Haring exhibition shows what 'pop art' can be

Untitled (Apartheid) 1984

It’s not uncommon to visit an exhibition and find something that you didn’t expect. More rarely, though, is visiting an exhibition that goes way beyond the unexpected and offers something revelatory.

The Keith Haring exhibition, which opened last month at Tate Liverpool, is in the latter category.

Knowing I would be in Liverpool for a week for work, I’d done my usual and checked what was on art wise in the city.

There was an exhibition of Charles Rennie MacIntosh at the Walker (on until 26 August), but it’s a push to get the time, during a particularly intense working week, to get that ‘far’ from the conference centre.

Mickey Mouse eyes

However, the Haring exhibition was scheduled to have just opened at the Tate, which is only a short walk away from where I would be working, so it was a simple matter of remembering to pack my Tate membership card.

I was familiar with Haring’s simple figures – pop art’s answer to Lowry’s stick figures. In the 1980s, you couldn’t miss them – they were ubiquitous.

But context can make all the difference.

Here, we see works from the very beginning of Haring’s all-too-short career: the early Mickey Mouse cartoon eyes and examples of the drawings that Haring, with a deep belief in art being for everyone, executed on paper stuck up in New York Metro stations.

On a personal note – God, I remember drawing those eyes myself. Since, I’ve remembered how I drew and then drew again Mickey Mouse and more off the Disney icons.

But setting such personal memories aside, these are interesting enough and show his style evolving, but what really starts to resonate is later works.

Silence = Death

Haring rarely titled his works, so the only guideline to what he wanted to say is mostly on the surface he worked on – and his ‘canvases’ ranged from the yellow hood of a New York taxi to squares of tarpaulin.

While I knew that Haring had died of AIDS-related causes – and had, late in his life, campaigned around HIV/AIDS – I had not been aware that his political awareness had begun far earlier and went far beyond that.

Perhaps the best example of the HIV/AIDS works is 1989’s Silence = Death, a moving combination of the pink triangle and the idea of ‘hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil’.

But in terms of wider political awareness, there are works here that specifically speak out against apartheid in South Africa, while others examine the links between money and war.

An A5 page of my studies from The Matrix

Even more fascinating – and complex – are Haring’s works exploring new technologies. Intrigued by the possibilities offered by growing computerisation, the artist was also aware that there could be downsides.

It’s been suggested that Haring’s line can be compared to Picasso’s, but in it’s effortless, it reminds me more of Matisse – and indeed, many of the later works have a decorative quality, created out of densely-packed glyphs, that is pure Matisse too.

And as glyphs, they also have a sense of continuing a form of human expression that is millennia old.

The vast (and unusually titled) The Matrix, from 1983, seems at first almost abstract: it needs attention to understand anything it, so densely is it packed with ideas.

A day after my visit I returned in a lunch break, complete with sketchbook and pens. Trying to replicate some of the figures is a great way to more fully appreciate the sureness of Haring’s line.

Untitled, 1983

But back to the complexity of technology. Could aliens save us – or slaughter us? Will technology enslave us? Will we end up fucking computers or being fucked by them?

Things here are not necessarily as obvious as they seem. The last works displayed are Boschian in their nightmare view.

Equally interesting are works such as No Sin ... run off on printers, yet interestingly designed and with an eye to mass communication of an idea. 

This is the first exhibition of Haring’s work in the UK.

It’s a revelatory experience: work that built upon pop culture and pop art – Haring might have been the successor to Warhol and Lichtenstein, but he was far more grounded in the community in which he lived and worked, and in political struggle, while he also believed in art for all.

Untitled, 1984 –  no doubt a Boschian hell, though

While I have seen little Warhol and only a small Lichtenstein exhibition (ironically, at Tate Liverpool a year or so ago), I would suggest that Haring was streets above both of them.

In his work, there are what now seem prophetic questions about the nature of technology.

While the last stage of his career was bound up with his own struggle with HIV/AIDS, there is no self-pity and no mawkishness anywhere, but a boisterous sense of joy that is present in every line he executed.

In his work, Haring often dealt with death and the means – or potential means of it. Yet ultimately, this is a life-affirming journey: his work bows to nobody and no god. It is out, it is not ashamed and it is most avowedly concerned with equality for all

It is on until November and is well worth a visit.

Keith Haring is on at Tate Liverpool until 10 November. Find out more here.