The AGO’s latest exhibit brings the protest art of Haring’s work to life

By Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng

The AGO’s ‘Art Is For Everybody’ exhibit opened early this November and runs until March. Many of Keith Haring’s designs are featured in a wide range of merch, including this piggy bank. (Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng/CanCulture)

“Let’s go find the piece about dying,” someone said to their friend as they passed me in the hall of AGO’s latest exhibit featuring selected works from the late Keith Haring. On its opening night, the room was filled with chatter and folks moving around from room to room in the gallery.

Haring was a pop artist active for 10 years in New York during the AIDS crisis, creating his now-iconic illustrations on public spaces like subway stations in the 1980s.

Through the clean-cut, zig-zaggy lines of Haring’s art, the world is portrayed vividly, at its most on-edge and feeling. Many featured works represent fears of nuclear disaster, political malignancy and apartheid.

Death, yes. But much more so, life lived while possible, life lived on a deadline set out by a careless state that didn’t care if it cut lives short. Haring’s piece mocking ‘serial killer’ Ronald Reagan was one of my favourite artworks in the entire gallery.

Six small wooden frames hold headlines cut out and mismatched glued into new sentences. From top to bottom, the read “Reagan: Ready to Kill, Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope, Pope Killed for Freed Hostage, Reagan son $50G Sex Deal Wife, Reagan Slain by — Haring’s cut-out-headline work on Reagan is political dissent at its finest and funniest. (Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng/CanCulture)

Haring’s work is instantly recognizable. The hollow outlined stick-people style he’s known, either from the art itself or your friend’s boyfriend’s t-shirt, sprawls the gallery walls and the merch shop's shelves, as you’re funnelled into the store through the exit. It’s incredible how much prolific work he managed to create in a short span of time. It’s even more staggering to think how much more work, art and life we’d have today had the AIDS crisis not been purposely mishandled. We now know that massive oversight by the United States government caused the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when they refused to initially take it seriously, according to leaked records.

Resistance to oppressive forces in search of queer joy and liberation are intrinsic in the visuals and themes of Haring’s work.

A bright yellow wall with black text on the side. A large square frame of Keith Haring’s ‘Free South Africa’ where a black figure with a rope around its neck steps on the neck of the smaller, white stick figure holding its chain. A person stands in t — ‘Free South Africa’ by Haring in 1985, condemning the apartheid system of racial segregation enforced by the state. . (Anna-Gisele-Funes-Eng/CanCulture)

An exhibited journal entry from Haring reads,“The Public has a right to art [...] The public needs art and it is the responsibility of a “self-proclaimed artist” to realize the public needs art and not just bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. Art is for everybody.”

A glass case holds an old wire-bound notebook with yellowed pages. The text on the page is handwritten cursive in blue pen. An identifying care underneath it reads “Notebook No. 3, October 1978, journal, The Keith Haring Foundation. — Haring’s journal entry from October 1978, where the exhibit takes its name. (Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng/CanCulture)

With such a strong emphasis on Haring’s passion for accessible art in public spaces like subways, it’s hard to ignore the irony in the bourgeois commodification of his work present at the shop at the front of the AGO and the end of the exhibit.

The entirety of the exhibit, Haring’s words and the volume of merch available make you wonder where the line is between creating accessibility to the art and collapsing its political symbolism. Having t-shirts or other merchandise can serve as a gateway to learning about queer history, but when does the excess of merch become overt consumerism?

Stephen Severn, an artist, PhD student and instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University, noted that the original messages of Haring’s work have been diluted despite their popularity ringing true. They say the historical context has to be considered when analyzing and consuming the art.

“40 years later and it's still in public spaces because people are wearing it as they walk around the city […] Although I don't think that a lot of people understand necessarily the political climate that it was made in or the reasons for making the art or art as being a form of activism,” said Severn.

“It kind of becomes the Mona Lisa, just an image that's been produced constantly and kind of loses its meaning,” they added.

Haring’s own words encapsulate the juxtaposition of the strong anti-bourgeois message in the art and the $225 French wooden chair no child would sit on willingly (for sad stiff children of the esteemed) featured in the merch stores.

A bright yellow chair in the shape of a Keith Haring’s style figure with their hands up sits on a white shelf. A wooden box of Keith Haring branded dominoes sits to its left, and on its right a picture book for children titled ‘Keith Haring; The Boy — Children should absolutely learn about Haring and his art through books like the one pictured above, though I’m not totally convinced they’d want to read it from a tiny solid wooden chair. (Anna-Giselle/CanCulture)

Haring would be 65 today. He died at 31 in 1996 of AIDS-related complications. His art, life and work are not distant memories, and it’s difficult not to think about how differently the world would look if he and so many others who lost their lives to the AIDS crisis were here, living the life they deserved to. While we don’t have him here, it is integral that we honour them and learn about their stories.

Seeing the delight of other queer folks as they explored the different sections of the exhibit and partake in that remembrance was joyous.

The exhibit honours the basis of Haring’s work by centring the complexity of the queer experience in the explicit joy that comes from community, the joy that comes from seeking collective liberation and expressing those beliefs freely through art.

“I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible, with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached,” he says from the wall, above a painting of Mickey Mouse pleasuring himself.

Mickey is a recurring character in Haring’s art. At times, he appears standing in money, in an Andy-Warhol hybrid. Sometimes Haring’s depiction is used for collabs with Disney, Uniqlo and Coach. You know, small, local, anti-capitalist brands.

Haring did face critiques of commercialism while he was alive when opening his store, The Pop Shop in New York, according to his foundation. He responded by saying his goal was, “to continue the same sort of communication as with the subway drawings [...] to attract the same wide range of people, and I wanted it to be a place where not only collectors could come, but also kids from the Bronx.”

“No final meaning attached” leaves room for time to shift meanings. There is room to understand that a Disney Swatch with Haring’s design is not as impactful of a message as the t-shirts from the 80s encouraging people to “Act up, Fight Aids.” There is room for an interpretation that Mickey pleasuring himself represents the Disney corporation’s capitalistic craving for wealth.

The meaning in Haring’s art may be ambiguous at times, but it extends beyond even death. His final piece, Unfinished Painting from 1989, leaves more than half of the canvas blank as paint drips down from an incomplete corner.