Perfect Day

For a while now, art hasn't meant a lot to me.  Think it has something to do with the Pandemic and Trump and post-Trump and social-media and my age and just a total new feeling inside my heart and head that art, whether it is capitalized or not, isn't really worth it.  Doing or seeing.  Plus a couple of my best friends have passed away.  So there's that.  But still something about this era of polarization and dialog flaming into monolog and all the things -- something has evaporated culturally.  Art and life have disconnected in a lot of ways, and when they do connect it often feels manneristic and self-serving and just plain, well, worthless.  

All of the above sounds particularly melodramatic I know, but I don't want melodrama.  I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.  I'm perfectly fine.  But I do just want to say:  art has sort of become an old acquaintance that I once had a deep crush on, but now when I come across it I kind of want to hide from it, pretend I never really knew it.  

And then Bill and I go to this show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last month, and I had a great sweet blissful epiphany.  "Keith Haring:  Art Is for Everybody" made me rethink all of my cynicism, and exhaustion with art.  I felt my brain stretch outside of its little cage.  A voluptuous retrospective of Keith H's amazingly sweet and homemade work, the show just took me over, and I remembered that crush I had, the feeling that art, especially of the kind in front of me, pure and ecstatically nonsensical even while trying to make sense of the world, can be something to turn to, to find again.  Back in the 80s, he was a touchstone for people like me, working-class weirdos who haunted the high school art department in little towns. I remembered reading about him and seeing him in magazines and on TV, those horn-rimmed glasses and white tees, that open-ended face. It really did feel like what he was doing was changing the world, all the way to his early death from complications from AIDS.  

The paintings and drawings and videos and photos in the show all attest to an optimism that was both expansive and self-effacing, full of feeling but getting the joke, and he leveraged a lot of his life and work toward ensuring kids got what he did, got to participate in it, learn from it, dance to it.  In fact, the show's magnificent centerpiece, for me at least, isn't a single painting or sculpture, but a little corner in a side-gallery housing a vitrine and video documenting Keith H's artists-in-residency at the Walker Art Center back in 1984.  Under glass is a letter from a school administrator thanking Walker Art Center for asking Keith H to come to their school, and includes statements by the kids of what it meant to them for him to come there and be a part of their world:

I was bawling the whole way through reading that little letter above, what the kids said, how they'll miss him.  "I will never forget Keith making a drawing for me."  Etc. 

And I guess that's it for me.  I don't know.  I had to sit down, overwhelmed, remembering what Keith H. meant to me back in the day, me who after high school went to art-school for a year and then dropped out and a few years later went back to college in Indianapolis, me and Bill joining a group of sweet artists at 431 Gallery, a co-op gallery there where we had so much fun doing whatever we wanted, and much of that work inspired by Keith H.  Our first show, "The $15 Museum" in 1989 was wild and crazy and creepy and we donated all the money from any sales to the Gleaners Food Bank.  And then as we moved through life and dedicated our time to supporting people with developmental disabilities we co-founded an art studio with a bunch of folks called Visionaries + Voices, and then we did a sort of co-op joint of our own called Thunder-Sky, Inc.  It was exhausting but beautiful and now I get it.  And somehow it's because of this Keith H. show.  So God bless everybody who had anything to do with it. 

Art has always been a crush, a pal, but for a long time now like I said -- it was a ghost I didn't want to see.  

"Keith Haring:  Art Is for Everybody" truly made me feel reconnected to those feelings in a way I don't think anything else can.  It didn't create momentum.  I'm not gonna go out and buy any brushes and paint God knows, but I do feel like I can understand what art is capable of when you feel it so deeply, like Keith H. did, that it propels you out of yourself and allows you to see the world as some brilliant phosphorescent adventure, filled with people who want to make sure everybody is a part, that everybody deserves to survive.   

Here are some more photos I took, in between bawling and laughing:

After witnessing all of this glory, at the Walker, you step out of the show and walk down a little hallway, and this is what you see:

A huge picture-window looking out at the backyard of the place, with abstract sculptures on a grassy hill and all kinds of kids playing and screaming and giggling.  Rolling down the grass, riding the curves.  I sat on a leather couch in that portico and watched the clouds and the kids and the grass and I was all of a sudden aware.  

Somebody did this on purpose I hope:  made sure people see this right after witnessing Keith H.'s genius.  Because his genius is out there too somehow.  Wide open and wild and true.