Issue 105 / November 2019

COMING
OUT
THROUGH
THE
GIFT
SHOP
20
As the hugely successful Keith Haring
exhibition at Tate Liverpool moves into
its final month, Jordan Ryder ponders
whether there is a battle to sustain
the artist’s campaigning sentiment
in the face of its aesthetic appeal.
I
recently got my nose pierced. Yes, that
darkening shape you can see on the horizon is
my 30th birthday. Maybe I can blame that. Or
I can blame my boyfriend for catching me at a
weak moment and making a long held (but crucially
hypothetical) desire happen. Regardless, the weight
of my already sizeable head has increased marginally
and I travel everywhere with a bottle of saline. Both
my mother and a number of my male friends have
remarked that they like it, it suits me, and “it makes me
look more gay”. Brilliant. But, I suppose that was part of
the point, when I think about it. This fairly unexceptional
act of identity assertion happened aged 29. American
artist KEITH HARING died in 1990, aged 31, of AIDSrelated
complications.
Over the course of his career he challenged the
American government’s ignorance of the AIDS crisis,
promoted safe sex and addressed the crack epidemic
in 1980s New York, as well as highlighting the dangers
of nuclear power. In conflating these two I do not seek
to elevate my choice of metallic facial furniture to that of
confrontational activist art, but rather highlight just how
young Haring was to be one of the visual voices of socially
conscious art during the Reagan era, and how an earlier
knowledge and understanding of his work may have eased my
own reconciliation with my homosexuality.
Had I been exposed to his art beyond the T-shirts of
my more fashion conscious friends, would I have felt more
comfortable in myself? I’d like to believe this is the case. Equally,
for any persons unsure of their gender, sexuality or even morality
that visits, or has visited, the exhibition. Subtracted from this line of
questioning, however, the exhibition is a huge success. Not just for
the Tate, but for Liverpool in general.
Returning to my point: if you expand this further, can art, in any
format, provide a focal point for solidarity and identification in the
same way music can, or is the message of an image or object more
firmly rooted in the time and place of production? Does radical art
only remain radical for so long, its didactic power only temporal and
therefore limited?
Essentially, can an exhibition of political art ever avoid the castration
of that art’s political message? Indeed, can a work of art retain its political
undertone without being part of a biographical retrospective?
Take Haring’s Silence Equals Death (1989), for example. Building on
the campaign of the same name by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
(ACT UP), Haring’s image recreates the infamous pink triangle on a stark
black background. The reclaimed triangle, initially used as a marker of
homosexuality in Nazi concentration camps, is plain and flat in the ACT UP
poster, but in Haring’s work is overlain with figures representing the ‘see no
evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ maxim. The overall effect is striking in a very
different way to the ACT UP poster. The tumble of human figures inevitably
connote a pyramid of bodies, Haring certainly conflating the AIDS pandemic
with the Holocaust, presenting both as a systematic eradication of a group
maligned and ignored by the ruling class, the wilful ignorance and inaction of the
Reagan administration set alongside the ideological antisemitism of the Nazis.
As a 29-year-old gay man in 2019 this work of art represents not just a
period in time and a particular aesthetic style, but a pivotal moment in the history
of people like me, one that has shaped not only my perception of what it is to
be gay, but also why it matters to not simply accept the superficial equality that
is framed as progress. But I wonder whether that is the same for younger gay
people, less politically aware gay people, or people who are not part of the LGBTQ+