INSPIRE ME! Artist Keith Haring

I present what not to do instead 
of saying "this is what you should do". 

~ KEITH HARING 

Keith Haring: The Ten Commandments at Deitch 2008

By TAHLIB

This May 2013, A&O salutes Keith Haring (1958-1990) as our INSPIRE ME! Artist of the Month. This Reading, Pennsylvania native whose friends said turned from "Jesus freak to AIDS activist" during the 1980s would have been 55-years-old on May 4th had he survived the devastation of AIDS. In our view, being an AIDS activist is the same thing as being a Jesus freak, and while saluting his religious activism; we also salute his genius as a religious artist by calling attention to a major retrospective of his works which just opened in France. This month's Inspire Me! posting is based on excerpts from Sylvie Couderc's 1985 inteview with Haring.

Keith Haring | DesignLovr

By Sylvie Couderc

1. Those ten paintings are entitled ‘The Ten Commandments”. Could you comment on this title, and on how you referred yourself to the Bible? Did you reread the book?I could not remember what the “Ten Commandments” were so I had to get a bible when I got here. The way I worked on the “Ten Commandments” is: even though its says “thou shalt not steal”, the picture I show is someone stealing: the antithesis. I present what not to do instead of saying “this is what you should do”. And at the same time there are things that allude to other ideas. If you did not know that they are the “Ten Commandments”, you would probably read a different story.

2. You have chosen to display a drawing by Matisse at the entrance of the exhibit, as an introduction to it. Why so? I picked Matisse for the simplicity of his line, and because he’s been one of my favorite painters for a long time. But also because those particular drawings were done for a chapel and the arches here remind me very much of a church. There is some kind of religious connotation to it. Matisse’s drawing is about taking Christ to the cross, and in a way he was doing a more literal translation of the story of the Bible, not trying to add other metaphors.

3. Don’t some of your works take their cue from ancient paintings, especially those of pre-Columbian civilizations? How important are primitive arts for you? For me it was very interesting how obviously early abstract painters like Braque, Picasso, or Brancusi really were directly inspired by things that were starting to turn up for the first time from Africa.

4. This attitude provides the basis on which you develop a mythology and a bestiary that are very personal to you. The vocabulary of my images became “physical”, almost; it’s a vocabulary of signs and symbols evoking different ideas, and gaining meaning through repetition and juxtaposition, changing meaning as they appear over and over, as I use them in different situations. Images gain power with repetition.

5. Where do those images arise from? There are things that Jung said about the collective unconscious. I don’t know if I can talk about “dream work” because I don’t really get things specifically from my dreams… I become a vessel for this information, for this kind of magic, the spirit that flows through me and creates this thing.

6. Taking a close look at your drawings and paintings, one notices that you paint them with great freedom, integrating the drippings and the spots into them. Is this another means of preserving this spontaneity you just mentioned? The dripping… well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it’s a natural part in the evolution of the work.

7. Haven’t your paintings become more colorful lately? I have been using color since I was a kid; but for a while there was a misconception that I did not use color because what I did in the subway was basically chalk on black paper. But when I started painting on canvas, then I could use the full range of colors again. in the “Ten Commandments”, from one panel to another, I began to make connections with the red always being the color representing power. If I were asked to use three colors it would be black, white and red, for they are the three strongest colors, and yellow would be my next choice. Red is one of the strongest colors, it’s blood, it has a power with the eye. That’s why traffic lights are red I guess, and stop signs as well… In fact I use red in all of my paintings.

Bordeaux, December 16,1985.This interview was made by Sylvie Couderc, with the collaboration of Syivie Marchand.Transcription Sylvie Marchand.