 Pleasure to be moderator with these stars in my right, but before I say anything you're going to get a pop quiz What's this? Students, what is that? That's a central beat of hip-hop, and if you don't know you need this lecture We're going to do it alphabetically We'll start with John or her And John I have One question for you. Yes, what is the role of innocence in the art of Keith Harington? I like to think that the Innocence means something very important related to preserving one's nature and it means being careful about the things that you absorb and the things that you'll hold private to yourself and So, you know, we have the barking dog and the crawling baby and certainly they represent some kind of innocence and And I think that I Think Keith wanted to cut through some of the the complexity of intellectual dialogue about contemporary art and and deal directly with the people and so the use of iconic images that were far more innocent was very useful for that and So I think Keith Harington used the comics and those and also a very simple Figuration that was very clear to everyone But there's a whole nother aspect of innocence that we're talking about too Which is you know, we have talked about transgression and innocence versus your purity and purity Maybe I'll leave it at that we'll go further into this Conversely, you know transgression is a rhyme the other rhyme. Do you want to talk about that? Well, I Really go together Yes, they do go together and I think Keith Haring had a kind of a joyful youthful celebration of a kind of adolescent gay liberation and And I think he wanted to be very clear with people where he stood in terms of his sexual attraction and this is very clear and he was very Expressive about that. So Are we talking are we calling gay transgressive? I don't know But I mean there's a lot of sexual references in this work Well, you know another thing I know you love to talk about scale Yes Well, I Was I like to talk about Keith's athleticism scale with the way that he was able to Address a wall that was possibly 50 feet long and and freely Work work over a wall without any hesitation or consideration of the problems inherent in doing this and I Think that one comparison of scale is the graffiti artists that were doing top-to-bottom Whole subway cars at the time, which was an amazing sense of scale that was happening Just previous to the work that he was doing. So he was seeing the straight artists the graffiti artists Taking on a very free sense of scale as they worked outdoors on walls Would you say that his mastery of scale one of the reason why he's able to jump from street to gallery just like that? Abstract expressionists who are always showing off scale. So he's going to show it on too Well his his first show at Tony Shafrazi I Think it really premiered his Tart paintings primarily as artworks for sale and I have this sort of a notion in my own mind that the Secret of the Tart paintings is the drip Technique that he used and I think when he would he would do this amazing line going very fast But the drip would sort of like maintain the sense of momentum and speed is Expressive in the line or double So it always maintained this sort of action painting And it looked like it was very spontaneous And if you if you cross out all the drips it loses some kind of energy. So the drips are very important Yes about Innocence what one of the things that always strikes me the way here and uses it. I mean even even simple Line drives like this in the subway which he was famous for is there's always this sense of the fragility of innocence You know, it's not a naive kind of innocence. You know, it's a sense that We we maintain it and protect it at great cost because there's always other these all these other menaces You know around they can rob you of it, you know and destroy it Yeah, so so there's this there's this sense of needing to to maintain it and somehow hold it and Preserve it amidst all of the other shit that's going on in the world, you know, and that's a very hard thing to do I want to kind of expand on the idea of innocence to the idea of liberation I think one of the things that's really important to understand about Keith's journey and The essence of his work is having come from small-town America to New York to essentially reinvent himself You know, we talk about innocence. It's sort of as a as a Unencumbered blind slate. I think that was sort of the initial joy for Keith coming to New York and being able to sort of Re-evaluate who he wanted to be how he wanted to approach the art world but not Not in a really Sort of necessarily academic programmatic sense. I mean he brought an academic sensibility and a greater understanding of the art world proper to the street level world and Activity he was involved in but I think You know in a much different world in 79 80 It wasn't much more innocent time And I think that period and that sense of discovery informed his work that way You know and even in sort of physical terms what you describe about how Keith preceded through a wall preceded through a space From Nobody more embodies the that sense of liberation that sense of starting in the beginning and and discovering where you end up along the way as opposed to Really having a restricted way of working. I don't think you said that a lot of me that Keith accomplished to a stylistic universe between 1980 and 1980 to You want to amplify on that the whole show is about that but I'd love to get your take on it. Well, a Where do you begin? It's a lot happened in 1981 for him and apparently I think that His drawings his chalk drawings Must have been a really important moment for him to realize that he could he could take a piece of white chalk and draw on these These black pieces of paper in some way and and that also that he had a very simple Variety of images to work You know one of the most interesting pieces to me and in this show is the early pure abstract Linework with you know, you can see how he developed the iconography and what his intention was in terms of both you know politics sexuality and Innocence but at the same time that that one real gestural piece really encapsulates The energy the motion the movement the rhythm that he that he Applied as his iconography developed He tried everything out, but then through that process of experimentation and improvisation He got his vocabulary and it gave them You know like a set of jazz or hip-hop sequences, you know, you could vary it you could improvise you could take any space and Make that an improvisational moment and once he had that basic vocabulary down He just ran with it you could do it anywhere any scale right any place on canvas on a wall in the subway It was just something he intuitively got you know how he could improvise I was gonna say that when he was doing the sort of non-figurative overall pieces That gave him his speed his sense of delivery He was already doing it before he knew what he was going to draw and the style was almost there Completed and all he needed to do was a little Sharper focus as to what the subject matter was So in a way his style preceded the subject I think And I think you know there was a real fearlessness Keith from day one both in terms of the content he challenged as well as the physicality of sort of a Absolute self-confidence in line. That's what's always amazing is that self-confidence? You see him back to the video in the in the exhibition if you haven't seen you yet of the painting Painting myself into the corner. He just starts out in this space. He doesn't know where he's going This is a very early work was that Sunday to Sunday night at 79 you know and He maps out the space and he fills it in and and he knows that The line is gonna take him there. His line is going to find the way, you know He just does it intuitively no plans. No drawings. No sketches. He's got this space and he's gonna fill it in It's really good Wanted I wanted to point out that Like Keith Keith erring. I was once a young man and So I remember Being a young man. I remember how life Evolved and changed from one week to the next and that the sense of the world that you were living in Especially the idea of what it meant to make art was changing from Month to month and it was evolving and changing and it's kind of amazing as an older person to look back and think That that was the way it seemed at that time and I was going to mention how New York City from the mid 70s to the beginning of the 80s how New York City evolved and and how the idea of what it meant to make art Evolved during that time and if I think it it involved a lot and would I remember I Like to say that I was an innocent person and I mean that in a self-deprecating kind of way like a lack of sophistication or knowledge about things and so I remember that you know, I came to New York and there was the Dematerialization of space there was a kind of a Very rattle sense of the extremities of art in both in performance and and the Using the extremities of materials and and I think in my opinion What the artist did at that moment in time and towards the end of the 70s They pulled back from that precipice and they got much more conservative and they started thinking please bear with me when I say conservative what I'm saying is they decided that They had a responsibility to address people and not just do whatever the fuck they were thinking about Doing as an extreme act was not the point the point was more communication with people and So the the the art changed the artists Started thinking in a more I call it a more conservative way like for instance some of the filmmakers started thinking I'm going to try to make a narrative movie That's very conservative as opposed to and we were stepping back away from abstraction towards subject matter towards having something to say to other people and The the reception that we got especially among regular people started becoming very important to us You know and I say boss and I think he's hearing is Sharing that you know and some of this preceded him and then he led the way as a torch bearer from that time And you know One of the responsibilities of an artist is to make sure that his work will last beyond him And I couldn't with you Well, he became much more conscious of materials after the first couple of years if you look at even some of the pieces in this show they were Done with magic marker they were they were In some ways very unstable and I think it was very early on in 81 82 that Keith realized that you know He'd always been conscious of longevity and making his mark But I think he Addressed the materials on a whole different real longevity exists in our hearts and our minds not in the materials You have Kwong Chi Taking photographs of drawings that made he made in the subway that would not last more than two weeks at the most those pieces Will forever be some of the most important iconic images that be created and the context is everything The fact that they themselves did not last does not matter. There is longevity in the documentation that Did his work I think there's different categories of art making to that He was very very much aware of the subway drawings were just a great spontaneous serendipitous act You know and and those pieces are really they're really acts, you know, they're they're performative, you know They're ephemeral there for the moment He wasn't thinking long term about what they were going to What were going to happen to the material you're absolutely right But the the record of them as an act, you know the audacity of that act, you know And the performance is what lasts and then he started reconceiving the way, you know, he could do other kinds of work He was doing work on other from kinds of media That's all We had a But I think he was also conscious of operating on all these levels at the same time I mean, I think that's one of Keith's greatest gifts is not to sort of be Tunnel vision in terms of what was fine art what was Public art what was product and and the balance between both Doing Transient art and permanent art at the same time within the same style parallels his sense of responsibility to both give it away while also charging for it within different contexts within different platforms, I mean, you know, we'll get into the Sort of relationship to graffiti and these kind of things in terms of public space in terms of You know John touched on it in terms of Engaging the public became a really primary act that the you know, Keith obviously Found a home on these black panels initially, but as as that era and the black panels disappeared Keith really You know was consistent in terms of just finding a bigger public platform for it Whether it was the low-reside murals or crack is a lack You know again, I think what was most consistent or maybe attracted to Keith about graffiti in essence was the lack of filter the lack of sort of Mechanism You know that yes, he came from art school. Yes, he understood the parameters of the gallery world But he also immediately engaged the context and a street level experience that eliminated that eliminated the filter eliminated the sort of Conservative mechanism of how you were supposed to display art Eric while you have a mic And that There is no substitute for speed and competence of total commitment to the moment That's something Eric Well, I think you know I'm going to try and avoid using graffiti as a catchphrase, but that's that's it the essence of Our understanding of graffiti from the beginning was that it was It was about the moment it was about the act it could get cleaned off it could get gone over and You know even in the earliest stage it wasn't Intended for a larger audience. It was Almost a sport that you've played that was about the moment it was about the act of creation And if you shared it with you know a small immediate audience that was great, but it wasn't It was understood in its impermanence and I think the that moment And I think even The speed with which one had to work in spray paint informed that that there was no going back and and I think I Wouldn't say that I Would say the Keith would have done what he did in the way he did Without that information, but I think it was sort of a perfect marriage at the time Then he fills that boundary, but then he makes a sub-subboundary So this nesting and embedding, you know the fill it and that's just a structure for nesting other Figures and information is like this density of information like the the beautiful lot matrix drawing in the show I hope you've seen it or if not see it at really long. What is it 50 feet up? It is It's just this incredible density of information that figures resolved into these you know different clusters of spaces and Every aspect is is filled in with this kind of energy and vibration. It's really incredible and He did that he executed that with no prior Plans Well, yeah, where do I start? You know, I think it's important to understand especially the time period in this show that You know, we understand Keith is a very successful very influential artist, but you also have to understand that You know prior to the internet and prior to the kind of communications were privy to now it was really Sort of much more inner city and that Keith, you know was working as a bus boy The club dance interior when he had his wife Tom show that You know Not only did he have the same commitment to what he was doing and the same sort of understanding of his tools and motivation You know, I think I Like to say that we lived in an era where there was no blueprint yet There was no aerial map of how you created it This kind of iconic identity. I mean, obviously There were the war halls and there were people that Keith took his cues from in terms of Understanding the nature of being a public figure, you know, I also want to say you know Physically as well as personally Keith was by far the most generous person I've ever known in spirit and in action You know, and I think Again in relation to say the graffiti community We were sort of tight-knit group that Was sort of defensive in our posture. I mean, we didn't want to be understood. We didn't want to be included in establishment and You know, it was a sort of rougher era where, you know, born out of street gangs where there was a Perhaps unhealthy sense of competition amongst us And Keith sort of jumped into the fray through some meetings we used to have with a group called soul artists on the Upper West Side and You know, I think Keith really impacted us in in his generosity of spirit in how he extended himself he invited us to be in Show called beyond words at the mud club where he was very involved and you know, we were sort of Bronx uptown Manhattan and Brooklyn people and Keith was really our first introduction in a window into the Lower East Side and this vibrant sort of alternative downtown Art scene but You know as much as Keith may have been attracted to what had been going on in our community He really extended himself to us to open our minds and You know See the big picture in a way. I don't think we did it at that time Well, Eric, what the other thing I'm dying to ask you is simple just one word signs Signs signs Signs and communication in terms of symbolism You know, I can only say that Keith was blessed to sort of find his find his symbols so early on You know the extent to which he built such a body of work around such sort of simple Universal elements in itself is remarkable but I think that that If you look at the work and in this show he sort of bounces back between, you know, very symbolic and very narrative to You know abstract and much more minimalist One of the things that strikes me about Everything he did was its accessibility And I think that the symbolism has a lot to that has a lot to do with that in terms of its absolute universality You know, some of my favorite work was always The stuff that really bordered on abstraction The iconography is there the symbolism is there but if you look at sort of some of the circular mandala pieces and you know the pieces that Could be Navajo in that context. They could be primitive in that context yet. They're so truly modern within their time that that's the amazing power of the very Simplistic approach to symbolism and simplistic is probably the wrong word because There was much more deeper thought and intention I believe to the simplistic elements than one might imagine And when you think of any of the ancient pyramids being irradiated by far out spaceships Primordial like cave paintings I just thought of cave paintings The lines in cave paintings. They're very late life like Petroglyphs Like you know all of his you know glyphic Pieces they kind of resonate with with forms that that go way back, but yet they're so contemporary You know, and I think that simplicity allowed his work to be translated in so many forms We're looking at 3d sculpture If you wander through the pop shop You know again there's a simplicity that is Sort of never lost in translation wherever he chooses to take it to I never felt you know took his credit that these figures repeat a lot He'll get you'll get an icon of an arrangement of maybe two or three figures and I'll see it Repeated like I just showed you in the book. That's the exact same two figures that I have Here it's funny that he would lift his own Template that he could reuse in so many different guys's right and that would help him Multiply the material. You know, I mean if he was pulling you like a bag of tricks, let's say He's a piece met it when he said that because he put it Yes, this I'm happy Yes But anyway, one last thing Eric You want to well, this is for all of him you guys discuss how Keith was able to melt the boundary between art and commerce You know, I think this is Perhaps one of the most underrated areas of Keith's contribution Besides the fact that early on Keith was interested in splitting the difference between high and low and May have taken some heat for it from the people on the high end who's Whose pockets were at stake when he gave it away on the other side of the fence, but again just sort of pulling the lens back my my memory and understanding of those times was that The fine art world gallery world and the world of graphic design and product was so much farther apart then they are these days that Design and Art of reproductions were almost sort of considered this bastard child of the art world and it was commercial It was sort of dirty work, but Keith understood the potential again in terms of accessibility and You know, we go back to the idea of permanence. I think Keith also understood that to recreate this imagery this iconography intangible product allowed not only greater access but but greater ownership on on a level that didn't demand deep pockets and that in terms of that exchange of ownership It extended the permanence of the work and that you know That I fit you know in the pop shop was a great risk for him on some levels and You know, he pushed through because it was really really important to him to make sure that this work was was accessible economically not just accessible intellectually and I think But it was a celebrity But this was part of the idea of a celebrity is to have his people Like a pop singer has their fans, right? So Keith Herring had his fans out there that needed to that he needed to address and to constantly Pay attention to I think that was a very important part of what we was as an artist was to is to maintain a Relationship with his thousands of Keith Herring fans out there that needed to get the Pins and the posters and all that kind of stuff. It's very important part of who he was But I think it's it becomes a little camouflaged if you if you put it in the guise of celebrity and and his Fame Well, you know when when you introduce being famous and you introduce celebrity You sort of think it it raises the bar in terms of the scope of what you're talking about when in fact it was The denizens of the Lower East Side those were the people he wanted to have pins and and toys and pillows that I think was international and kids too But what I'm saying is that the famous people the celebrity the the people who Enjoyed success could afford his art. That's not no I mean it the other way around. I mean if you're Judy Garland you have your fans, right? I don't mean that he's appealing to the Judy Garland He's doing the same as celebrities do which is they all have their fan base Which they have to maintain and take care of and that was important part of what he was doing Absolutely, and I think what were what were What one sec what we're pointing out is that that There were say two fan bases Simultaneously that work at complete obsidenza the spectrum, you know Tony Shifrazi in the art world had to satisfy the demands and value system of his fan base if you will Clientel in the art world while at the same time there was a whole different Demographic of his fan base audience and say Consumer base that is just radically different than the gallery world in the context But to be a legend gives collectors an interest in collecting a work of art agreed of a Personality when they want a name becomes precious to people If his major works were selling for a lot of money then There was the potential that Doing $5 product and $10 product had a negative impact on the value system on the high end and that was a Calculated personal risk Keith was willing to take in every step of the way He was criticized for that but he insisted it on doing the populist line to go directly to the people who weren't art collectors And he could satisfy the scarcity the art Art always works on the principle of scarcity and you know very limited supply So I disagree totally But I will say that in my opinion Scarcity is not the issue and I you know look at the castle, right or we're all I think that The problem with Keith Herring was not scarcity and I'm I'm making this up as I go along, okay So trust me. I mean don't trust me is what I mean In my humble opinion, I think that the point of collectors is they may be looking for some Artifact of Keith Herring's that has some intrinsic Realness to them as opposed to a blue as opposed to a Xerox or a copy of something, right? So Warhol was very careful to have some of his paintings were done in a kind of Original feel to them, right? That's the trick with Keith Herring. I mentioned earlier that some of the drips seem very crucial to the value of the work Right, so of course a collector is not going to want something that is the same as everybody else has But I think what they were looking for maybe is You know this pressure on the artist to continually invent themselves and to produce something that is that they'd never seen before, right? So what but I don't think the reproduction is what was the problem in my opinion. I don't think there was a problem One of the things that you haven't mentioned and what you've forgotten is that In the beginning he was all about reaching out to the people and when he was doing those Subway drawings he instead of telling people to come up to him and ask them or ask him like You know, Cory, what are you doing this for blah blah blah? He had made buttons with this work on them and handed them to the people so that they could be part of it and have something They can take it with them and appreciate it and I think that by saying that he opened this pop shop for Celebrity and trying did I say celebrity? No, I said celebrity. I did not say that So misunderstood Do me a favor, please just clarify what it is you're disagreeing with because I think we've kind of come No, I think that no with the whole idea that he opened it as sort of You know, because like you're talking about like You may miss under you may be thinking that I'm saying to you that he lacked all generosity or feelings of Kindness towards the people that he was giving things away to and I never meant that so please I Think that part of the motivation Opening the pop shop was Percaps a continuation of that generosity Canceling out funds to say who he was or t-shirts and also I think somebody wanted either Eric for Sorry But I want to say I am completely with you and on your side Just to clarify Keith was doing product was giving it away Was selling it long before the pop shop the pop shop is just a natural evolution of him really Raising his hand and saying I'm doing this and I'm gonna do it on a bigger level Regardless of any Consequences Jane Jane He was about joy The product of rights March I mean, I remember working with him And he's like I'm just having so much fun. I can't stop drawing, you know Because he drew all day that's why he developed his style so fast and He never met an offer that he didn't find exciting so when I said hey Keith I can do this Artist series on the billboard in one time square. You want to do it? He was like great and I think I feel like it wasn't so much Strategic like how can I you know feed my fans? It was that and I was essentially on your friend who helped him develop the pop shop And she was like he just would say this is so much fun. I'm so excited You know and people were attracted to the energy and I feel like that's what people love about his energy around the world You know my kids that didn't know him and he gave you know, but they were born to get a little You know they they they put his work up in college because it's generous And he was really really generous and whoever approached him. He'd be like great. Let's pick, you know Let's do giant sculptures. Let's do a chapel. Let's do neon lights. Sure. Let's do t-shirts he was an expansive And they have more than all this strategy And I think in terms of what you're saying Keith was unfiltered as an individual and that's that's true of his work and that's true of the generosity and that's true of You know what you were saying with engaging your people Keith was just very in a very open soul the work Blessing came out of him very open and in an unfiltered fashion But that was who he was it wasn't just a question of his artistic mission Yeah, but I've got a simple question that Positioned Keith culture a resident academic Well, I'm not going to play the buzzkill academic here You know, there's a great thing about about Keith and like a lot of pop artists, too Is that there's the ability to do to make some really serious statements about art, but Without losing the fun, you know without losing the joy without losing the motivation for it And there's definitely a serious side to Keith. I mean especially those those early years I'm just gonna bring up a couple of images, you know to look at For the father to give us some you know some reference points Yeah, one of the things I was thinking about you know preparing for this talk and for a book that I'm working on is thinking about this You know what I call a whole dialogic context going on in New York in 78 when he arrives, you know I think John Fertu and Eric both it's it was like that the art world was kind of up for grabs You know, you had a lot of these competing forces, you know, you're going to art school You're getting a lot of input information One of the great things that happened in the 70s, you know the legacy of pop and conceptual and performance was What I call finally Killing the teleological steamroller of our history That is that The job of the artist is to somehow fulfill the direction of our history whatever that is, you know And that really wasn't what Keith was about what his generation was about I think a lot of what the 70s artists were about is the sense that well Okay, this whole grand narrative of art history is is It's it's open to at its end And now there's a sense of all right. What's next? What are we going to do? And the whole thing was was opened up to a different sense of what the role of the artist could be Especially post war hole in the sense of how you manage high and low and all these different resources and Keith got so much stuff intuitively from just you know, a number of really interesting hints I just want to take you through like tripped on memory lane, you know all right, he's really interested in pictographs and symbols and how he could develop You know, we've been talking about how very quickly he got how he could do this Recognizable array of symbols that that people got right away. Well, you come to New York in the 70s There's still the legacy of abbex. There's still the legacy of all these sage and serious artists including Godly I don't think he ever references or refers to Gottlieb specifically But when you think about all the stuff that's going on, it's kind of presupposed and assumed as part of the mix There's no way that him making the work or the way it's received especially in the art world, right? Cannot kind of set up these coordinates and say, okay, where is he positioned? What is he thinking about right? So the abbex people were for experimenting with glyphs and signs and symbols and pictograms Because they were baking up the picture plane and again This was back when breaking up the picture plane was part of what the fuck do we do with this brand narrative of our history, right? And we're gonna fuck up pain because we doesn't what doesn't need to be illusionistic anymore We can do whatever we want on the surface, but there's still the problem of we're painters and we got the picture plane, right? That's that was the dilemma back then and now superficially you can say oh, well here's some glyphs and you know images and pictograms that look superficially like what Keith might have come up with or Baskiat might have come up with but it's superficial because we know that what's going on here is part of a completely different art argument, right? Completely different art story, but if you're in New York in the 70s, it's part of the story It's part of what you've got to deal with I gotta tell you a really cool side story about Francis Ryan McGinnis, you know, there are other artists inspired by this whole thing went to a studio one day and spray painted on his wall was Art history is the competition And what I found so cool about that it wasn't a kind of like nice printed poster But in spray paint art history is the competition, right? Well, it's only one of the competitions I had to throw this in because in 95 the Brooklyn Museum did a godly exhibition So we're kind of in that history. So we got whole pictograph idea going way back Now Keith said when you know, he was in Pittsburgh He was totally inspired by hero shinsky What I found interesting too about Keith is that he drew from these outliers these kind of oddball characters who weren't part of the main Story of the oven guard. They weren't part of the main story of abbex They weren't really part of any story I mean the copper group of artists Lachinsky's with it, you know different kind of tradition story But he got what Alekshinsky was doing Alekshinsky was working in Sumi right doing these big huge expensive things And you could see he would lock out these frames and put all these images again non-narrative images stick symbolic and ways of building up this kind of Expressionist imagery it's something that the Keith got right away and ran with it Here's some other images. Well, look at snakes like all this stuff all this kind of imagery and you can see Keith think like Yeah, I can I can work with that. You know the snake is one of those iconic things But again, he would synthesize and rechannel it and rethink about how he was going to do it Well, I just throw this in what goes around comes around. There's a there's a big huge Alekshinsky mural in Paris right now and when I looked at I was thinking well, you know Probably without the disciple doing something without Keith herring actually showing what street art could do I seriously doubt if this installation would have happened So we've got Alekshinsky now scaled up huge, you know in Paris the kind of thing that of course, you know Would have done to just some other things. He says he really admired Mark Toby like another one of those outliers in the kind of abax thing Working with symbols and all over compositions and all this stuff You can tell that he was seriously looking at this You know when you see you know when you see some of Keith's early kind of gestural Calligraphic things, you know, he was looking at this work and he was thinking about how do I draw from this and make it live? How do I make it mine, right? Well, how can you be in New York in the 70s and 80s and not know about Sideswan Green, right? The graphic gestural stuff and what I find fascinating about this and thinking about it as part of this Dialogic world that the artists are working through is that again This is back in this old art historical problem of the picture plane and what only is doing he's quoting Writing and graffiti and gestures, right? He's not using it as an instrument, right? He's you he's quoting it to do something with the picture plane. He's not using writing or graffiti To make stuff and that's very different What's up? What else is interesting in this kind of dialogic universe is it just the moment when when Basquiat is working on the street and herring is trying to figure out what he's doing in the high art world, you know totally Continuing on this kind of later-day interpretation of abbex totally stone classical, right? Series of paintings on Homer's Iliad, you know that are drawing and gestural, right? So there's it to me that this is kind of a desperate act, you know to bring Seriousness and history and gravity into this tradition what on the other hand you've got you've got guys in the street You've got graffiti artists We're going right at it directly, you know not not this kind of folk naive, you know writing and gestural stuff 78 a series of paintings on Homer's Iliad. I mean what all this other stuff bursting around on the street You know, it's really really striking So you're growing up in New York and you're seeing all this stuff around of course you got you know I'm sure Basquiat working maybe you guys know this image and so things you know cover art for the Ronald Z single that was used in Style Wars and so we got you know, he'd be friends Basquiat. He's aware of what's going on in the street, you know And he's aware of all the amazing subway graffiti, which I'm going to get to in a minute So again mixing high and low another artist that he that he was really inspired by which is very different They are pink German expressionist again another one of these kind of odd ball outliers who was never really championed as one of the you know High artists of the of the modern world in Germany, but he's there and he's a player. He's interesting Keith was in the same art fair. I think it was the clone art fair I think it was year that was where there was some pink paintings and drawings one of the dealer's Spaces the same time somebody was showing his work and Hearing said I'd love going there and seeing his work, but I blew away, you know Didn't think show a shufrazy Well, I think there was a pink show a shufrazy. That would have made sense. It would have made sense But you can see what's going on here You've got these kind of primitive figures and imagery, you know that you could see that Keith was saying you got the snake, right? Say, oh, okay. I get it. Yeah, that's that's gone somewhere. I can work with that And then you get stuff that's a lot more, you know primitive and gestural And then pink starts getting more abstract Color ground it's still using this kind of solid black line Of course by that time Keith was already he was already gone, you know, he was already out of his own Again the other context, you know, you've got sites only doing this like, you know high-level classical thing going on At the same time, you've got, you know, all the all the great graffiti stuff going on in New York So by 83 you've got the you know the famous Sydney Janet show in 84 Was the crash show, right? And these are the look at just these dates, you know the famous, you know Chalifant book, you know in 81 Charlie Aarons, Mervyn 83 Tony Silver's movie, Star Wars in 83 and the famous Subway art book which again kind of locks into cultural memory all the stuff that was going on from the mid-70s to this time Worth noting of all of those the New York New Wave show at PS1 in 1981 was it was a seminal New York show on a lot of levels, but For my generation for the graffiti artist. It was the first time we cross-pollinated and were exposed to The likes of Hanging our work together with Warhol with Keith with John with Maple Thorpe. I think You know, it's a whole conversation in itself, but there's there were a few Real formative moments where where everybody ended up under the same banner for the first time We were talking you know, we're really about The subway work, you know Keith, you know the journalist says he came to New York and one of the most exciting things He saw was was the life and the energy of the graffiti on the subway cars. He had immediately gravitated to this the energy the beauty It was really transformative and Lee, you know the honest friend they show together Crash of course, I just kind of threw these together as quickly as I could just to say okay This is a visual context. We were talking about, you know, okay Here's his creative synthesis. Well, he said he watched videos of here Alashinsky working large on the floor on the floor Creating these big, you know canvases and here he is. He's filling out the frame drawing it in Thinking around his own abstract vocabulary. This is one of the early drawings where he is working on these signs and symbols He's abstracting all kinds of stuff out and then by the time he's working on the Subway panels what I love about this is that you know, he was doing so many of them He was treating them really as his laboratory a studio, you know, he would go and just do it 40 40 at a time in one day And it was a way to improvise it was a way to really work this out performatively and He worked out so much of his vocabulary that way Really brilliant move I can go on and on about the significance of working on blank advertising panels But he got it intuitively he knew this was a this was a messaging system that he could have that he could work with and he Could redirect in terms of making really Interesting acts of art right in a way that hadn't been done before and in the Times Square Storyboard you get, you know the kind of sequence of a lot of his classic imagery You know that he works with you know the barking dog the baby the TV set I always love these kind of menacing crosses, you know That are in the background all the time You know the dog with the cross and the snake and you know barking Nuclear, you know an atom. I mean the whole thing is just amazing, you know It's like this spontaneous combustion of imagery and You can see that well, he was synthesizing all those a lot of the stuff and more obviously from some of the imagery I showed you earlier, but he was a great Great improviser, you know again the panels, you know filled in all this imagery And what's so cool about it is he got this kind of storyboarding paneling idea But it wasn't narrative like comics, you know, it wasn't that you know The each panel was part of some sort of story or added up to a narrative But it formed its own kind of iconic space and he really saw the power of working that way And of course now, you know the great drawing here and others where he could just scale up and use all this space for this real complexity and density of information and You know, he like Warhol was frequently criticized for just being too pop too simplistic to whatever I want to end with two famous paintings that to me have always been some of this most powerful It's a little beyond the context But it shows that well. Yeah, you want complexity. You want something that's gonna blow you away You want something that isn't just radiating babies. Well, here you are motherfuckers, basically You know, I mean these these two paintings Luckily that with the top one is that the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC, which you know Every time I see that whenever they have it out I'm just totally blown away and of course the Michael Stewart Kind of commemorative piece at the bottom is it's just it's it's so powerful You've got the symbolism. You've got surrealism. You've got the grotesque You've got the the kind of line drawing gestures that he's famous for but then he just pushes it I mean he just pushes it in a whole new in a whole new direction So, you know, he can do the stuff but there were moments when he was so moved to do that dense complex piece that was like from the inner core of his being that he just had to get this out He can do this too. You know, I mean the range of what he can do is just spectacular So I know that's really quick and brief, but I'm always I've always astonished and impressed by how he synthesized from There's so many different sources his own language and did it in what two years two or three years The question here Those This world It wasn't until the commercialization of graffiti and hip-hop Did it and specifically the music industry that they segregated to say this is black And I found that as a person from New York It wasn't just black it was urban was born out of comedy boredom and like you said being cultured being ignored and it created a whole new culture Well, my question is that I always wanted to know no one's ever asked When did not the commercial world but the political world come to keep Did they come like for instance? He did a lot of the drawing for the age walk-a-talks and it became a huge symbol What a soup or if you saw keep having you like, oh, he's about eight Or or the crack Crackies whack stuff like that. So I always wanted did Was he political and politics came to him or the politics comes to him because they saw Like the woman said everybody I remember when I got keep having buttons. I didn't know keep having a man But I was like, yo, I'm gonna keep having I Think it is a bit of the chicken and the egg. I think Keith was always a political animal on some level and I think as his star began to rise and Both he and the world around him understood sort of the power that he wielded Keith assumed the role of Promoting change and promoting Whatever he felt Comfortable with politically. I mean, you know as a As a punctuation to that in the later stages when Keith was diagnosed HIV positive He actually sat down myself and probably a number of his good friends and basically said I want to tell you this, you know people had been passing around him his boyfriend as well and You know, he had prepared himself for that moment politically and personally and It wasn't only that he wanted to tell us himself before it was public, but part of his message was I'm gonna be open and was proactive about this and I understand that I'm in a unique position to Use whatever time I have in the most positive fashion politically in terms of AIDS awareness and in terms of not Not hiding behind anything about it to be very open and very proactive and very young Consciously political about getting ahead of the movement or getting ahead of the medicine getting ahead of people's perception about the Medical realities, but I think that is the ultimate example of Keith embracing What was obviously? You know a Negative in a crisis for him personally and finding a way to turn it into something as positive Symbolically politically and personally as he could and and I think those things always went hand-in-hand with Eve as his as his Reach grew so did his sense of social and political responsibility You know the insides of the schedule stand and you can see him during walk-a-thons and having this social conscience from a very young age So while yeah, I did proceed from Anything but I do think a lot of it came from him really naturally like Something he just wanted to do he did it and then the city parks Kind of took it under their shelter once they realized this is a great service message I mean he's almost always doing public service messages very naturally I Think it was just an automatic reaction to The Devastation he saw around him in the neighborhood with people he worked with with people he loved and respected as well as strangers that I can't remember what year exactly crack is lack But you know again it was it was an epidemic that Keith had You know whatever grand or whatever limited opportunity to make a statement and and you know he always Welcome those platforms as well First of all a Look at his paintings Watch for this I just younger than I that means I am so happy for watch for this say what Would you stand like that in front of your grandmother? Culturally correct answer thank you this Young by old Congo gesture it means I'm tired. Let's stop And there's a lot of it in his work. He saw it by a capoeira where the capoeira means I'm tired out time means this time out so look for this this but also this Keith was Keith's best friends were B boys DJs. They were Latino They would put that again. He was very tight with the culture and you can see the confidence. They play Keith's Robot, which is like a sheba of some sort of tantric cancina With several arms, but look at the arms and they're forward. They're playing the same Across three records so that when one is finished boom started again to connect the other this was one of the discoveries of African and father and others we had the DJ robot runs the corner of Avenue D and house them Keith once drew to decode dad's gestures in his Conceive a headstand spider move with DJ robot and the Electric looking next slide It picked up as soon as it happened as soon as headspins came in would be boring. He was there And you can see except they're learning it from television But when Keith said once I put it in the subway because I knew the subway was where the B boys work And they would recognize themselves So these are love letters all of them to the black and Puerto Rican New York next slide And it became more athletic and more dangerous The 1900 where you do this spin on your palm and you can see the best B boy Well, and I love doing it on the left and one of the masters of capoeira, New York Who is doing it only they call it but a fool zone which means to screw your mom into the earth Music was powerful combination of commerce art where Keith has a young green boy during the 1990 on top of a Never-never With this wonderful stuff called the spider One of the great photographers of hip-hop Claudette and Queens up there in 1982 83 and you can see The Brazilian couple in a star is using this move over the Frustrated body of Connobon The body is called the bridge for obvious reason and it leads to one of his masterpieces where the dancer Dancers over the bridge of the body of his partner. This is from his Los Angeles parents Which is qualitatively one of the most exciting moments in American art as far as I'm concerned next slide And you can see that what he does is he turns street sign into museum sign Is to hit it with some elegance hit it with full color And blow it up And now the ultimate has happened the fusion of the two people is this total one unit There they have come together forever next slide But one of the things that's most beautiful about hip-hop choreography is the electric boogie In black church modified Modified imitation What if I couldn't believe that the shoulders of where the spirit hits first And the word for shoulders in my vehicle and that tons on my input, which means ecstasy This is when you're getting really happy And that ecstatic church behavior was seen in none other than Fresno, California by the Solomon brothers who picked it up And added more electricity to it So thank you I love this glass If you want to see what it comes from Here's a shame of the upper right hand corner who is drawing what it feels like the power comes down from God It's like lightning your legs turn to lightning everything turns to lightning But ultimately if the power is strong enough you're blown away Here's his leg two legs two arms and God knows what else Keith always did these things with a sense of humor And he was saying some of these people as they're so was actually boogie that they could light a light bulb With the current in their body next slide Then of course Egypt Malcolm Garvey black nationalism is very deep Malcolm Garvey who said that Egypt is where we come from upper Egypt the ancient black civilization King David was into it those of you who know your Davidic or your Torah Psalm 69 and Princess should come from Africa from Egypt And Ethiopia she'll pull it from us to the war That's Davidic this King David's poetry and it goes straight into not only hip hop, but it goes into reggae and a lot of apropos Jamaican, but you can see the The vestiges of African gestures from ancient Egypt They first of all the torso for they had to decide And these were known as tough teams When the hieroglyphs were played out In slightly different ways Bopam Bentham Agile Egypt These are not just anyone. These are some of the biggest stars of the New York City breakers on the left But then when you look at Hayes in high art context, you can see that he's loyal to it He keeps going here was the tough team over the barking dog By the way, when I asked Hayes, what was the name of your dog mean the one we had a touchdown? Yeah Mambo Think about that There's a tough two tough teams battling it out We learned from Everybody else in the panel if there's anything as the engine of hip hop It's a competition that they're battling it out next slide, please And then of course the the wonderful transference of the spiritual electricity Transferred by a Dominican beneath us And his black body Energy goes through one arm through his shoulder blade down his arm and into the other guy And you see the two guys of the New York City breakers are Keeping that dance alive in the 21st century And then Keith again with his sense of humor the electricity goes boom It hits the person and the person goes oh All right next slide, please The fighting we ended with voguing I mean Keith was into that too voguing is done from that from the waist up voguing is done with a lot of Facial framing and he caught that here's a voguer friend of his Demonstrating one of the gestures that goes into voguing on the left So to sum up dance is transcendent What we are dealing with here is a man who knew that dance is more than dance Dance is freedom dances transcendence. Look at how he says it if you dance with your partner tight enough lovingly enough Intimately enough you will become a pair of scissors and you can cut the bonds of other people so they share your freedom Excellent Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for coming. I'd like to thank both of you Very good