| Artist: | Keith Haring |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Subway Art: "Now Roast Without Risk" | |
| Date: | 1982-1984 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Postmodern Pluralism | |
| Movement: | Graffiti Art | |
| Materials: | chalk on board in New York subways | |
| Subject: drawing literally "on the run," Haring is a postmodern graffiti artist who creates a unique street iconography of radiant babies, barking dogs, and zapping spacecrafts and that do something to the advertisements around them; they make us read the ads from a new point of view; strangely enough, the authority of these drawings dominate over all the slick ads with all their high-production values; Haring's goofy inventiveness wins the day; in the glut of mass media advertising and officially sanctioned signage, his subversive, illegal subway graffiti interjects a personal creativity and rebellious cultural non-conformity that exposes the canned, packaged advertising world and the all-too-isolated, removed world of the gallery system. Style: simple drawings, but drawn with great authority. Draws in the black spaces left behind, reserved for official signage and ads; appeal is to a popular audience and not an elite art world crowd. Context: the signscape in a late 20th c. Information Age. Offers a new critique on established notions of where art should be shown, for whom, and with what intentions; works public spaces; opened his own art shop where art was sold at cheap prices, not so much as yet another commodity, but more as an anti-elitest statement; much of the profits went and still go to charities fighting AIDS (he died of AIDS in 1990). Provides new level of public access to the advertising landscape. His street iconography is full of energized imagery that takes up the themes of TV evangelism, sci fi escapism, and nuclear power terrors. An art that sums up the end of the millenium. | ||
