THE KEITH HARING CUT-UP: The Motion Line in Keith Haring’s Art and Thought — Intro
INSPIRATION
This cut-up conversation on Keith Haring was particularly inspired by Keith Haring’s art, writing and interviews, John Gruen’s biography on Keith Haring, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Julia Gruen and Robert Farris Thompson’s spirits, Plato’s dialogues and Jack Kerouac’s on the road.
Initially, confronting Keith Haring’s ideas with those that inspired him, as well as those he inspired revealed interesting. Also, the nature of Haring’s work, which defies definition and set meaning indicated the cut-up format as the most logical/natural choice for an interpretation of Haring’s art and thought.
METHOD
The thoughts were first collected through interviews, books and movies to be edited and printed out on paper.
The thoughts were then divided, marked and cut-out one by one with scissors.
The bits of paper were laid down all over the floor and cut-up together in one long road in an hour and a half time, around midnight, on a Saturday night.
Of course, some minor editing has been permitted since then.
CONFESSION
This text was initially presented as an MA thesis in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2007. It did not have a single word ‘’written’’ by me but it passed, barely, but it passed.
It is still meant to be read as an essay, oscillating between reality and imagination while also aiming to capture and represent Keith Haring’s true soul and spirit. This method was chosen only because I believed it was the best way for me to ‘’talk’’ about his art. Keith Haring has always meant a lot to me from the moment I saw his art for the first time around the age of 13. It was love at first sight. I came up with this method because it is the closest I could get to ‘’meeting’’ him.
This is a love letter to the artist Keith Haring, I hope you enjoy it.
Introduction
WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else? Use of scissors renders the process explicit and subject to extension and variation. Clear classical prose can be composed entirely of rearranged cut-ups. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. Images shift sense under the scissors smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kinesthetic. This is where Rimbaud was going with his color of vowels. And his “systematic derangement of the senses”. The place of mescaline hallucination: seeing colors tasting sounds smelling forms¹.
KEITH HARING The way it began, was to draw my tag — tag, meaning signature of what graffiti artists called their name. So my tag was an animal, which started to look more and more like a dog. Then I drew a little person crawling on all fours, and, the more I drew it, the more it became ‘The Baby’. So, on the streets, I’d do various configurations of the dog and the baby. Sometimes the baby would be facing the dog — confronting it. Sometimes, it would be a row of babies, and the dog behind them. I was using these images, always bearing in mind the Burroughs/ Gysin cut-up ideas. And I juxtaposed these different tags or signatures of images, which would convey a different meaning depending on how you combined them².
STEPHEN ADDISS Full of paradox, Zen is beyond words, but has occasioned countless books; Zen is individual, but usually requires a teacher; Zen is everyday and down-to-earth, yet is traditionally practiced in remote monasteries; Zen is profoundly serious, but full of humor; Zen demands being rather than representing, yet has inspired many different kinds of art. Zen teaches us not merely to hear, but to listen; not just to look, but to see; not only to think, but to experience; and above all not to cling to what we know, but to accept and rejoice in as much of the world as we may encounter³.
ROLAND BARTHES The text does not ‘gloss’ the images, which do not ‘illustrate’ the text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty, analogous perhaps to that loss of meaning Zen calls a satori. Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read the retreat of signs⁴.
MATISSE A musician once said: in art, truth begins when one no longer understands what one is doing, what one knows, and until there remains in you an energy all the stronger because it is troubled, constrained, compressed. One must present oneself with great humility, all white, all pure, and candid, the mind seemingly empty, with a spirit close to that of the communicant approaching the Holy Table. Obviously, one must have all one’s knowledge behind one, and yet be capable of keeping the freshness of one’s instincts⁵.
WILLIAM S.BURROUGHS The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for seventy years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit — all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point — had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors⁶.
To be continued…
¹ William S. Burroughs, ‘The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin”, in William S. Burroughs / Brion Gysin,The Third Mind, Grove Press, New York, 1982, p.32.
² John Gruen, The Authorized Biography, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1991, p.65.
³ Stephen Addiss, The Art of Zen: Paintings and Calligraphy by Japanese Monks 1600–1925, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1989, p.6.
⁴ Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982, p.xi.
⁵ Henri Matisse, Jazz, printed for the Museum of Modern Art New York, R. Piper and Co Verlag Munich, 1948, p.1.
⁶ William S. Burroughs, ‘The Cut-up Method of Brion Gysin”, in William S. Burroughs / Brion Gysin,The Third Mind, Grove Press, New York, 1982, p.29.
