A Note on Keith Haring (an excerpt). (Patreon)

The following article is apart of a chapter on Humans of Flat Design in my forthcoming book entitled “Neoliberal Kitsch: Online Art and Aesthetics in the 21st Century".

It would be unwise not to speak a bit about the legacy and influence of Keith Haring in regards to commercial illustration and what some have called “corporate art” or the “corporate Memphis” design. There are a number of works and biopics with exhaustive details on his life and impact on the art world filled with information that goes beyond our purposes. What I rather wish is to comment on the works themselves, and Haring as a towering figure that blended street art, illustration and fine art. A blend of different avenues that are now common place in the halls of corporations, galleries and on the pages of UI website design.

Haring from the beginning of his affinity with Andy Warhol was a relentless self-marketer and master of selling credibility of the streets to posh fine art people looking for hip and fresh new styles to take up and sell. His distinct, repetitious and easily-produced style embodies what is a common designer trait that is almost taken for granted these days. Haring could pump out works at lightening speed, and more than that, create whole flat worlds in them teeming with activity, rituals, sex, movement, dance and verve. I do not wish to attack him, nor his personal life and untimely end. Haring is an artist's artist that took his style and designs to it's limits and created whole urban tapestries that defined a generation. He is an interesting case in that his style we would not immediately classify as Kitsch sentimentalism, but only later became Kitschified and markets as such. And this is was his genius and also subversive kernel in the works themselves.

you can put his distinctly flat human designs anywhere. They can dance upon any surface, textile, sticker, board room wall or gallery wall. In them these figures danced, had relations, meshed into one another and formed whole leviathan-like bodies out of their murals. They were cells in singular organisms of works defined by the colour choices and hard, graffiti-like lines guiding their motions on each piece. They no doubt were efficient flat designs that would pave the way for digital works well after Haring's passing. And during his life he marketed them as such with his unique DIY art “pop shop”. A store/gallery he encouraged “everyone to visit” in a quest to reach millions of people with his art. A noble, egalitarian sentiment that has become embittered over time as “HARING” the brand, the trade mark took over. This same ethos is of course the ethos of the contemporary Neoliberal order. An aesthetic regime of easily movable types and parts. Complete with a backstory of egalitarian inclusivity as a selling point. Haring, like Warhol, either unwittingly or knowingly unleashed the forces of commerce upon the work of art, and things have never been the same since.

Many people in the contemporary cultural left celebrate Haring for his AIDs activism, and his visual panacea of a time that was indicative of the 1980s. A time of excess, unbridled hedonism, sexual expression, the waning of values, the destruction of high and low culture that blending into one, where even an urban graffiti artist can achieve applause and recognition in traditional art institutions. What is often overlooked however, is Haring's early teen years, specifically his interactions with the Jesus movement in the 60s and 70s; many a religious themes run throughout his work, including the birth of Christ, all the way to the late 80s with visions of the apocalypse, of nuclear war, and the AIDs crisis. Personal faults and degenerate hedonism were things that Haring owed up to and near the end admitted was his downfall. And his works of religious figures, specifically Christianity and biblical eschatology reflected a side of him that activists and art marketers wish to ignore. Some of his most telling works were ones with the idea of the “Radiant Child” of the Jesus movement (a very hippie version of Christianity in America) atop mushroom clouds. Denoting a symbol of the destruction of innocence in the modern world. Or a man with a hole in his center surrounded by crosses, a piece wrapped in blood with the Virgin Mary and the like. All denoting a supreme sense of loss and a tearing away of sacredness in the times he lived in1.

“Matrix,” Haring's near decade-long mural work is in some ways was his magnum opus. It has the same distinctive style but does not have the same air as his other commercial-friendly works. A tapestry of psychedelia, it preempted a lot of the various obsessions with drugs, technology and alt-history that would become so popular a decade or two later in the early internet age. UFOs are beaming up figures, there are dog deities, a pyramid being propped up by human figures with strange symbols. A cosmic mother is pregnant with a Radiant Child next to a buzzing television screen with a money symbol in the middle while a man is plunging his arm into an open head of another figure, denoting the programming of the subject via technology. As well as the beginning of the mural happening around 1979 nuclear accident in New York at 3-Mile Island2. Haring was well aware of the apocalypticism of a new age, and combined it with the ecstasies of motion. J-like shapes and electric squiggling lines were experiments to him that “suggested flowing movement,” modern phenomenon he combined with ancient symbolism, such as a Mesoamerican Dog-man head dress figure dancing around the picture plane. Haring possessed the same flatness of modern art but chose quite a different, sketch-like presentation of figures that did not seem flat. They moved along the mural like a video game character in a side-scroller, interacting on all levels upwards and downwards in nebulous space.

Haring certainly created complex worlds when he wasn't being sold as a parody of his own image. He came at just the right time when the art world was thawing out and willing to embrace “the public” at large, with his message of affirmation, “love, peace and acceptance” getting in on the ground floor of a new way of looking at art. Art as a commodity of course, but not simply as the sophisticated pursuit of rich collectors. But art as a lifestyle brand, art that can access the public because of it's mass appeal. Like Caws and Banksy after him, whom I would argue are even more shameless examples of this, Haring not only made flat design acceptable, but didn't shy away from becoming Kitsch. Kitsch to him was in some ways a necessity in conveying a message of mass, democratic art which has little barriers to entry and appreciation. This makes things complicated in terms of appreciating his meaningful works that embraced stark, serious subject matter and resisted this feel-good impulse.

Haring of course was not met with just emphatic praise by the art world. He had his share of warranted critics. Robert Hughes called him tedious and “Keith Boring”. Jonathan Jones at the Guardian, rather than criticize Haring directly, laid a well-deserved criticism of the post-humorous marketing of his work and image. Commenting on how “brutal” it is that a drawing on the wall of his childhood home, done when he was an infant, sold for millions3. Even during his life, Haring did not shy from the crass commercialization of his work that became more so after his death, such as the (in)famous Absolute Vodka ad. It would be, given the circumstances of his life, beliefs and death, the perfect ground of an aesthetics for Neoliberalism with a human and kinder face. Easily replicated and mass produced flat design with all of the correct messaging, now reified further in the digital age.

This leads us to a quite recent controversy online, perhaps demonstrating that Haring still has immense social relevance, even decades after his passing. A tweet went viral in the middle of 2023 which featured his last painting asking for works that “never fail to destroy you” when you see them4. The piece is of a standard Haring work with purple and black line figures, left unfinished with drip marks, a symbol of his life and his work being tragically cut short by AIDs. The post was met with some of the most horrendously sappy and sentimental examples of Kitsch and politically driven works around the AIDs crisis in particular. It really did filter a lot of people in terms of their art acumen and intelligence. Some of the choices people posted were esoteric and meaningful, but a lot of them were the art world equivalent of pop activist Kitsch. A lot of Ai Weiwei, Banksy and other pop activist Kitsch mongers, some of which are featured in this book.

What was clear is that for the younger leftist and casual art observer, Haring had been elevated into a place of secular sacredness due to the lifestyle politics he represented in his death. All of this set the stage for perhaps one of the most irreverent, outstanding online troll posts on the very last day of 2023; an account by the name of “Donnel” posted what seemed like an earnest tribute. An AI filtered image of his last work that had been “completed” by the program. Instead of just the left-top corner being completed, it was now the whole picture. The AI art program could not fully replicate his work, but got enough of what it would appear to be a completed painting if one gave it a momentary first glance. The patterns did not fully match, like all “completed” works of art by AI. Donnel's post states that “we can now complete what he didn't finish”5.

Within an instant, a torrent of rage, death threats, doxing attempts and brimstone posts were unleashed upon this small account. The post had garnered 30 million impressions, and at least a few quote tweets with over a hundred-thousand likes calling it out for it's lack of “media literacy” in terms of Haring's intended meaning. Also the outrage at AI art in general was sparked a new. A legion of LGBT+ kids with flags and pronouns in their bios descended on this act of trolling to defend Haring's legacy, and post bile about it's insensitivity to the AIDs crisis. It became an immediate viral sensation with culture war debates between online Right posters and the cultural Left. It set off a deep nerve that only the work of art can dig into.

There were a number of questions that I personally expressed on the time line, and is worth mentioning when assessing the legacy of Haring and his corpus; in terms of interpretation and authorship, we can easily see that in terms of mainstream thinking on the Left, their attitudes towards the author has significantly changed. It was once a hip and educated opinion that the death of the author thesis had more or less taken hold of all culture. The author, or the artist, had become irrelevant in terms of what the intentional meaning of art and literature. Interpretation by the audience is democratic, it was good, and at the least it was encouraged, for it is inevitable. Traditional criticism that focused on interpretations by the artists themselves, and the social context from which authors and artists operate, have become irrelevant. We live in a new Postmodern world of the hyper-text, that works of visual art also participate in.

Now we see this attitude being completely reversed. Maybe it has something to do with the Left's dominance over all cultural and artistic productions on a mainstream level. Or maybe it has to do with, as we have examined elsewhere in this work, a fundamental onto-political insecurity of artists and writers today. Whom in this environment must lock down and cut off any and all interpretations, nuances and ambiguities that can lead the works down a road of having “problematic” political baggage. That and the realities of criticism in the digital age are much different. Everyone is now a critic; critics that can reach the author and artist directly, who feels that because of the supposed communicative action of the internet age, demands to have a voice on everything. And therefore criticism of art is felt directly while also being impersonal, irreverent, and subject to online spectacles of ritual chiding and virality. So the actions of artists and authors to preempt and eliminate off-interpretations that are not intentional on their part becomes a necessity.

Either way, what this online kerfuffle demonstrated is that “media literacy” in terms of intention presented by sacred cow subject and secular saintly figures has triumphed over the death of the artist-author. AI interpreting a work of art that must be left intentional is a deep wound to the cultural and political order. Haring embodies one of the only sources of sacred reverence and solemnity for a cultural Left that has destroyed and deconstructed all other political, social and religious taboos: the AIDs crisis, the activism of lifestyle politics and the like. And all of this was done at the backdrop of years where the Left cheered, celebrated and even participated in the destruction of public monuments, not just those of the Confederacy, but all over the Anglosphere, and the “cancelling” of “problematic” artworks that subserviently got taken down from gallery walls. Even artists of the New Left, with bold forms of modernist artivism, like Phillip Guston, were targeted by the new standards and leftists cultural understanding for having insufficient demonization of Nazis and the Klan. Themes of anti-racism and parodying of fascist regimes of course always featured strongly in his work. But their mere presence as subject matter is now enough to spark controversy. The evils and ills of such things cannot be named or displayed, but must hang in the air as an omnipresent threat.

To be honest, this work of AI desecration is exactly that, a desecration and a profanation of something which should be left as it is. We have seen in other chapters in this work, the quest to “complete” works of art's tradition and canon via artificial intelligence is a sign of decay. Another cheap spectacle of the digital age that further sings the work of art into cultural irrelevancy and nullity. But what is interesting is when there is a genuine testing of the limits to toleration, to wade into crass controversy with art objects that are made to be sacred by an entirely different order of things. It calls into question once again the values and social functions we place inside the work of art.

Haring no doubt is the grandfather of Kitsch aesthetic liberalism and flat design humans. But his other works demonstrate a capacity for nuance and artistic insight that in this case is overlooked by the Right. They are presented an art object of worship and political relevance and take the cultural Left for their word. The natural impulse is to tear down and criticize a sacred cow in the culture war. Certainly here, I am contending with Haring's legacy in a less than favourable light. But there is an artistic spirit there, one that is overlooked. Even Haring's more complicated religious works and his sentiments towards his own hedonism at the end of his life are now glossed over by a pretty picture of pure political Kitsch activism.

Finally, it is worth commenting on the nature of Flat Design Humans genealogically. Haring has a foundational part of reinvigorating the concept of the human body in mass democratic design itself. The body can now be everywhere, it's energies and intensities. A light-body that can be placed anywhere and has no distinguishing marker of identity besides that of whatever activity is being presented in the picture plane. Beings of pure activity, colour and motion were unique and vitalistic in the 1980s. It captured the energy of the time, a new world of motion and dissolution of difference. Haring did not foresee the pernicious and alienating global airport homogeneity of the present age of course.

In this genealogy we see that HOFD overtook various design trends of the 90s and the 2000s. Specifically “Skeuomorphism” and the “new international standard” of digital corporate design. The latter some have termed “Globalist imagery”of corporate and non-profit/government design. Featuring vast grid-like cities, solar and minimalist corporate sterility, “global village” motifs that are often seen in UN and NGO pamphlets and digital presentations. Both of these rival design motifs represent twin features of Hypermodernity; the first attempts to melt down and capture all of time. This was attempted by cobbling together every previous design feature through the decades. Rendering them down to mere UI symbolism, in essence a form of postmodern eclecticism. A good example is the old I Phone YouTube symbol being an old box television from the 80s.

The other (Globalist design) wanted to conquer all of space. The whole globe could be sunk into one vast village in post-history, the global city being a pure utilitarian function based on rational planning. This of course necessitates a non-specific, relentlessly affirmative aesthetic that can be carried to every corner of the globe. This globalist design ethos along with Skeuomorphism both fell by the wayside because of certain internal contradictions in their aesthetic. You cannot take “Swedish minimalism” templates that are meant for certain cities and inject them into the Global south. Likewise, the attempt to conquer time by fitting older, “analogue” design symbolism wouldn't work in the world of click-and-play minimalist functionality.

But more importantly, both design motifs and philosophies fell to HOFD because Flat Humans deliver us a deep human impulse while also alienating us from that impulse at the same time. The need to see the human figure in the foreground of public existence. The human now is at the centre stage of design, but objectified, processed and broken down into utility and activity. HOFD also escapes the complicated issues of history and locality that Skeuomorphism and Globalist imagery cannot. One is too heavily predicated on the past designs of western consumerism and the Western collective memory of designed objects. The other seems homogeneous and truly globalized, but in practise cannot help but reveal that it is the product of the Western Faustian psyche. An attempt to conquer all of space with orderliness and sterile cleanliness which in an unfavourable light can come off as “cultural erasure” of other global cities and regional aesthetic choices.

The human at the centre, a flat and abstracted human accommodates everything. Haring is the father of HOFD because he wanted an art that expressed a new awareness of the “global community” and celebrated it as such. To then only be the victim in some ways of his very ethos. That of homogeneous humans in motion and consumption, worshipping corporate logos and placed on every square inch of cities that can link everywhere and every time together with no unique regional and cultural distinctions. This may not have been his intention, but it is a complicated history that must be revealed. Corporations, art galleries and even governments love robbing his grave for significance all the same.

1Phillips, Natalie. E. “The Radiant (Christ) Child: Keith Haring and the Jesus Movement”. American Art. Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall 2007), pp. 54-73. (University of Chicago press).

2New York Times Art & Design. “Keith Haring's Matrix”. 2012. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/17/arts/design/20120617-haring.html?ref=art

3Cochrane, Lauren. “It’s about having your tag everywhere’: why the art of Keith Haring is all around us”. The Guardian.  Nov, 7, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/nov/17/keith-haring-art-fashion-brand-partnerships

4https://twitter.com/peachlybeloved/status/1669585830057328643

5https://twitter.com/DonnelVillager/status/1741394747594318275