Keith Haring had the singular ability to depict the complexity of the present with both its sublime and horrifying aspects as well as its marvelous and monstrous forms. He did so by means of lightness and irony, pleasure and gaiety, interwoven with an iconographic hardness and an acuteness rooted in the origin of his myth as a both angelic and demonic artist...

Keith Haring had the singular ability to depict the complexity of the present with both its sublime and horrifying aspects as well as its marvelous and monstrous forms. He did so by means of lightness and irony, pleasure and gaiety, interwoven with an iconographic hardness and an acuteness rooted in the origin of his myth as a both angelic and demonic artist. This myth was fully experienced in Haring's time, which was made up of the computer and the subway, spaceships and television, racial uprisings and ethnic repressions, consumerism and AIDS. Haring, offering a visual and religious, a political and social interpretation, was quite aware that the fundamental meaning of human existence, both personal and collective, is not death, but rebirth. This book tries to grasp the rites of initiation and transmutation with which Haring sought to guarantee rebirth for himself - that is, access to a metahistorical condition: art.

Acknowledgments

GERMANO CELANT

Keith Hating: Labyrinths of Life and Death

BRUCE D. KURTZ

Haring's Place in Homoerotic American Art

DAVID GALLOWAY

A Quest for Immortality: The Sculptures of Keith Haring

BARRY BLINDERMAN

And We All Shine On

Plates I

"A real artist is only a vehicle"

Keith Haring on the Creative Process and the Role of the Artist

Plates II

"I wish I didn't have to sleep"

Excerpts from Interviews with Keith Haring

Plates III

List of Plates

Chronology

Selected Bibliography

Index of Names