BEFORE: I've decided that I'm counter-programming against the Republican Convention, because I just can't take any more news about it. I know I'm supposed to "turn down" the rhetoric at this time of "national crisis" but I just can't do it. Republicans are terrible people, and they're a bunch of dumb-asses if they think Trump cares about them, or anybody but himself. And Ronald Reagan was a terrible president, both Bushes too. There, I said it. And J.D. Vance got it right the first time when he said Trump was like "America's Hitler" or had the potential to be that, or whatever he said then that he's not saying now. Nobody likes a flip-flopper, J.D.
Anyway, I couldn't work my Pride Month (OK, week) films into June, it just wasn't possible to honor both that and Father's Day AND still get to a July 4 movie. Maybe I should have worked a little harder at it, but even I get sick of building up my movie chains at some point, always looking for a "better" order. At some point I just have to go with the order that I have. So Pride Week is in mid-July for me, sorry about that, but at least I'm celebrating it in some fashion, that's better than ignoring it, right? This week is all about what made American culture great - gay musicians like Elton John and Little Richard, gay movie stars like Rock Hudson and, umm, others, and gay artists like Keith Haring. There, deal with it, conservatives.
Tom Brokaw carries over from "Rock Hudson: All that Heaven Allowed". I know the links are pretty tenuous if I'm falling back on news anchors and talk show hosts, but it's the only way to watch these films in the order I want to watch them in. And seeing as this doc's been on my list for two years at least, it's really high time I found a way to link to it. I'm not letting it slip through the cracks again this year.
THE PLOT: The story of international art sensation Keith Haring, told using previously unheard interviews.
AFTER: I was around NYC in the late 1980's, since I went to NYU from 1986 to 1989 (got paroled a year early) and back then you couldn't walk around town without seeing Keith Haring graffiti, or maybe billboards by that time. I remember seeing his art on the album cover for "A Very Special Christmas" in 1987, and thinking how much it looked like the graffiti that was all over town, but duh, same artist. And then in the early 1990's I had a job at a little production company in lower Manhattan, and she directed and edited a dance piece with Bill T. Jones in it, and between the dance numbers he talked about friends who had died from AIDS, and I remember there was footage of Keith Haring in the montage.
Then, well, then thirty years kind of came and went in a flash, and I found myself, well not exactly back where I started, but let's say at a different job a few blocks away. I'm working part-time now at a movie theater run by the School of Visual Arts, and it's two blocks west of a movie theater that I worked at in the summer of 1989, before getting married the first time, and before starting my climb up to middle management of independent production companies. But SVA is also where Keith Haring went to art school, so knowing that kind of brought back some memories from the 1980's, the school is still there, but the theater I worked at back then is now shuttered (after changing hands about five times) and of course, Keith is still gone.
So I never met him, but people at SVA still talk about him with reverence, the way they still talk about Spike Lee at NYU (they have to, he teaches there and I think donated a wing to the film school or something) but of course every university likes to take some credit for their students being successful. I'm honestly not sure if he graduated from SVA, or if he just kind of outgrew the school and went from sophomore year to having gallery shows and exhibitions - I think in some schools you can get credit for that, it's called being a successful artist and then they just kind of hand you a degree, or they grade your opening night party as if it's your final exam or something. Anyway, Keith had already studied art at the Ivy School in Pittsburgh, and also had a temp job at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center where he heard lectures from Christo and explored the art of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey, so I think he only came to NYC to make connections, both professional and personal.
Anyway, he attended School of Visual Arts in 1978, while also working as a busboy at a nightclub, Danceteria. Inspired by graffiti artsts who spray-painted subway cars, he brought chalk with him into subway stations and made his drawings any time there was a black space for a poster where a poster had not yet been placed. Naturally, people believed that the art belonged there, and then once you saw it in one subway station, you knew what to look for, and you'd see similar designs in the next station, on that lamppost, and on that mailbox. Haring's rudimentary outline drawings of men, babies and dogs seemed to be everywhere, and he graduated from subway station poster spaces to outdoor murals. By 1982 he was showing his art in group exhibitions, then got the gig designing the poster for the 1983 Montreux Jazz Festival.
Murals at art centers and at Brooklyn Academy of Music followed, a stamp for the United Nations and a poster for Live Aid (kids, ask your parents). Posters for nuclear disarmament and against Apartheid. A 90-foot banner to commemorate the Statue of Liberty's centennial, and the big sign up in Harlem that read "Crack Is Wack". And a big mural on the Berlin Wall in 1986, three years before the wall came down. Album covers for David Bowie and that Christmas album, and painting directly on the bodies of people like Grace Jones and Bill T. Jones. And when people said his work was getting overpriced, he opened up the Pop Shop to sell his art on t-shirts and buttons, he was like Banksy before Banksy, except everybody knew who he was in addition to seeing his art everywhere.
But then of course he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987 - it didn't slow him down, however, quite the contrary. In 1989 he established his foundation, funded by the Pop Shop, to fund AIDS organizations and non-profits to educate disadvantaged youths. After his death came more fund-raising, benefit concerts, the AIDS quilt, and keeping his art on display worldwide to increase awareness as well as fund-raising. His work was in 50 solo exhibitions during his life, and then was featured in over 150 exhibitions after he died. So yeah, I'd say he tapped into something, for sure. A 2020 online auction of his works by Sotheby's was expected to raise $1.4 million and went on to raise $4.6 million, with all proceeds going to the LGBT Community Center of New York. And I'm just going to leave things there.
One quibble, though, the IMDB lists this documentary as being 89 minutes long, but the version that ran on the PBS series "American Masters" was just under an hour, so was the version I watched edited? And if so, what did they leave out when they aired this on PBS? I can't really get a straight answer on this.
Oh yeah, one more connection, last year at the theater, which again is run by the school that Keith Haring went to, the Tribeca Film Festival had a special screening of "Wild Style", a 1982 film about early hip-hop and the graffiti art movement in NYC. And Fab 5 Freddy came to the screening! Sure, I knew who he was, but I had to explain that to some of my younger co-workers. Anyway, everything seems to come around full circle if you just wait long enough, I think.
Also starring Kurt Andersen, George Condo, Fab 5 Freddy (last seen in "Barry"), Julia Gruen, Allen Haring, Joan Haring, Kristen Haring, Bill T. Jones, Ann Magnuson (last seen in "Desperately Seeking Susan"), Samantha McEwen, Kermit Oswald, Lee Quinones, Kenny Scharf, Bruno Schmidt, Tony Shafrazi, Jack Smith, Peter Staley, Drew Straub, Gil Vazquez, Keyonn Wright-Sheppard,
with archive footage of Keith Haring, David Dinkins (last seen in "Citizen Ashe"), Boy George (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Michael Jackson (ditto), Madonna (ditto), Grace Jones (last seen in "Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "LennoNYC"), Yoko Ono (ditto), Andy Warhol (ditto), Diana Ross (last seen in "What's My Name: Myhammad Ali"), Brooke Shields, with narration by Josh Hamilton (?)
RATING: 5 out of 10 crude barking dog drawings
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