The Chicago Cultural Center, March 3 – September 23, 2018
Reviewed by Luke A. Fidler
In 1989, Mayor Richard M. Daley declared May 15 to 21 “Keith Haring Week” in Chicago, as hundreds of students from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) descended on Grant Park to collaborate with the painter on a large mural. The declaration came just weeks into Daley’s term, after a special election was held to replace Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor. Daley’s victory put the city on notice that the old days of corrupt governance were alive and well; the son of a notorious former mayor, he had served eight years as Cook County State’s Attorney, blithely overseeing a period during which the Chicago Police Department institutionalized the torture of black Chicagoans. He notoriously ignored the observations of a medical officer who raised concerns about the brutal treatment of suspects on the South Side, was a named defendant in a 2007 settlement with four torture victims, and, even as he signed his “Haring Week” proclamation, the Chicago press was reporting on several policemen from Area 2 who had finally been brought to trial. Of course, Daley made no bones about his racial politics during his campaign, famously telling a rally that, on the heels of a black incumbent, “you want a white mayor to sit down with everybody.” That 1989 election reverberates through Chicago politics today: David Axelrod, Forrest Claypool, and Rahm Emanuel, all of whom have conspired to systematically dismantle the city’s public resources under the current mayoral regime, each worked for the Daley campaign.
None of this context is presented in the Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the mural painted by Haring and his small army of CPS students, but it clearly shapes the ways that the work ought to be judged as a project of public art. It was made at the height of Haring’s international fame, at a time when his distinctive figures adorned clothing lines worldwide, his paintings commanded robust sums on the market, and his public projects were going up in Barcelona, Pisa, and Monte Carlo—an early commitment to making art outside the gallery and the museum bearing fruit in the form of high-profile gallery and museum shows. Extravagant claims for his importance were being made both inside and outside the art world, which Michael Kimmelman summed up in The New York Times just a year later: “The vehemence with which some people dismissed him as an embodiment of all that was wrong with glitzy, shallow, MTV-style 1980’s consumer culture was matched only by the preposterousness of the associations others made between Haring’s designs and major landmarks in the history of art, from the cave paintings at Lascaux through Picasso.”[1] Much as Daley’s father had recruited well-known artists to bolster the global fame of Chicago’s urban spaces—the monumental Picasso in Daley Plaza is a case in point—the Grant Park mural signaled that the younger Daley would likewise deploy high-profile art sponsorship as a smokescreen for his less savory activities. (The current mayor’s support for Theaster Gates extends this tradition.) Moreover, despite the polarizing qualities Kimmelman alluded to, Haring was a particularly supportable public artist. He lent a friendlier queer face to the AIDS crisis than more confrontational artists like David Wojnarowicz, and a whiter face to hip-hop culture than the artists of color who so often served as his interlocutors in New York’s graffiti scene. Towards the end of the eighties, his murals worked their way closer to liberal institutions of power, culminating in a set of plywood panels painted for Ronald Reagan’s 1988 White House Easter Egg Roll.
But this is not to say that the Chicago mural project can be reduced to crass propaganda for a corrupt administration. Things are rarely so simple in the realm of public art, and Haring’s mural is especially useful to reinspect in the wake of the controversies over statues and sculptures that have gripped the American imagination of late. Debates over if, when, and how Confederate monuments should come down have demonstrated just how contested issues of memory, public space, and participation remain, and just how strongly these issues remain yoked to artistic objects. Given how interested the city has been in the preservation and staging of Haring’s mural—this exhibition is just the latest iteration of the piece after part of it was reinstalled at Midway Airport, and a facsimile was repainted by high school students at the Museum of Science and Industry in 1999—it’s worth asking both what the work meant some thirty years ago and what resources it might make available to spectators now.
As correspondence displayed in the exhibition makes clear, the mayor may have latched onto Haring’s project, but the mural was the brainchild of a CPS teacher, Irving Zucker, who cornered the artist at an opening in New York. While in Chicago, Haring also designed a mural for Zucker’s home institution, Wells Community Academy High School. Fueled, in part, by his reading of Robert Henri’s classic text The Art Spirit, Haring embarked in his later years on a series of large-scale public projects on behalf of, and sometimes in collaboration with, the youth. A wealth of books, articles, and oral histories attest his interest in depicting children (“nobody else made such a tribute to babies,” Yoko Ono once remarked), something investigated by art historians fascinated by his encounters with the Jesus Freak movement during his younger years, but his journals also chronicle his genuine delight at painting alongside teenagers. “I feel more like a teacher all the time,” he wrote while working on a mural in Barcelona, “like in Chicago and also here the last week, I keep finding myself sitting with little groups of ‘students,’ answering questions for hours. I like it.”[2] The quotation marks he placed around the term “students” are an apt reflection of the degree to which Haring’s working method approached a collaborative, rather than a hierarchical, pedagogy even as he worked around a grueling schedule of AIDS treatment. After painting black outlines of his customary dancing figures on the Masonite panels, he tasked students with filling in the spaces with designs of their own devising, specifying only the color scheme and a few subjects (gang symbols, etc.) to be avoided.
Even the most casual inspection of the surviving panels demonstrates a wide range of abilities, approaches, and images. More than a few references to Batman abound, as do the names of students, leopard-like spots, and solid color fields. One or two sections display virtuosic skill, such as a pink rendering of pre-Columbian motifs and figures. The student artists transformed a fairly unremarkable Haring composition, typical of a working method that prioritized speed over study, into a repository of difference; the painted surface records and presents the work of hundreds of participants. Significantly, the mayor’s Office of Employment and Training paid each student for their daily artistic labor. The painters may have had their artistic choices constrained by Haring’s instructions and outlines, as well as the time limits imposed by the project’s logistics, but the whole business made stronger ethical commitments to its participants than many of the public art projects detailed in Miwon Kwon’s seminal One Place After Another. Taking Chicago as a case study, Kwon discusses the exhibition “Culture in Action,” which took place four years after Haring’s mural and which made “the active participation of residents in diverse communities” the driving force for eight public art projects. Conceived in opposition to Sculpture Chicago’s 1989 summer program, which featured artists working publicly rather than enlisting the public in a communal, creative enterprise, the exhibition nevertheless pointed up the failure of public projects to reconceive relations with communities (e.g., Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, which simply sought out Chicago-centric knowledge to provide local “content” for her art and Chicago residents to “perform and signify the decentralization of the artist’s authority” while still shoring that authority up).[3] For Kwon, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s work with pre-existing community organizations and high school programs in his own neighborhood exemplified the kind of ongoing “invented community” that could augur genuinely transformative public art.
Thanks to the research of Kwon and other art historians like Rebecca Zorach, who describes how the Museum of Contemporary Art—another sponsor of Haring’s mural—only temporarily supported an “experimental friendship” with black gangs in the sixties, we’re now in a position to critically assess Haring’s project in light of the establishment’s relationship with other public art projects in Chicago.[4] If this exhibition aims to enshrine Haring’s mural and its teenage participants as a key event in Chicago history, for example, it does so, in part, at the expense of other histories of community art-making that did not receive such high-profile sanction and support and which, by virtue of both their makers and their aims, posed a more significant challenge to the centers of Chicago power. (One reason, by the way, that I’m able to make this claim confidently is because the Chicago Cultural Center has recently displayed a number of important objects made for various Chicago publics, including Eugene Eda’s doors for Malcolm X College.) During the 1980s, artists in the predominantly Latinx neighborhood of Pilsen produced antiwar murals that explicitly took aim at figures like Reagan. The massive community mural I Welcome Myself to a New Place was painted in 1988 by over a hundred residents of the Pullman and Roseland neighborhoods and depicts, among other things, Eugene Debs and an African mask. Héctor Duarte’s 1992 mural in Humboldt Park subordinates the Chicago skyline to a Puerto Rican flag, gesturing to the neighborhood’s powerful Puerto Rican ties. Each of these mural ventures served, in one form or another, to reclaim areas of urban space from the powerful interests of white politicians and racist police. Such claims cannot be made for Haring’s project in Grant Park. In a year when Congress finally began to discuss the issue of reparations and when trials of uniformed torturers like Jon Burge gave the South Side a sliver of hope for justice (a hope that would shortly be dashed), Haring and his collaborators produced a well-funded work of public art that largely evacuated issues of inequality in favor of a celebratory, pan-racial rhetoric of utopian togetherness.
And so, if Haring’s mural promised its participants more than Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle, it promised them less than Manglano-Ovalle’s Street-Level Video, and it certainly contributed less in the way of critical intervention than the Wall of Respect (1967), which has garnered such attention of late. “Since the Enlightenment,” O.K. Werckmeister argued in 2002, “bourgeois culture has provided a forum for a principled, or abstract, reasoning about alternatives to the political status quo with no immediate venue of political enactment, whose impact on the conduct of politics has depended on the variable interactions between public sphere and political institutions in the democratic state.”[5] Examining Haring’s mural now, I’m impressed by the ways that the project enacted small aspects of political change by paying its teenage participants, encouraging their creative freedom, and transforming Grant Park, briefly, into a site of collaborative art production. But it also seems the perfect illustration of a proposed change to the status quo that depended on the good graces of corrupt institutions for its existence, and which left nary a mark on Chicago politics.
[1] Michael Kimmelman, “A Look at Keith Haring, Especially on the Graffiti,” The New York Times, September 21, 1990, sec. C, 19.
[2] Keith Haring, Journals (New York: Penguin, 2010), 348.
[3] Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 118.
[4] Rebecca Zorach, “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship between the Street and a Museum,” Art Journal 70, no. 2 (2011): 66–87.
[5] O. K. Werckmeister, “A Critique of T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 4 (2002), 857.
April 2018