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Keith Haring Keith Haring Keith Haring's large painted aluminum figures are the least ephemeral of his production, but they retain the playful, accessible humanity that underlies his works' site-specific, momentary, or performative spirit. Making public sculpture was a natural extension of the activity of an artist who loved to work in public, who enjoyed seeing his art worn as T-shirts or buttons, and who early recognized his own power to use the mass media as a model for art. These three figures are meant for public places and have been prominently displayed on the plaza in front of the National Gallery of Canada. Fully aware that heavy metal sculpture can be intimidating in a public setting, Haring made them as bright, stable, and inviting as playground equipment. With their painted surfaces, they look, as he put it, "like bright, shiny toys that should be played with," Among his influences he acknowledged Alexander Calder, an artist noted for the playful use of movement and colour in his mobiles and for the suggestion of figures in motion in his monumental stabiles. Haring's sculpture draws upon the stock of motifs that he repeated over and over in many different contexts, graphic figures that could be called up on a moment's inspiration, graffiti-style. Memorable are the "radiant child," the barking dog, the landing space ship, the dancing figures - the sunny side of an oeuvre that also encompassed political activism, erotic imagery, and castration fears. Haring's graphic figures are never static - they suggest movement, action, animation. In Julia, the yellow figure's pose is that of a dancer or a person doing tai chi, one arm extended, the other flexed, with the head turned to follow the direction of the arms. The schematic legs are at right angles to one another, an unusual pose suggesting movement about to happen. Haring was acquainted with dancers, and had previously painted the bodies of dancers and performers such as Bill T. Jones and Grace Jones. The blue Figure on Baby shows a fanciful stacking of two figures, reminiscent, perhaps, of a baroque Roman fountain - the crawling baby as the base and a larger figure stepping up (or down) its head and back. The baby is yet another manifestation of Haring's "radiant child," one of his earliest motifs, first appearing in subway drawings and then as a give-away button. Critics have seen the motif as "an idealized self-portrait" and as a "call on the Western World to preserve the universe of children," The red Ringed Figure is the most sentinel-like of the three pieces, symmetrically posed. Haring described his "figures with holes" as having to do with "the heart, the emotions, the id a of soul as opposed to physical body." |
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