The AGO’s latest exhibit brings the protest art of Haring’s work to life 

By Anna-Giselle Funes-Eng

“Let’s go find the piece about dying,” someone said to their friend as they passed me in the hall of AGO’s latest exhibit featuring selected works from the late Keith Haring. On its opening night, the room was filled with chatter and folks moving around from room to room in the gallery. 

Haring was a pop artist active for 10 years in New York during the AIDS crisis, creating his now-iconic illustrations on public spaces like subway stations in the 1980s. 

Through the clean-cut, zig-zaggy lines of Haring’s art, the world is portrayed vividly, at its most on-edge and feeling. Many featured works represent fears of nuclear disaster, political malignancy and apartheid. 

Death, yes. But much more so, life lived while possible, life lived on a deadline set out by a careless state that didn’t care if it cut lives short. Haring’s piece mocking ‘serial killer’ Ronald Reagan was one of my favourite artworks in the entire gallery. 

Haring’s work is instantly recognizable. The hollow outlined stick-people style he’s known, either from the art itself or your friend’s boyfriend’s t-shirt, sprawls the gallery walls and the merch shop’s shelves, as you’re funnelled into the store through the exit. It’s incredible how much prolific work he managed to create in a short span of time. It’s even more staggering to think how much more work, art and life we’d have today had the AIDS crisis not been purposely mishandled. We now know that massive oversight by the United States government caused the HIV/AIDS epidemic, when they refused to initially take it seriously, according to leaked records. 

Resistance to oppressive forces in search of queer joy and liberation are intrinsic in the visuals and themes of Haring’s work. 

An exhibited journal entry from Haring reads,“The Public has a right to art […] The public needs art and it is the responsibility of a “self-proclaimed artist” to realize the public needs art and not just bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. Art is for everybody.”

With such a strong emphasis on Haring’s passion for accessible art in public spaces like subways, it’s hard to ignore the irony in the bourgeois commodification of his work present at the shop at the front of the AGO and the end of the exhibit. 

The entirety of the exhibit, Haring’s words and the volume of merch available make you wonder where the line is between creating accessibility to the art and collapsing its political symbolism. Having t-shirts or other merchandise can serve as a gateway to learning about queer history, but when does the excess of merch become overt consumerism?

Stephen Severn, an artist, PhD student and instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University, noted that the original messages of Haring’s work have been diluted despite their popularity ringing true. They say the historical context has to be considered when analyzing and consuming the art. 

“40 years later and it’s still in public spaces because people are wearing it as they walk around the city […] Although I don’t think that a lot of people understand necessarily the political climate that it was made in or the reasons for making the art or art as being a form of activism,” said Severn.

“It kind of becomes the Mona Lisa, just an image that’s been produced constantly and kind of loses its meaning,” they added. 

Haring’s own words encapsulate the juxtaposition of the strong anti-bourgeois message in the art and the $225 French wooden chair no child would sit on willingly (for sad stiff children of the esteemed) featured in the merch stores. 

Haring would be 65 today. He died at 31 in 1996 of AIDS-related complications. His art, life and work are not distant memories, and it’s difficult not to think about how differently the world would look if he and so many others who lost their lives to the AIDS crisis were here, living the life they deserved to. While we don’t have him here, it is integral that we honour them and learn about their stories.  

Seeing the delight of other queer folks as they explored the different sections of the exhibit and partake in that remembrance was joyous. 

The exhibit honours the basis of Haring’s work by centring the complexity of the queer experience in the explicit joy that comes from community, the joy that comes from seeking collective liberation and expressing those beliefs freely through art. 

“I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible, with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached,” he says from the wall, above a painting of Mickey Mouse pleasuring himself. 

Mickey is a recurring character in Haring’s art. At times, he appears standing in money, in an Andy-Warhol hybrid. Sometimes Haring’s depiction is used for collabs with Disney, Uniqlo and Coach.  You know, small, local, anti-capitalist brands. 

Haring did face critiques of commercialism while he was alive when opening his store, The Pop Shop in New York, according to his foundation. He responded by saying his goal was, “to continue the same sort of communication as with the subway drawings […] to attract the same wide range of people, and I wanted it to be a place where not only collectors could come, but also kids from the Bronx.”

“No final meaning attached” leaves room for time to shift meanings. There is room to understand that a Disney Swatch with Haring’s design is not as impactful of a message as the t-shirts from the 80s encouraging people to “Act up, Fight Aids.” There is room for an interpretation that Mickey pleasuring himself represents the Disney corporation’s capitalistic craving for wealth. 

The meaning in Haring’s art may be ambiguous at times, but it extends beyond even death. His final piece, Unfinished Painting from 1989, leaves more than half of the canvas blank as paint drips down from an incomplete corner. 

There is no final meaning, even in death. All meaning in art is up for grabs, which Haring knew. Art is for everybody. 

Haring speaks beyond the grave; there can be no fixed or singular message. He calls us to act up, fight the power, and to do it in the community. 

And that’s a great place for everybody to start. 

People 25 and under can visit the AGO for free with the yearly youth pass. The Keith Haring Exhibit runs until March 17. 

Interview with professor Stephen Severn done by Grace Henkel