Keith Haring Journals (16 page)

Books/Articles

Read/Consulted

William Burroughs Interview,
Paris Review: Writers at Work,
3rd Series

“The Uses of Observation: A Study of Correspondential Vision in the Writings of Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman.” Christopher Collins; 1971 (Mouton)

Information Theory and Esthetic Perception,
by Abraham Moles, 1968

Cosmology
—Charon

The Politics of Experience
—R.D. Laing, 1967

Lolita
—Nabokov

Artaud Anthology
—Edited—Jack Hirschman, Second Edition, 1965

“A Vision,” W.B. Yeats, 1937

“Performing Arts Journal/11” Vol. IV/No. 1 and 2, 1979

“I’ve Left: a Manifesto”—Bern Porter

Elements of Semiology,
Roland Barthes, 1969

“Learning from Las Vegas”—[Robert] Venturi

Principles of Genetic Epistemology
—Jean Piaget, 1972

Our Lady of the Flowers
—Jean Genet

Ludwig Wittgenstein—
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

“Joseph Beuys: His Life and Works”

Antonin Artaud: Poet Without Words
—Naomi Greene

“Talking Poetics from Naropa Inst.” Vols I & II

The Hidden Order of Art
—Anton Ehrenzweig

“Meaning and Control”—D. O. Edge and J. Wolfe

Experience and Conceptual Activity
—J. M. Burgers

Japanese Painting—Henry P. Bowie

Lady Chatterley’s Lover
—D. H. Lawrence

Dubliners
—James Joyce

Finnegans Wake
—James Joyce

Essaying Essays
—Richard Kostalanetz

The Super Male
—Alfred Jarry

Mythologies
—R. Barthes

Ubu Roi
—Alfred Jarry

The Banquet Years
—[Roger] Shattuck

Again it was the same and I feel just the same again. Waiting for an answer. And you can say all you want to. I’m not saying anything. And we sit and talk about Barthes’ “Lover’s Discourse.” And I experienced all these signs—condensed—last night and I guess always again. And it’s just the way you always knew it was. Nothing has changed—it’s still the same thing. But I’m tired—and feel guilty about being tired of it. But it hurt like it hurts for everyone. Distance and no more hope. O.K., give up—go home. He doesn’t want you—and it wasn’t just that—the right moves never happened. Uncomfortable pause and he gets up and walks away—but he was the only hope—so go home and don’t care—and especially don’t feel sorry for yourself—read Nietzsche, right? Rationalizations—I mean I just didn’t do the right thing at the right time, but I couldn’t control that at the time—so fast, I said. So he gets up and leaves and I’ve done it too—I’ve been on that side before. So why are you still talking. You’ve been in his shoes just one more rejection but this time it’s not me who is feeling powerful. And it sounds like pure adolescent babble—silly—childish—and if I can’t even overcome my own doubt—what can I overcome. This is not a little thing. It has been the only thing in my head since this happened—this thing has crushed me. A misunderstanding, he said. I am nauseous with chilled stunted exaltation, I said. Sometimes I’m really happy. When? he said. I can’t remember if—I’m not sure he . . . We’re not going to help you, he said. So go away again and say to yourself that maybe it’s happening to you because for you it’s more than rejection—for you it is something else too. I’m not just sad—I compensate with rationalization or others—They can do this to me and I can say it will help me—make me stronger, bigger. I already saw the sadness—tragedy at home. I can see inside of it and absorb it into myself so that it has become bigger than me inside me and it is only me. But it’s not only me—it’s always again still the same—the tragedy—the ultimate failure of the spirit. He said soul. I said I’m going home. And how can this boy from the baths make me be in this place—and if he hadn’t got up and walked away would you be better and didn’t you cause it to happen—didn’t you inflict the wound yourself? Sometimes I feel really stupid and sometimes I know I am—But you boy in the baths—you turned me inside out again and exposed myself—to myself—and I guess that’s good again.

I showed a large red-black on white painting 9ʹ × 9ʹ done January 15, 1979, in this group painting show called “Salsa ’n’ Colors” at a Spanish school on the Lower East Side—107 Suffolk Street—in the gymnasium.

These fucking beautiful boys drive me crazy. This guy in the subway sitting with his legs wide open in front of him—on purpose. Glancing at me and just enjoying being looked at. This guy in the cafeteria. Gorgeous. I just stand there and say “gorgeous” to myself over and over again. I find a reason to use the phone so I can stand there near him a little longer, just a little longer—pretty—pretty—pretty boys. And I just look and I know it’s just as bad because I only look and I have an incredible imagination. I can have these boys, any of them, all of them, tonight alone in my little room in the dark—just my imagination—dark eyes, dark hair and gorgeous bodies, penetrating gaze. To quote from an essay by Jean Genet I read recently, “Eager thick penis rising from a bed of black curls.” So writing it out. Writing it out of myself—stop thinking about it and take this energy into another form. This energy, sexual energy, may be the single strongest impulse I feel—more than art?(!)

I missed Cosmology class. I completely forgot. I never thought about it the whole day till I saw Kenny and he said, “God is light.”

The question of
whether
or
not
there
should be
any texts or grammar to raise moral issues or make us define our values, is itself a moral question.

Have the aspirations of the futurists and constructivists (the social upheaval of values of society by the introduction of abstract art) been realized?

Finally understanding the conflict between the piece I presented and the generally “visual” domination of the other work. An understanding of a totally “visually oriented” program with the exception of my “language-based” presentation.

Context (as it was) remains determinant of criticism comparison: immediate response.

Maybe the “language-based presentation” (re: calculable specific information) becomes part of other attention center (memory) recall: associations fixed: juxtapo (he said) and I remembered.

Reading Gide, Lautréamont, Solanis: information recurring of self as artwork. Diaries of Hugo Ball: pieces of. The life of the artist as a work of art itself. See: Greek understanding of. “Man thinks of himself as beautiful—however it is simply a rationalization to deal with miserableness of self.” Mankind thought as source/bit maybe virus situation occurs: again. “Painting is a disease or a curse”—Frank Holliday. Valerie Solanis sees “man” as eternal mutation: deviation: aborted female. Male spirit seen as weak, in opposition, she said. They shot Andy Warhol, she said.

Painting has a double advantage over the language
of words. First, painting conjures objects with
greater strength and comes much closer to them.
Second, painting opens to the inner dance of the
painter’s mind a larger door to the outside.

—Jean Dubuffet “Anticultural Positions” December 20, 1951

 

Being born in 1958, the first generation of the Space Age, born into a world of television technology and instant gratification, a child of the atomic age. Raised in America during the sixties and learning about war from
Life
magazines on Vietnam. Watching riots on television in a warm living room comfortably safe in middle-class white America. I don’t believe in solutions. Things are beyond my control and beyond comprehension. I do not have dreams of changing the world. I do not have dreams of saving the world. However, I am in the world and I am a human being. In 1982, with telephones and radio, computers and airplanes, world news and video tape, satellites and automobiles, human beings are still frighteningly similar to human beings 2,000 years ago. I am scared to death.

I think I was born an artist. I think I have a responsibility to live up to that. I’ve spent my life up to this point trying to find out just what that responsibility is. I learned from studying other artists’ lives and studying the world. Now I live in New York City, which I believe to be the center of the world. My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.