at something like “Tuttomondo”, the big outdoor work that he did in Pisa, it’s one of his great, giant public works. There is also a lot  from that period that I like, Even in between these projects he is always experimenting. I also love the vases that he made. I like the sculpture that he did with Hans Meyer which was fabricated in Germany. Haring tries kind of everything and, with my enjoyment of his art, you hit on all these different styles and periods. 

Jeffrey Deich said to me that there's always this sort of tendency or desire to compare everybody, such as asking the question “who's the great artist of the 80s?” Of course, Keith Haring and Basquiat are there but it's hard to, especially in Haring’s case, compare because he wasn't a studio artist in that sense. 


He was very interested in doing a kind of public activist art -  painting on the Berlin Wall, AIDS works in Barcelona, doing the Crack is Wack mural in New York City. Half of what Haring was doing were these kinds of public works and activist works. 

 

You can't really compare what his art was when he was working on these two distinct tracks atl the time (public and gallery works) Even the Pop shop, what do you compare that to? The Pop Shop to a canvas by Jasper Johns?  Keith was simultaneously like an outsider artist in a funny way, while very much being tuned into and accepted by important parts of the established art world at the time globally. 


Alex: I think that's a really interesting point as it sounds like as his fame and success increased, he was inhabiting those two very distinct spaces. I got the feeling that there's a slight uncomfortability around this reverence that he was receiving from the mainstream established art world and this desire to keep the  respect of the streets. There's this kind of desire to adhere to this underground movement whilst obviously embracing the ability to reach for more people, which Keith was really passionate about and really strived towards doing. 


Brad: It was hard to pull off from both sides. Keith wasn't trying to be a graffiti artist, he never used a spray can, and was respectful to and in conversation with street art and you rarely find people writing over his street works.  The only times this happened was a type of counter graffiti from East Village artists writing “capitalist” or things like that on his work.


The Museum of Modern Art and other museums never bought any work of Haring's during his lifetime or showed it, and at the time there was a distinction (which have since been obliterated) between high and low art, street art, public art, humorous art and all these things that Haring was playing around with. With all of Keith’s work it was slightly hermetic like some kind of cypher or riddle that you as the viewer had to play around with to understand it.


Alex: There's a narrative thread running through his development and his artworks that if you're familiar with it you're kind of on the inside. It’s also accessible enough to allow people to come in to embrace and enjoy it and feels like an act of giving. I think it’s self-referential, not in a closed way, more in a fun way. 


Brad: New Wave Filmmaker Diego Cortez was an important curator downtown at the time and did the New York New Wave show at PS1 which was very seminal, who said to me that  when he and Keith came to New York saying the 70s the art world was basically white people in white rooms drinking white wine which was very much the vibe. I would say that Haring was crucially important in bending that and changing that and bringing a new demographic in. which for certain parts of the art world of the time, was controversial and suspect


Alex: Do you think that one of his biggest legacies is the democratisation and the blowing apart of the artworld? 


Brad: The work is beautiful and he was very aware having taken semiotics to the SVA. I mean he was very aware of creating a personal language and alphabet to work from. He knew what he was doing and was inspired by William Burroughs' cut up method to then arrange those kind of cartoon cut ups.  An important other piece of it was that he was trying to re-establish the distribution network of the art world. And again he was aware that in a semiotics class he wrote a piece, in student essay, about how scarcity and value are connected in selling artworks in the artworld. And this is something that he purposely then went against.

I mean he created 10,000 works of art in his lifetime and it was like a two track system where he opens the Pop Shop to sell t-shirts and condom cases and pins and all these things at price points that just about anyone could buy. And, at the same time, he was selling the same images, a couple of blocks away at Tony Shifrazi gallery for $10,000. He was trying to keep this balance and sometimes it crashed down around him. I mean sometimes it came together and it seems to be making more sense now. 


Alex: I think one of Haring’s strongest and maybe unappreciated aspects is his vision. He seemed to be able to see how and where the art market would develop, maybe because he was so integral, like you said, in establishing his two track system between an accessible network of channels for the everyday person whilst keeping the bills paid and allowing himself to fund such projects. What were some of the challenges dealing with a kind of such a big artist? I mean, how do you approach an artist like Haring in a biography from a journalistic standpoint?


Brad: I'd written art criticism throughout my life, certainly in the 80s and the 90s, but I hadn't written a biography about an artist. I remember some prominent critics saying to me when I was starting this that the book will rise or fall on my ability to write about art. So, I partly went back to when I was writing art criticism in the 80s and 90s. I've also been a young poet and published a book of poems and the art critics who were respected, at least in my world, were often poets. For example,people like Peter Schjeldahl, John Ashbury, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler who were  poets who were also writing, So with that, I went back to that mode but there were also other modes. I think there's partly the sense in biography that people always ask that by the end of the book “Did you not like him anymore?” or at least that's kind of an expectation. 

For me, that challenge didn’t really work with Keith. His heart was in the right place in a certain sense and he really was generous and sincere about his projects. I just had to sort of decide to go with that, I suppose, and to obviously have some affection for the character about whom I was writing. 


Alex: Do you think you need to be able to appreciate the character to be able to fully engage with them as a subject or do you think there's a bit of professional distance still on regardless of appreciation for their art or persona?


Brad: Biography doesn't come down to you liking them or not, I think I felt free enough to be objective. I felt like I had a lot of distance as my connections with Keith at the time were also very minimal, it was like the social life at that time was like a three-dimensional Instagram: there's so many people around so you knew everyone, and you liked everyone and you recognised everyone. People were creating a lot of works at the time and  I would see Keith Haring as part of that and in that way. I didn't have a personal relationship with him and, in terms of distance, there's of course the distance of decades and time as well as, hopefully, the intellect being able to naturally size up what's going on. 


Every book is different and the characters are different. The great biographer Robert Caro is interested in power, so he writes about Robert Moses about Lyndon Johnson: neither of them are particularly likeable people, especially Robert Moses. It’s like do we want writers to love their subject? Do we expect them to love their subject? 


I remember when I wrote a book about Franco O’Hara called “City Poet” and someone said to me, “Did you ever meet Frank O’Hara?”  and I said “No”, and they said “Oh good, because if you'd even seen him that would change the whole way in which you could write this book.”


Alex: Reading your work, it did feel that the author was very much present at the time and in the scene whilst still understanding and maintaining an objective stance. It’s a very immersive book and vividly paints Keith’s work and life. There seems to be a real appreciation of the art and the artist. 


Brad: I mean certainly towards the work I felt much more of an attraction to the early pieces. But I could also see that it didn't always work. There were shows that were thinner than other shows, and that was absolutely true with Haring. But I think it's true for almost anyone who works that way. It’s true also of writers and for certain Haring liked the Beat Writers such as Jack Kerouac and he was also friendly with Allen Ginsberg who were both all about free flow, no editing. no going back and that's the way Keith created his work and his life, I suppose.

There was very little distinction with Haring between his life and art because he was such a workaholic, he was just constantly drawing, creating and signing people's t-shirts and it sort of didn't stop.  I mean when William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch he just had all these pages and working like that can lead to an uneven way of life and work but, at the same time, it has a certain kind of energy and freshness to draw from and that's the combination that Haring seemed to have in abundance. 


All at Andipa would like to sincerely thank Brad for his time and his book can be purchased from various outlets including Amazon. Explore Keith Haring prints for sale and contact sales@andipa.com or call +44 (0)20 7589 2371 for further information. 

About the author

Alex Yellop