Keith Haring: 1978-1982 was an exhibition in the Kunsthalle Wien. It centered on Haring‘s early work, especially his video performances and his early drawings.

Probably everybody knows Harings later work, the outlined figures and forms, but – though he always did draw those – it seems that in the beginning he was more interested in words and semiotics. For example, he developed a set of 25 gouaches that form an alphabet. There were also his journals on display, detailing the process with which he arrived there.

Then there were his collages, newspaper headlines accusing Reagan of murder or trading the pope for hostages. And this:

The exhibition also showed quite a few of his later drawings, in his recognisable style, which I like a lot. But personally, I thought the best part of the exhibition was his poem “Lick Fat Boys”. It’s basically verbalised math, with a little bit of code making thrown into the mix and it’s got an awesome rythm.

And to take a quote from here:

Haring devoted considerable energy to a project in which he took the letters from the corporate name “First National City Bank” and rearranged them to form different words. One of the results was the LICK FAT BOYS chant Magnuson reported Haring gave at Club 57. No matter how words like “AS”, “ART”, “BOY”, “LICK”, “FAT”, “SIN”, “NO”, “IF” are ordered in performances or collages they cease to reference the bank and instead evoke sexual desire in relationship to art. As Burroughs and Gysin predicted, despite the seemingly random process by which words are reconfigured “the resulting texts always took a narrative turn, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory.”

Summarising, it was a pretty short exhibition, but very much worth my while to discover unknown parts of Haring’s work.