Keith Haring, An Intimate Conversation
by
David Sheff | Rolling Stone | August | 1989
DAVID SHEFF co-wrote “Portrait of a Generation;’ which appeared in
Rolling Stone 523 and Rolling Stone 525.
What made you want to be
an artist?
My father made cartoons.
Since I was little, I had been doing cartoons, creating characters and stories.
In my mind, though, there was a separation between cartooning and being a
quote-unquote artist. When I made the decision to be an artist, I began doing
these completely abstract things that were as far away from cartooning as you
could go. It was around the time that I was taking hallucinogens – when I was
sixteen or so. Psychedelic shapes would come like automatic writing, come out
of my unconscious. The drawings were abstract, but you’d see things in them.
Were you taking drugs
because it was fashionable?
Drugs were a way to rebel against what was there and at the same
time to sort of not be there. And I remember that all the antidrug things on
television at the time only made me want to do them more. They showed all these
things to scare you: a gas burner turning into a beautiful flower. Thought,
that’s great! You mean I can see like that?
Drugs showed me a whole new world. It completely change me. I
was a terror when I was a teenager, an embarrassment to the family, really a
mess on drugs. I ran away. I came home stoned out of my mind on downs. I got
arrested – for stuff like stealing liquor from a firehouse, on my newspaper
route, no less. Me and my friends were making and selling angel dust.
If you had conformed to
your parents’ expectations, what would you have been like?
We were in a little,
conservative town. You grew up there, went to high school there, had kids
there, and your kids stayed, too. I had been a good little kid. My parents had
taken us to church and things like that, but I became this little Jesus freak,
and my parents were appalled. I had fallen in the movement out of a lack of any
other thing to believe in and out of wanting to be part of something.
When did you decide to go
to art school?
I’d been convinced to by my parents and guidance counselor. They
said that if I was going to seriously pursue being an artist, I should have
some commercial-art background. I went to a commercial-art school, where I quickly
realized that I didn’t want to be an illustrator or a graphic designer. The
people I met who were doing it seemed really unhappy; they said that they were
only doing it for a job while they did their own art on the side, but in
reality that was never the case – their own art was lost. I quit school. I
went to a huge retrospective by Pierre Alechinsky at the Carnegie Museum of
Art. It was the first time that I had seen someone older and established doing
something that was vaguely similar to my little abstract drawings. It gave me
this whole new boost of confidence. It was the time I was trying to figure out
if I was an artist, why and what that meant. I was inspired by the writings of
Jean Dubuffet, and I remember seeing a lecture by Christo and seeing the film
on his work Running
Fence.
How did these artists
inspire you?
The thing I responded to most was their belief that art could
reach all kinds of people, as opposed to the traditional view, which has art as
this elitist thing. The fact that these influences quote-unquote happened to along change the whole course I was on. Then another
so-called coincidence happened. I applied at a public-employment place for work
and happened to get placed in a job at what’s now the Pittsburgh Center for the
Arts. I was painting walls and repairing the roof and things. I started using
their facilities to do bigger and bigger paintings. When someone canceled an
exhibition and they had an empty space, the director offered me an exhibit in
one of the galleries. For Pittsburgh, this was a big thing, especially for me,
being nineteen and showing in the best place I could show in Pittsburgh besides
the museum. From that time, I knew I wasn’t going to be satisfied with
Pittsburgh anymore or with the life I was living there. I had started sleeping
with men. I wanted to get away from the girl I was living with. She said she
was pregnant. I was in the position of having to get married and be a father or
making a break. One thing I knew for sure: I didn’t want to stay there and be a
Pittsburgh artist and married with a family. I decided to make a major break.
New York was the only place to go.
What did you do once you
got there?
At first I was just working in the same style as I was at home.
But then all kinds of things started to happen. Maybe the most important was
that I learned about William Burroughs. I learned about him almost by accident
– like almost everything else that has happened to me, sort of by
accident-chance-coincidence.
Apparently, you believe
in fate.
From the time that I was little, things would happen that seemed
like chance, but they always meant more, so I came to believe there was no such
thing as chance. If you accept that there are no coincidences, you use
whatever comes along.
How did Burroughs influence you?
Burroughs’s work with Brion Gysin with the cut-up method became the basis for
the whole way that I approached making art then. The idea of their book, The Third
Mind, is that when two separate
things are cut up and fused together, completely randomly, the thing that is
born of that combination is this completely separate thing, a third mind with
its own life. Sometimes the result was not that interesting, but sometimes it
was prophetic. The main point was that by relying on so-called chance, they would
uncover the essence of things, things below the surface that were more
significant than what was visible.
How did you use the
concepts?
I used the idea when I cut up headlines from the New
YorkPost and put them back
together and then put them up on the streets as handbills. That’s how I started
work on the street. There was a group of people using the streets for art then,
like Jenny Holzer, who was putting out these handbills with things she was
calling truisms, these absurd comments. I was altering advertisements and
making these fake Post headlines that were completely absurd: REAGAN SLAIN BY HERO COP
or POPE KILLED FOR FREED HOSTAGE. I’d post them all over the place.
With what intent?
The idea was that people would be stopped in their tracks, not
knowing whether it was real or not. They’d stop because it had familiar words
like Reagan or pope and it was in a familiar typeface – so they had to confront it
and somehow deal with it.
What was it like living
in the East Village at that time?
It was just exploding. All kinds of new things were starting. In
music, it was the punk and New Wave scenes. There was a migration of artists
from all over America to New York. It was completely wild. And we controlled it
ourselves. There was the group of artists called COLAB – Collaborative Projects
– doing exhibitions in abandoned buildings. And there was the club scene – the
Mudd Club and Club 57, at St. Mark’s Place, in the basement of a Polish church,
which became our hangout, a clubhouse, where we could do whatever we wanted. We
started doing theme parties – beatnik parties that were satires of the Sixties
and parties with porno movies and stripteases. We showed early Warhol films.
And there was this art out on the streets. Before I knew who he was, I became
obsessed with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work.
Was this the period in
which Basquiat was doing his early graffiti
Yeah, but the stuff I saw on the walls was more poetry than
graffiti. They were sort of philosophical poems that would use the language the
way Burroughs did – in that it seemed like it could mean something other than
what it was. On the surface they seemed really simple, but the minute I saw
them I knew that they were more than that. From the beginning he was my
favorite artist.
And how was your art
developing?
I’d gone from the abstract drawings to the word pieces, but I
decided that I was going to draw again. But if I was going to draw again, I
couldn’t go back to the abstract drawings; it had to have some connection to
the real world. I organized a show at Club 57 for Frank Holliday and me. I
bought a roll of oak-tag paper and cut it up and put it all over the floor and
worked on this whole group of drawings. The first few were abstracts, but then
these images started coming. They were humans and animals in different
combinations. Then flying saucers were zapping the humans. I remember trying to
figure out where this stuff came from, but I have no idea. It just grew into
this group of drawings. I was thinking about these images as symbols, as a
vocabulary of things. In one a dog’s being worshiped by these people. In
another one the dog is being zapped by a flying saucer. Suddenly it made sense
to draw on the street, because I had something to say. I made this person
crawling on all fours, which evolved into the quote-unquote baby. And there was
an animal being, which now has evolved into the dog. They really were
representational of human and animal. In different combinations they were about
the difference between human power and the power of animal instinct. It all
came back to the ideas I learned from semiotics* and the stuff from Burroughs –
different juxtapositions would make different meanings. I was becoming more and
more involved in the underground art scene, doing graffiti, and then I would
use people’s studios and do paintings. It was one of the first times graffiti
was being considered art, and there were shows. In the summer of 1980, COLAB
organized an exhibition of a lot of these artists in the Times Square Show. It
was the first time the art world really paid attention to graffiti and to these
other outsider artists. It was written about in the Village
Voice and in the art magazines.
Jean-Michel and I got singled out of the group then.
How did you begin
drawing in the subways?
One day, riding the subway, I saw this empty black panel where
an advertisement was supposed to go. I immediately realized that this was the
perfect place to draw. I went back above ground to a card shop and bought a box
of white chalk, went back down and did a drawing on it. It was perfect – soft
black paper; chalk drew on it really easily.
I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on
them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, people left them alone
and respected them; they didn’t rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave
them this other power. It was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of
all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were
completely enthralled.
Except the police.
Well, I was arrested, but since it was chalk and could easily be
erased, it was like a borderline case. The cops never knew how to deal with it.
The other part that was great about it was the whole thing was a performance.
When I did it, there were inevitably people watching – all kinds
of people. After the first month or two I started making buttons because I was
so interested in what was happening with the people I would meet. I wanted to
have something to make some other bonding between them and the work. People
were walking around with little badges with the crawling baby with glowing rays
around it. The buttons started to become a thing now, too; people with them
would talk to each other, there was a connection between people in the subway.
The subway pictures became a media thing, and the images started
going out into the rest of the world via magazines and television. I became
associated with New York and the hip-hop scene, which was all about graffiti
and rap music and break dancing. It had existed for five years or more, but it
hadn’t really started to cross over into the general population. It was
incredibly interesting to me that it was reaching all kinds of people in
different levels from different backgrounds. Then, in 1982, I had my first
one-man show in New York at a big gallery, Tony Shafrazi, in SoHo.
What happened to your
resolve to study away from the traditional snobbish art scene?
As an art student and being sort of in the underground and
having very precise and cynical ideas about the art world, the traditional
art-dealer gallery represented a lot that I hated about the art world. But
people started to see an opportunity to make a lot of money buying my work. I
got disillusioned with letting dealers and collectors come to my studio. They
would come in and, for prices that were nothing, a couple hundred dollars, go
through all the paintings and then not get anything or try to bargain. I didn’t
want to see those people anymore. I wanted to sell paintings because it would
enable me to quit my job, whether as a cook or delivering house plants or
whatever else I was doing – and paint full time. But I had to have a gallery
just to give me distance.
Was it hard to accept
that the paintings were commodities?
Yes, but it’s not that way for everyone. People get something
from living with a painting. I love living with paintings.
What do you have on the
wall in your apartment?
One of my favorite Warhol paintings that I ever got from Andy –
a small hand-painted portrait of Christ at the Last Supper. Two George Condo
paintings. One Basquiat. A small Lichtenstein drawing. A Picasso etching. A
Clemente monoprint and a Kenny Scharf I also have a television painted by Kenny
that is incredible. And one piece of mine, a metal mask that I made for an
exhibition a few years ago in New York. In the collection, I have a lot of
things, from Jean Tinguely to Robert Mapplethorpe photographs to a lot more
Warhols and Basquiats.
Had you met Warhol by the
time of your first show?
Before I knew him, he had been an image to me. He was totally
unapproachable. I met him finally through (photographer] Christopher Makos, who
brought me to the Factory. At first Andy was very distant. It was difficult for
him to be comfortable with people if he didn’t know them. Then he came to
another exhibition at the Fun Gallery, which was soon after the show at
Shafrazi. He was more friendly. We started talking, going out. We traded a lot
of works at that time.
Haw do you feel about the
publication of the Warhol diaries?
He wanted them published. That’s why he kept them. The weirdest thing to me is to see his insecurity.
It was all ridiculous, because he had nothing to be insecure about; this was
after he’d already safely carved himself a permanent notch in our history,
probably the most important notch since Picasso. It’s nice going through the
diaries, though, because he tells enough of the story that it takes me back to
the exact moment, and I can fill in all the rest.
You were hanging out with
Madonna, Michael Jackson, Yoko Ono, Boy George pretty glamorous.
I knew Madonna from before. We were in that scene in the lower
East Village at the same time. She was just starting. She used to go out with
Fun House, where he was the OJ. Bur I met the others through Andy. He had a way
of sort of making things happen around him. I don’t go to those parties much
anymore; I’m not leading the same glamorous life. I don’t miss it a lot, but
when it started happening, I was young and naive, and it was really exciting.
It was like incredible to go, you know, to meet Michael Jackson backstage with
Andy. When he brought me to Yoko’ s apartment the first time, it was
incredible. You can’t believe that you’re there. The ultimate one was a dinner
at Yoko’s. I brought Madonna and the artist Martin Burgoyne. Andy was already
there. Bob Dylan was there. David Bowie was there. And Iggy Pop. Just sort of
in the kitchen. At first you are more in awe of things like that, but you adapt
really quickly.
What do you think was the
basis of your friendship with Warhol?
Andy always had young people around him at all points of his
life. Fresh blood with fresh ideas. It was good for him to be around, and for
us it was good because it was giving us this whole seal of approval – the
ultimate approval you could get was from Andy. Everyone looked up to him. He
was the only figure that represented any real forerunner of the attitude
about making art in a more public way and dealing with art as part of the real
world. Even when we became friends, I was always still sort of in awe of him.
But everyone who knew Andy talks about him as if he was the sweetest, most
generous, simple, kind person. People have a hard time believing that; they
have the media image of him that was totally damaged by the whole Edie Sedgwick thing – Andy as a bloodsucking vampire
taking advantage of people and throwing them away. People felt this meanness
toward him. When you actually knew Andy, you saw that it was completely
unfounded. It stemmed from other people’s jealousy at not being his friend, not
being part of the whatever, the inner circle, so they would attack it and blame
their own misfortune on him because he was a good scapegoat.
What was it like being
with him?
He was easy to know, easy to be with. I learned a lot from him.
Some of the best things were about generosity and about how to conduct
yourself. I always learned from watching quietly and listening or seeing the
way that he would deal with things, like someone coming up to him at an art
event or seeing a reaction that he would have to something that would be
written about him. He was really supportive.
He was a big supporter of the Pop Shop. I was scared. I knew I
would be attacked. The art world thrives in its little elitist world. The rest
of the world can get access if the art dribbles down, like Mondrian shoes or
Warhol whatever or window displays that look like Jackson Pollock. That’s
acceptable. What happened to me is that it started in the subways, it began
in popular culture and was absorbed and accepted by the popular culture before
the other art world had time to rake credit for it. They want to say, “We’re
giving you your culture;’ which they usually do. By opening the Pop Shop, it
was the ultimate in cutting them out of the picture.
Some think that the Pop
Shop is about crass
commercialism.
Other artists had been accusing me of selling out since my
paintings started selling. I mean, I don’t know what they intended me to do:
Just stay in the subway the rest of my life? Somehow that would have made me
stay pure? By 1984 the subway thing started to backfire, because everyone was
stealing the pieces. I’d go down and draw in the subway, and two hours later
every piece would be gone. They were turning up for sale.
My work was starting to become more expensive and more popular
within the art marker. Those prices meant that only people who could afford big
art prices could have access to the work. The Pop Shop makes it accessible. To
me, the Pop Shop is totally in keeping ideologically with what Andy was doing
and what conceptual artists and earth artists were doing: It was all about
participation on a big level.
If it was about money, I could have been the most successful
commercial designer and illustrator in the world. I’ve turned down numerous
huge things. I’ve been approached to do Saturday-morning television and
breakfast cereals. I didn’t do the advertisements for Kraft cheese or Dodge
trucks.
But you did a poster for
Absolut vodka and the Swatch watch. What’s the difference?
There were challenges in each thing I’ve done, and they circulated the work, and the quality was controlled and limited.
But the point wasn’t to try to get rich. The money has been the least interesting and, in some ways, the biggest drawback. You get thrust into this position of
attention and wealth that you don’t necessarily know that you deserve
in terms of payment. To me, the whole thing of payback is an idea, an
ideological or emotional thing, or something that I get from making successful
work.
And even that isn’t the main thing. See, when I paint, it is an
experience that, at its best, is transcending reality. When it is working, you completely go into another place, you’retapping into things that are totally universal, of the total consciousness, completely beyond your ego and your own
self That’s what it’s all about. That’s why it’s the biggest insult of all when people talk about me selling
out. I’ve spent my entire life trying to avoid that, trying to figure out why it happens to people, trying to figure out what it means. How do you participate in the world but not lose your integrity? It’s a constant struggle. Part of growing is trying
to teach yourself to be empty enough that the thing can come throughyou completely so it’s nor affected by your preconceived ideas of what a work of art should be or what an
artist should do. Since there have been people waiting to buythings, I’ve known that if I wanted to make things people would
expect or people would want, I could do it easily. As soon as you let
that affect you,
you’ve lost everything. As soon
as you get some acclaim, you have alienated some people that think that theydeserved it instead of you. So you sold out. I never sold out.
At the Pop Shop, you sell
“Free South Africa” posters and a lot of AIDS-related art. Were you always
politically conscious?
I learned a certain sensitivity to things at home. My parents weren’t in any way politicallyinvolved, and, in fact,
they were straight Republicans and have voted straight Republican up until now
– even I couldn’t change their mind about Reagan – but they were concerned about things. I guess I reacted to their
politics. I remember driving somewhere, like to New Jersey to the shore for vacation, and being in the back seat and seeing
hitchhikers and hippies and feeling like I was on the wrong side. I was the enemy, myfather and me with our crew cuts driving by. When Nixon or someone asked Americans to show their support for
the war effort by driving with their headlights on for this one day, we were driving to New Jersey with the headlights on. I was only eleven, but I was embarrassed. As soon as I was old enough, I
got involved. I remember being really into Earth Day, making collages with peace signs.
Your safe-sex campaign is
my explicit - like the
recurring character Debbie Dick.
Yet people respond really strongly. Teachers everywhere ask me for safe-sex stickers. In the United
States people are shy to talk about safe sex. In Europe it’s completely acceptable. A
lot of what we see here is more tame because of some people’s preconceived
notions of what they think people can handle. In fact when people are treated
as if they have some intelligence and are given explicit information, they
appreciate it. And it’s the only thing that gets through to kids, the people
that need it.
Where did Debbie Dick
come from?
I wanted to make something that communicated the message with a
sense of humor. The whole subject is so morbid and antihumor. People have the
hardest time just rallcing about it. They can’t get used to rallcing about
condoms, never mind going out and buying condoms.
You did a pretty
well-known anticrack painting - ‘Crack Is
Wack’ - on a wall in New
York. What’s the difference between kids’ doing crack now and your doing drugs
when you were younger?
Crack is a businessman’s drug. It was invented to make someone
profit Smoking pot never made you go poor. And crack is completely different
than the mind-expanding drugs like LSD or pot. It’s the opposite of
mind-expanding; crack makes you subservient. Instead of opening your mind, it
shuts it and makes you dependent on whoever’s providing you with the drug. I
think crack is even worse than heroin. Heroin calms you and makes you feel sort
of unaware. Crack makes you totally schizophrenic, aggressive and irrationally
obsessed with wanting more. It’s much more quickly addicting than heroin or any
other drug. What’s most repulsive is that I don’t think the powers that be
really want to stop the crack problem. For them it’s the perfect thing. It
makes people very easy to control. After all, the government is really the one
controlling the source. They’re supposedly having a war on drugs now, but the
whole time Bush was vice-president the amounts of cocaine coming into this
country were phenomenal.
Does it bother you that
many important critics have essentially dismissed your work?
A lot of critics read my work one way a long time ago, when they
first saw it, and they will continue to see it the same way no matter what.
It took Warhol a long
time before he was taken seriously by the mainstream art establishment.
Andy and people like Roy
Lichtenstein have stories about the early criticism that they were getting.
When they first came out, they were attacked and laughed at and written off.
There’s still an attitude about it. Robert Hughes’s eulogy to Andy in Time was the most horrible, insulting thing, trying to dismiss
whatever stature he had earned.
Hughes once compared you
to Peter Max - fashion but not
art, essentially.
He has written particularly horrible things about me. He hates
my work. He’s said it many times. The Peter Max thing is a way of saying that
it may be commercially interesting and even reflective of the time, but it has
no value beyond that. I don’t know. . . . The things that have always given me
the strength and confidence not to worry about those things are, first of all,
support from other artists, artists whom I look up to and respect much more
than I respect these critics or curators, and second, things that come from
real people, people who don’t have any art background, who aren’t part of the
elitist establishment or of the intellecrua1 community but who respond with
complete honesty from deep down inside their hearts or their souls.
Unfortunately, these moments sustain you for a certain amount of time, and then
your paranoia sets in, and you remember that you’re not in this important
contemporary American art show, and it’s very frustrating. It’s frightening how
much power critics and curators have. People like that may have enough power to
completely write you out of history. I mean, Hughes called Jean-Michel the
Eddie Murphy of the art world. It was this completely racist, ridiculous,
narrow-minded and silly criticism.
Was it a shock to you
when Jean-Michel overdosed on heroin last summer?
The last few years his friends were really scared for him. He
was really playing with death, pushing it to the extreme. But there was no
point in telling him. He knew what he was doing. He knew what the risks were.
He had friends that died. His friends could only hope that it wasn’t going to
happen. But it was not a surprise to any one when he
died. .
It must have been
particularly difficult after losing Andy the year before.
Jean-Michel was like… icing on the cake. There are artists whose
work I appreciate, but there aren’t a lot of artists that I have a relationship
with that I’m totally inspired and intimidated by at the same time. They were
born like that.
Why were you intimidated
by them?
You think that they are so good that it makes you think that
you’re not good. Or that you think you’re not doing enough, because seeing what
they do just making you want to go back and work. So to lose Andy and
Jean-Michel…. The weirder thing was that it had happened right after I had lost
someone else. When Andy passed away, I had just lost a friend of mine who was
sort of like a guardian angel for me, Bobby Breslau. He was like my conscience,
my Jiminy Cricket. He was working here until he got so sick that he couldn’t
even come to work. I think he knew that he was really sick, but it wasn’t
diagnosed as AIDS for a long time. By the time he went to the hospital, he died
within a week. And that… that was almost… that was like pulling the rug out
from under me. It was like being a little bird thrown out of a nest. You’ve got to do
it on your own now. And you’ve got to do it in a way that’s going to live up to
what he would have expected. Within
a month, Andy passed away. Losing both of them in a month was hard. This was
after losing a lot of other friends, too. I was supposed to go on a vacation. A
week before I was to go, my ex-lover, Juan Dubose, who had been sick for a
while, died. Within the week, my friend Yves Arman, on his way to come see me
in Spain, gets killed in a car accident. He was one of my best friends –
probably the best supporter I had in the art world – and a photographer and an
art dealer and the son of Arman, the sculptor. I was the godfather of his
child, a beautiful one-year-old girl. Four or five people died within a year
and a half. The main people. It’s like somehow, every time it happens, you get
a little bit tougher, a little bit more sensitive somehow but a little bit
stronger at the same time. And you have to… You sort of have to go beyond it.
In a way, in a horrible way, somehow it’s easier when someone is
dying slowly and you know they’re dying, because you can get to live it out or
work it out while it’s happening. It still hurts, but it’s somehow easier
because it’s not a shock. The harder ones are when it’s a shock. I’ll never get
over them. In the face of things like that the only solution is to be really
strong. There’s no rational way to deal with it
With all the close
friends who have died, do you sometimes wonder why?
Unfortunately, death is a fact of life. I don’t think it’s
happened to me any more unfairly than to anyone else. It could always be worse.
I’ve lost a lot of people, but I haven’t lost everybody. I didn’t lose my
parents or my family. But it’s been an incredible education, facing death,
facing it the way that I’ve had to face it at this early age. I guess it’s
similar to what it must have been to go to with and to lose your friends while
you’re at war. A lot of people don’t start to lose their friends until they’re
fifty or sixty years old. But to start having it happen when you’re in your
mid-twenties – especially because a lot of the people that I’ve lost have been
lost because of AIDS – to have it happen that way, in a way which can many
times be very slow and very horrible and very painful, you know, it’s been
really hard. It’s toughened me. It’s made me, in a way, more respectful of
life and more appreciative of life than I ever, ever could have been.
Did your parents know you
were gay from the beginning?
My parents have been so amazing about the whole thing, but in
their own way – knowing but not saying anything. I never tried to hide it from
them, and they never asked me about it When I lived with Juan, they would come
visit the house. By that time, because of the work that I was doing, I had sort
of proven myself as a grown-up. They knew that I had turned my life into something
good, and that’s what they cared about
But it was never
discussed?
No, but they would come to the house and there was only one bed.
And Juan came with me to Christmas to a family-reunion thing for the entire
family. My Father has ten brothers and sisters. It’s a marine-corps family. All
my Father’s relatives are marines; I know that I could have been a marine. On
one side there is this really macho thing, but there is also this thing of
pride in yourself and in family and in real simple things. I could have done
all that, but it was even more incredible to have their respect even though I
was not a marine and even though the whole family knew, by now figuring it out,
that I’m gay. Haring is their name, too, and what I’ve done makes them
incredibly proud. And though we never talked about it, after coming to New York
and visiting me when I was living with Juan, my parents finally accepted him as
part of the family, buying him a present at Christmastime. And, by the way, the
fact that he was black was an added thing for them to deal with. Although
they’re a very open-minded family, I heard nigger jokes at the Thanksgiving
table growing up. Not in the last years, but when I was a kid. So it’s changed
incredibly. It happened over time. It happened, I think, because I taught them,
and my sisters taught them.
Now it’s to the point that they come to New York and they’re
friends with my friends and they’re comfortable being at my parties, where,
like, a drag queen can walk up and say hello – like Dean Johnson of Dean and
the Weenies, who’s very tall, shaved bald, very masculine looking but wearing
this incredible little negligee and platforms. They tell their friends about
it. On their refrigerator at home they have pictures. There’s a picture of them
with Yoko Ono at the last opening. And a picture of Bill Cosby posing with
them, sitting on the Huxtables’ couch, him sitting with his arm around my
mother and dad, on either side. They have these Polaroids on their refrigerator
beside all of the report cards and pictures of the grandchildren.
Are you emphatic in your
belief that people should be open about their homosexuality?
Normal about it. It’s not an issue to me. It doesn’t have that much to
do with the rest of my life. It shouldn’t prevent me from being able to work
with children.It doesn’t mean I’m going to molest them. A lot of people can’t
even imagine the idea of someone that is gay working with children. They assume
they’re going to be lecherous. It’s very sad. And now, within the last few
years, AIDS has changed everything. AIDS has made it even harder for people to
accept, because homosexuality has been made to be synonymous with death. It’s a
justifiable fright with people that are just totally uninformed and therefore
ignorant. Now it means that you’re a potential harborer of death. That’s why it
is so important for people to know what AIDS is and what it isn’t. Because
there is the potential forfar, far worse things to happen, the possibility of
more hysteria or more fascist reaction. It’s really dangerous. Jews weren’t
even causing anyone to die, and they became this incredible target of hate. All
it will take is some major economic disaster for it to get totally out of hand.
That’s the biggest fear that I have. I’m cynical enough to be very curious how
this whole thing could have even started. We know they’re capable of making
diseases. They do it. They have laboratories for germ warfare. They could have done it. The original targets were just homosexual men and
IV drug users. Perfect people to wipe out.
But it’s rampant in
Africa and other places.
Which adds a racist thing on top. They experiment with people
they don’t want around. It’s just this perfectly invented disease. It depends
on how far you want to take it, on how paranoid you are about conspiracies.
Did you find out because
you were getting sick or from a test?
I had been tested before.
But even if you’re positive, it doesn’t really sink in until you get sick.
So you knew you were HIV
positive before you got symptoms?
Yeah, and even before, I knew. I’ve been having safe sex for a
very long time, before I ever got tested. I knew it was a possibility. I was
here at the peak of the sexual promiscuity in New York. I arrived, fresh from
coming out of the closet, at the time and place where everyone was just wild. I
was major into experimenting. If I didn’t get it, no one would. So I knew. It
was just a matter of time.
Now the thing I’m most concerned about is how it’s going to
affect other people. I have so many friends, kids that are friends. My godchildren. I have a lot of kids almost like my own, because I
can never have kids but I always wanted kids; other people’s kids were like my
kids. I just can’t imagine. I really, really, really don’t want them to see me
get the way that I’ve seen other people get. I don’t know which is more noble:
to fight to the end, until your last breath, no matter what you turn into, or
to cut it off and die with dignity. I don’t know which would leave a better
impression in their minds. Would it be worse for them to know that you took your own life? Or to know, even if it wasn’t pretty at the
end, that you fought and had a will to fight and tried to survive? Even though
at a certain point it’s killing everyone around you.
You described how much
you learned from the people around you that were dying.
Isn’t that the answer?
That’s the argument that makes me think I have to have the
courage to go all the way through it and not be scared what people are going to
think. But the little kids. I just can’t imagine. That’s the worst part.
I think part of the
reason grown-ups have such a hard time dealing with illness and death is
because we have no experience with it growing up; kids are always kept away
from it. I was struck by your reluctance to talk. At first about being sick
because you’re afraid that people ignorant of the disease will stop you from
being able to work with kids; they won’t invite you to their schools to paint
with kids.
I know they won’t invite
me. But I think it’s not fair for them not to know and to go on and then find
out: “He was here, and he had AIDS.” I think that what will happen with people
knowing will be far more interesting than just going on as if nothing had
changed and having them find out later. It will force things to happen. Maybe
they won’t be good. There will be people who will make a stand and want me to
still do the work with kids and a lot who won’t.
By keeping quiet about
it, Rock Hudson helped perpetuate the ignorance.
Because he didn’t talk
about it, the media was able to perpetuate this thing that AIDS was punishment
for something he did that was bad.
And made it seem like he
was ashamed of being gay.
To me, one of the most
important things is that being sick is not going to make me go back on anything
in my life. I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done. I wouldn’t change
anything. Everything was natural and out in the open.
I think one of the hardest things AIDS has done is to kids
growing up now, trying to figure out their sexuality in an unbiased way. They
always will have their sexuality shoved down their throats, but they’ll make
their own way because it’s such a strong thing- it will override everything, no
matter how much brainwashing’s going on. So imagine how horrible it must be to
some young kid who knows he’s gay or someone thinking of experimenting. They
could have a sentence of death. It’s horribly frightening. It gives so much
firel to the people who are telling you that it’s wrong to be who you are.
There are so few people who are good openly gay role models or just good people who are respected who are
open about their sexuality. Now there has to be openness about all these issues. Kids are going to have
sex, so help them have safe sex. People still don’t do safe sex. I know so many
kids that think that if they’re screwing girls it doesn’t apply to them. They
hate wearing condoms. But heterosexual transmissions is one of the leading
causes of new cases.
Have you had any symptoms
in addition to the lesions?
No. I never get the kind
of sick that you don’t want to get out of bed. But it’s like you know it’s out
there. You know, it’s just being in the wrong place at the wrong rime. In ten
years it will be a whole different situation. Inevitably, in the beginning,
they’re not going to know how to deal with any new disease. And it was just bad
timing in getting it, too. We got infected because we didn’t even know the
thing existed. When people started getting sick, they had no idea where it was
coming from, had no idea that it was out there, so you didn’t know how to be
protective and prevent it. Now people have no excuse. Now you’re responsible
for what happens to you because you have the ability to protect yourself. Ifyou didn’t know about it, you can’t be held responsible for it.
How has having AIDS
changed your life?
The hardest thing is just knowing that there’s so much more
scuff to do. I’m a complete workaholic. I’m so scared that one day I’ll wake up
and I won’t be able to do it.
Do you
make time for life outside of work?
You force yourself to. Otherwise I would just work. I spend
enough time enjoying, too. I have no complaints at all. Zero. In a way, it’s
almost a privilege. To know. When I was a little kid, I always felt that I was
going to die young, in my twenties
or something. So in a way, I always lived my life as if I expected it. I did everything I wanted to do. I’m
still doing whatever I want.
No matter how long you work, it’s always going to end sometime. And there’s always
going to be things left undone. And it wouldn’t matter if you lived until you were
seventy-five. There would still be new ideas. There would still be things that you wished you would
have accomplished. You could work for several lifetimes. If I could clone
myself, there would still be too much work to do – even if there were five of
me. And there are no regrets. Part of the reason that I’m not having trouble
facing the reality of death is that it’s not a limitation, in a way. It could
have happened any time, and it is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant.
Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do.
Do you get more impatient
with the trivial things in life?
The opposite. Nothing is trivial. I wish I didn’t have to sleep.
But otherwise, it’s all fun. It’s all part of the game. [He is quiet, and then he
looks up.] There’s one last thing in my head. With the thought of – of summing up. My last show in New
York felt like it had to be the best painting that I could do. To show
everything I have learned about painting. The thing about all the projects I’m
working on now – a wall in a hospital or new paintings – is that there is a
certain sense of summing up in them. Everything I do now is a chance to put a –
a crown on the whole thing. It adds another kind of intensity to the work that
I do now; it’s one of the good things to come from being sick.
If you’re writing a story, you can sort of ramble on and go in a
lot of directions at once, but when you are getting to the end of the story,
you have to start pointing all the things toward one thing. That’s the point
that I’m at now, not knowing where it stops but knowing how important it is to
do it now. The whole thing is getting much more articulate. In a way it’s
really liberating.
Semiotics - Semiotics, also called semiotic studies and in
the Saussurean tradition called semiology, is the study of signs and sign
processes, indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism,
signification, and communication.
In my opinion, Keith Haring’s work speaks louder than it
appears. Using a cartoon style it
may seem childish or humorous, rather there are deeper meanings and ideas. Haring doesn’t let mainstream ideology
clog his vision. He was well
integrated in the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s, himself being diagnosed and dying
as well. He stands up for what he
believes in and I feel that is a good trait to have as an artist.
