FDR Drive Mural, 1984: Keith Haring

Martos Gallery is pleased to present Keith Haring’s FDR Drive mural, with fourteen of the thirty panels which composed the original work, created on site in the fall of 1984, spanning some 300 feet alongside the highway and the East River, on view for nearly a year. The sheet metal panels on which the artist painted were already in place, hung about 4 1/2 feet off the ground, which their installation for this exhibition follows. The FDR mural, now more than forty years later, remains one of the artists’s major public works. 

The exhibition is accompanied by an essay by critic and curator Bob Nickas, which follows.

Keith Haring’s FDR Drive Mural

That whispered hiss when paint sprays from an aerosol can’s nozzle, paint on an atomic level, accompanied by its distinctive pssssst, a finger poised, held in place assuring a steady stream, the arm directing a fluid line as an extension of the body in motion. For viewers, moving past the panels comprising one of Keith Haring’s major works, the frieze-like mural he created on site in 1984, spanning some three hundred feet of New York’s FDR Drive, we imagine that sound, its faint echo. Faint for the distance this work has traveled to reach us here and now, as well because it would only have been audible to the artist himself in proximity to the moment the work was brought to life. And it’s still alive. Haring’s distinctive, vibratory line animates figures that float, fly, somersault, and exuberantly defy gravity, movement from dancing, breakdancing and the sense that bodies can transcend physical limits. The staccato red marks around black outlined figures represent bursts of energy that are joyous, spontaneous, celebratory. A winged figure soaring upwards into space, an oversize lightbulb aglow, a dog barking. It’s all there in the mural, which we can think of—and it’s true for all Haring’s work—as an amplifier, delivering a message, graphically bold, visible from a distance, pitch perfect in volume, the artist’s voice yet echoing. That pssssst, which might be the sound of a secret about to be passed, in its amplification, meant for all to hear. Whoever was listening. 

Consider the mural’s original site, the length of highway defining the city’s eastern edge, with the East River flowing in parallel, cars moving in both directions. There would have been a constant low hum or a whoosh of velocity as they passed by, depending on how well traffic was moving, or not. The speed limit is forty, but when cars slow to a crawl there’s another sound: impatient drivers leaning into their horns. Though it did give them a chance to see what Haring was creating for whoever went by, although he wasn’t widely known at the time. The promenade of Carl Schurz Park is there, as a straight line between East 90th and 91st Streets, so there were cyclists, joggers, people walking dogs, some who would stop to watch the artist at work, and speak with him.1 Haring’s audience was the public at large, day and night. (Imagine cars driving by after dark, the mural illuminated by passing headlights.) When traffic moved smoothly, this frieze, frame by frame, was a panoramic movie, a linear, urban zoetrope, not unlike the graffiti that could be seen in subway tunnels in the late ’70s and ‘80s, a film flickering as trains rumbled between stations, underground movies which Haring would have seen as well.2 We all did, at least those of us who rode the subway; the first time was startling, as it must have been aboveground along the FDR Drive in 1984.

In a number of photographs taken by Haring’s friend, the artist Tseng Kwong Chi,3 we see him with a portable cassette player in the bend of his arm; in another it’s raised up on his shoulder, small, bright yellow and red. (As nearby traffic slowed, the sleek, sinuous funk of a Grace Jones song may have reverberated, “Pull Up to the Bumper,” as it does now just thinking about it, in the ‘home movies’ we call memory.) He’s holding a can of spray paint in his right hand, wearing a tight t-shirt with his image of a winged, dancing TV set. Haring listened to music when he was working; it was a big part of his life, a continuous soundtrack.4 He frequented clubs downtown—Club 57, Danceteria, Paradise Garage, the Mudd Club, and Area. There was always music in the street at the time, more forty years ago than today, it seems, and of course the street was often his studio, and gallery, open seven days a week. Keith Haring’s art was a democracy of sorts, an ongoing engagement with public address, particularly in that auspicious year by way of George Orwell’s famous cautionary tale, 1984. "In a time of universal deceit,” Orwell had observed, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act." In a curious inversion, though it may not have been coincidental at all, the book had mostly been written in 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War, a period that had witnessed an unprecedented surge of political propaganda amid great sacrifice and loss. What was true in 1948 held true almost forty years later, with Ronald Reagan in his second term as president, having won by a landslide—which we didn’t know would end up burying so many, our own period of loss about to unfold—buoyed by his slogan “Let’s Make American Great Again” (sound familiar?), and, for our misfortune, that story foretold seventy- five years ago remains true today. 

1984 was the year the first Macintosh personal computer came onto the market. Prominently, for some controversially, it was announced with a commercial directed by Ridley Scott, who presented a dystopian world inspired by Orwell’s 1984, which was strategically aired during the Super Bowl, with an audience of nearly eighty million. Bleakly lit, the ad begins with a line of grim-faced inmates, heads shaved, in uniform gray scrubs, being marched into an airless hall. The air is being sucked out by Big Brother, projected on a giant screen, proclaiming in messianic tones that “a garden of pure ideology” awaits, that “We are one people, with one will, one cause.” These scenes are intercut with a female runner, an Olympian, carrying a heavy hammer, pursued by police in riot gear. She enters the hall and, in slow motion, hurls the hammer at the screen, and it shatters and explodes dramatically. A printed text, read in a measured, soothing voice, follows: “On January 24th, Apple will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984.” Then the bright, colorful Apple logo appears on a deep black ground. Just under a minute has elapsed.5

To watch the ad today, knowing all that has followed, well aware that we are fully captive to technology, that it hasn’t saved us from tyranny and surveillance, we can be sure of one thing: the Orwellian 1984 has been on continuous loop since 1948. And Apple, “big brotherly” to the core, as Orwell would have surely predicted had he lived to see the Internet, may have never been meant as part of the solution, or how and for who?, but rather a normalized means for invasively expanding social control. The ultimate monitor. Today, at least one in every home, in every phone, everywhere, all across the globe. Haring pictured, in numerous paintings and drawings, a caterpillar with a computer for a head, at times being ridden by a headless (signifying brainless) figure, with images on the screen that include a monkey-like creature held tightly by its tail, a figure crucified upside down, and a dollar sign, the earliest of them dating to 1983—none of which would have been lost on Orwell. In the photo of Haring cradling the tape player, we see behind him, inching its way across the murals’ tenth and eleventh panels, a caterpillar with a giant plug-like head—in search of its outlet? 

There can be no doubt that as soon as Haring saw the long line of white sheet metal panels that had been put up against the fencing by the FDR Drive, he saw his canvas and went at it, quickly as always. The improvisatory nature of his way of working is evident, the energy he imbued his figures with, in parallel to his own. He believed in individual expression, in human interaction, and in how art has the power to bring people together, particularly outside galleries and museums, in public, freely available to all. A force of nature, his art flowed directly from his hand, his eye, and his mind. Haring would encounter a number of the panels some years after the mural had been disassembled, or in his words “rescued,” and although he said they appeared in bad shape, he thought that “somehow this makes it look even better.”6 The panels were weathered, worn from nearly a year exposed to the elements, but they had survived: art and urban archaeology. If we consider the FDR Drive mural in the time of its creation as an antidote to a sense of future dread —from the past, 1948/1984—and we think about where we find ourselves today, Keith Haring’s work remains so: an antidote, hopeful, joyous, alive.

—Bob Nickas

Notes:

1. I am indebted to a first-hand account from Steve McHugh, who was 16 in 1984, knew Keith Haring casually, and rode his father’s bike over to where the artist was working to see for himself. The great coincidence in connecting McHugh with Haring after so much time had passed is that he now works for an art shipping company, and had been contacted about transporting the panels to the gallery. His recollection also points to the artist’s generosity. As he wrote in an email:

“I knew Keith in the ‘80s and was there hanging out with him one day when he was painting these panels. I grew up in New York, and at that time I lived on 85th Street and East End Avenue, just six blocks from FDR and 91st.

“I also knew Keith from the Lower East Side and the trains. I was in a rock band called Hidden Scream, and we had a rehearsal space on Saint Marks Place and 2nd Avenue in the East Village. It was a very different neighborhood back then, and Keith was just a guy we knew that did graffiti.

“That day that he was doing the FDR mural, I was wearing a denim jacket, and he drew a picture, of me behind my drum kit, on the back of my jacket with a magic marker while I was wearing it. I still have the jacket.”

2. It’s important to note a public art project from that time, Bill Brand’s MASSTRANSISCOPE, a series of animated drawings that were installed in a subway tunnel in 1980 (reinstalled in 2012 as a permanent work), which can be viewed from the Manhattan bound Q or B trains departing from DeKalb Avenue.

3. In the left corner of panel #5, a figure bent over backwards is identified as T.K.C.— Tseng Kwong Chi.

4. Many of Haring’s mixtapes have been digitized, tapes he made as well as those made for him by DJ Juan Dubose and Larry Levan across the ‘80s. They provide a soundtrack to his art, still today—including songs by Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Herbie Hancock, ESG, Grace Jones, Madonna, Prince, Sylvester, B52s, Talking Heads, Section 25, Mantronix, Trouble Funk, the Beastie Boys, and NYC Peech Boys—for whom Haring did the cover artwork for their album, Life Is Something Special, in 1983.

5. The commercial is available to be seen on YouTube.

6. “The next day I go to Galerie Beaubourg with Gil to discuss show of mural from New York (91st) FDR Drive Mural (1984), which has been “rescued” and shipped to Paris. It is in really bad shape, but somehow this makes it look even better.” From Keith Haring Journals, first published by Penguin Books, 1997, and in a deluxe edition, 2010, p. 358.