Poured Over: Brad Gooch on Radiant

Jenna Seery

Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring is biographer Brad Gooch’s compassionate and comprehensive look at the artist’s work and archives. Gooch joined us to talk about why he chose Haring as a subject, the lasting legacy of his work, his connections to other artists and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.        

Featured Books (Episode):
Radiant by Brad Gooch
City Poet by Brad Gooch
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and you know, I am not sentimental by nature. I’m not nostalgic by nature. I will say that reading Brad Gooch his biography of Keith Haring Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring did make me a little wistful for New York that really just lives in our memories at this point. But Brad, it’s such a treat to meet you. I have been reading you since you’re Frank O’Hara biography City Poet. So I may have just dated myself. I’m so excited to have this conversation here. Well, here’s the thing. When did you start working on this? Because it sounds like you were working on it during the pandemic.

Brad Gooch

I was. Which was very interesting. I mean, it also changed biography writing for me, because instead of taking people to lunch and, and dinner, everyone was on zoom. It was kind of nice. It also gave me more time to write, so it was a plus.

You’ve also written biographies of Rumi and Flannery O’Connor. I mean, I think of you as sort of a literary biographer first and you have done other — there’s a memoir of your early life in New York, there’s a poetry collection, there’s a story collection, there’s some books about spirituality. I mean, this is not your first project. But I feel like it’s a really perfect pairing of biographer and subject and it speaks to a lot of different parts of your life as well as Haring’s. Yeah, can we talk about that for a second?

Biography, I always think a lot before I start, because, you know, it goes on for a long time, this book took six years to write. And so it has to be an idea I’ve had for a while. And I basically had this idea of writing something about Keith Haring since the 1980s when I would intersect with him at certain points, and I was thinking of it and I knew he would come in and out of my life, when it came time to actually that I had space to write that novel, that I don’t really like novels about famous artists and also the kind of Guinness Book of Records, facts of Keith’s life are so astonishing. I mean, this comet of 10 years that he had when he went from being this kid on the streets of these village to a to a global art star are amazing.

And the amount of work he did I love that you use comet to describe him because I have a note to myself after reading the book. Thanks space race baby. That Keith Haring was a space race baby. I mean, he was raised on television as a new thing, sitcoms, I Dream of Jeannie, The Beatles, Life magazine, Look magazine, like, he’s really a product of that sort of American peak mono culture kind of thing, right? And yet, he turns everything inside out.

I mean, again, personal connections with Keith. I’m from Pennsylvania, I was six years younger but I well understood that the television, I well understood the conservative parents and his phases where he goes through his Jesus Freak and a Monkees fan and the Dead Head. I mean, all of this is, is very lively. And just now something that you would write about in someone’s biography.

That’s the thing. The Monkees stuff was new to me. The Jesus freaks stuff was really new to me, the Dead head stuff. I mean, I just always thought of him as the sort of quintessential downtown guy, right. Like, when I was in college, we all had, you know, the silence equals death posters. We all had whatever pieces of Haring, you know, and it’s right next to the Smiths poster and that Toronto kiss photograph that like literally, you were not allowed to go to college without that poster on your wall at a certain period in the 90s. And he was just he was so much a part of our experience of the world. I mean, there he was on MTV. There he was on the subway, like, he felt accessible even though of course, Tony Shafrazi is showing his work. Like, as you said, he’s a global art superstar. But for college kids and teenagers and young people in their 20s. Like, he still felt like, we could be part of that energy and that excitement and that it wasn’t just for adults.

And he was aware of it. I mean, his bumper sticker concept was art is for everybody. And he really, from doing these 5000 drawings on the subway system and beyond. He was always trying to bring people in to the art world and into that experience. And it was at a time when it was it had been the opposite. I mean, it’s kind of elite and conceptual. And he really opened it up so he wanted you to feel the way you were feeling.

He was so ahead of his time. That’s how it felt for me, right?

I mean, we I talked to, and it’s at the end of my book, the curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. She kind of apologized for the institution to me. I mean, that moment never showed him when he was. They never bought any work and she said, well, at some radical art, there’s like a 30-year time period, an alarm clock goes off, and it happened with The Water Lilies that happened with the painters. And she was saying that Keith Haring is just about at that 30 year mark, where is we can see his work is lasting.

I was one of the fortunate people who got to see the show that the Brood put on in Los Angeles called Keith Haring Artist is for Everyone. And it was electric walking through that space. And again, like my experience of Haring, originally, when I was younger and very, very impressionable was, you know, T shirts, and posters and postcards and MTV and, you know, 30 second ads kind of thing, right, like we or pins or button, it was just, it was very sort of free moving on the street. And to see these huge, I mean, some of these paintings are like 40 feet long, and 20 feet high. And I think I didn’t understand the scope of the work because when you see it reproduced on the page or the screen, like you just you don’t, unless you see him working on the piece, you just don’t understand how physically huge some of these pieces were. And some of them are painted on tarps, and some are on Canvas, but he really started on paper. Right?

Right. And he always favored paper. The canvas was too arty, you know, sort of classic artist and that intimidated him and it was too expensive. So Tony Shafrazi his dealer kept encouraging him, of course, I will do paintings do paintings then he found tarp, which is what is plastic they were covering construction sites with, and then did all these paintings on tarp. So, he was always trying to get around the traditional art world. And also those kind of speak that language at the same time. But I had the same experience as you even in the middle of writing this book, I went to the show at the Tate in Liverpool. And it was really the first time you saw this Haring work on a museum wall wasn’t necessarily in a big party scene, they weren’t playing a lot of 80s music, and saw that it that it’s communicating to you and kind of a big way. And that’s when I realized, also that he was, you know, here in an enduring way and that people didn’t realize it at the time. Because he, he treated it so, so lightly.

There were people who mistook sort of, alright, we all refer to it as dancing babies, right? Dancing, babies, barking dogs, the spaceships, all of that kind of thing. They were people who just saw the playfulness first. But if you see a lot of the larger scale works, the boys are really angry. They’re really like the rage just radiates off of that, like, there was a lot more happening with him than you saw on the walls of the Pop Shop. Right? Or, and certainly MTV, like, I know, I keep coming back to MTV. But that was like a groundbreaking thing. Right between the music and the fashion and everything. Like that was a moment even though there was lots of stuff going off the rails across the country. I mean, just an AIDS was really starting. It was bad. It was really bad. But the idea that you had fashion and music and art all feeding into one place, I mean, music videos now, you know, you pretty much just shoot them on the phone. But back in the day, they used to be treated like many movies, like you had real budgets and you took weeks and weeks and weeks to shoot them and you hired fancy directors and all of this stuff.

And Keith was on MTV. All wrapped around painting. That’s where he wanted to be. But you’re right. I always think that it’s he’s sort of the opposite of Andy Warhol, where yeah, he was taking these kinds of silly topics like camp and treating it very seriously. Keith took these very serious topics like nuclear proliferation, environmentalism, AIDS, and he treats them with these bright colors, with these kind of cartoon characters jumping around, and it seduces you into this subject matter, which is often pretty serious.

I thought it was also really subversive too that he never really titled individual pieces. And because he was like, Yeah, I don’t actually have to name it, but he’s also really good at naming them. Right.

Well, he was a poet. Yeah, that whole poet period. Yeah. Canton, New York. And I always thought of him in that setting. I mean, it was like a leading Art in New York in the 1970s downtown along with rock music, and you can tell him it shows and Keith’s titles and his attitude, I think, towards art.

there’s one piece that includes it’s, it’s painted on the piece itself. And I’m not going to say the name of the piece only because I don’t want to get it wrong. But the message is the message is painted in it. And, you know, obviously, it’s a play off of Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. And Keith was like, yeah, no, actually, it is. And that always sort of stuck with me. And now it’s just like, Oh, God, this guy was so prescient, and really, ahead of his time, in so many ways. Yeah. And here he is, you see these photos of him with his giant glasses, and, you know, his sort of scrubby hair and his T shirts and his sneakers. And he’s very much sort of proto hip hop, culture kid, and he’s pulling, you know, from Fab Five Freddy, and the whole hip hop scene, and the graffiti scene in New York Wyldstyle is taking off at this point. Like, it’s this perfect storm, right? Of the city building on itself, right?

Again, with a sort of Warhol construct contract, interviewed Sean Lennon, Keith had these really strong friendships with kids. But he was saying to me, you know, at the time, Andy Warhol was also hanging out with his mother. No, it was very kind of had a kind of chic style. And, and also, his work wasn’t really comprehensible. Whereas Keith, I mean, he said, his style, with his sneakers and things was what everyone was wearing it Middle School, and, and the work, you know, these cartoon characters was just, it just was made for him. So kids were one of these audiences that he spoke to, I mean, speaking to many at once. That was wonderful.

But you tell a great story to in the book, in Radiant where Keith goes to Iowa, because an art teacher just wrote to him and said, Hey, my student, I’m teaching you to my tiny people I for its middle school. And he’s like, Yeah, I’ll go. And he gets on a plane, and goes and teaches an art class to little kids in Iowa. And he sort of does it in a way that his dad got him to sort of think about his work when he was tiny, he would just draw a circle and have the kids expand on it, or he draw a squiggly line and have the kids expand on it. And I think that’s such a great way to teach art, because you just end up making a thing. But if you’re, you know, if you’re starting out, it’s a really great way to feel like you get what’s happening, right? It’s not like draw that vase or draw that apple. But like any kid can make a squiggly line, right? Any one of us not just a kid, I should say.

Which actually, I’m glad you brought up his dad. Because you know, in the small town Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where he was from, he’s from a marine family. His father was a Marine. And his father was also an amateur cartoonist. And besides the influence of Walt Disney, his father had a big influence and, and part of it was this game, that pastime of you draw something and I’ll draw something and we draw together, and also his father would always encourage them to draw original cartoons. So don’t just mimic Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck. And there’s a way of seeing that. The conic semiotic imagery of Keith’s, the beginning is original cartoons and barking dogs and crawling babies that are now speak to us as Keith Haring and I think that’s part of what’s endearing about him. He wasn’t appropriating, he wasn’t being erotic. And he was trying to communicate well, you said the message was the message.

I’m also fond of a dude who’s running around SVA. He went to the School of Visual Arts in New York for not a full run, but you talk about how he gets the school and he’s using post. It’s his art because they were new. And I’m like, yep, dude after my own heart. Not that I’m making art with post its. But I do run my life off of post its. I appreciate them quite a lot. But, I mean, he really is, in a lot of ways, like Basquiat who was a peer of his, he’s taking unconventional material and saying, I can turn this into art, you have to step away and stop thinking, like I grew up in a place where, you know, art had to be 1000s of years old or hundreds of years old, and it had to look a certain way and no one was ever going to hang a Haring. Now obviously, the art scene has changed quite a lot in Boston and other parts of New England. And but when I was growing up, there’s no way a guy like keyed Herring is getting into any, you know, quote, unquote, legitimate and I’m using air quotes Art space and the critics also gave him really hard time here in New York.

It’s really brutal to read some of these reviews from the thing that really triggered them was the Pop Shop. I mean, all have been playing around with our business he called it then he starts a store and No one, no artist in his generation or before it had started a little store, and he starts selling at price points these kids could buy and everyone could buy T shirts that were prints and, and pins and all in all of this, but for but this act of mixing commerce and high art, the high and the low, really bothered people. I mean, Robert Hughes was the radix means. And I’m in the I would call him Keith boring and John Michel Basquiat case and talked about him as a disco decorate. So there’s also like, shading of homophobia, right? Of course, no a lot of this criticism at the time. But if you take them one after another, the attacks were quite intense. And keeping there was insulated from this or escaped from it. Because in Europe, as has been the case with other American poets and painters, he was being taken more seriously than he was in America. In his lifetime, he was never shown at a museum in the United States. But he was shown at the Bordeaux in the south of France, at the Pompidou in Paris. He lived in Amsterdam. So he was seen closer to the way that he was seeing himself in Europe. I mean, we’ve taken seriously.

I mean, he really was a global thinker, though. I mean, he really he was pushing the envelope on height, you know, that whole artificial, high versus low. I mean, one of the things I love most about Margo Jefferson, who was a longtime critic for the New York Times, she always did that high low, but she was like, you can pretend that this is she just wrote what she wanted to write. And it was always really fantastic. Because I always felt like I was going to learn something new from her because of the way she approached the all of the things criticism could do, right? Or the way she wrote about dance, or she’d write about a movie or write about a book. And she’s just throwing in whatever reference she felt like. And it all made sense. And I kind of feel like that with Keith. Because obviously, music is a huge piece of this, like you’re writing about the mud area, and the palladium and all of these places, Paradise garage, which I had not thought about in 8 million years, like all of these places, though, where the culture is being built in New York, and it’s being built by black and brown, and queer people. And in a way that I mean, real estate being what it is. It’s harder for these spaces to exist, right like, Limelight is a mall now. Granted, limelight was like but it’s a mall,

right? No, I mean, he definitely mixed all of those things together. And he was definitely in the, in the forefront of that. And now it seems I mean, people were so upset that he sold anything. I mean, now we have licensing, certainly of Keith Haring stuff. So you go to the playground and these kids are in a key there and sometimes below or is that just have this little chair on them? Can be a lot. But you know that but all this is now part of what artists do. I mean, they there’s a there’s a younger generation that keyed in to Aaron and that’s why he can make sense to us now, and at the time seemed like a complete outsider. Well,

I also want to put him in a tiny bit of context. I mean, his peers includes Cindy Sherman, Kenny Scharf, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, whose work I also love, like, I mean, he’s coming up at a period where lots of folks are challenging what the idea of art looks like. And you know, Jenny halter hangs in museums now and Barbara Kruger, actually the Brode in Los Angeles, and it’s a couple of halters and a couple of Cougars that are standouts, I mean, they own some baskets, as well, that are pretty standard as well. It’s a nice collection,

good, early collector, and I mean, that’s why Yeah, are they have that collection, or someplace like the Museum of Modern Art, collected nothing, therefore, they don’t have much they have one great 30 foot long that they brought out for the reopening of the museum, but that was given to them by the Foundation. So it helps follow the collectors and he said, wow, right. It is follow

the collectors, but I did not know. There’s a tiny bit of a backstory though, with MoMA that isn’t just being a little snotty about what’s high and what’s low. And I’m kind of laughing because I did not know this story until you tell it in radiant. Tony shafrazi may have done a thing. At moment, I’m going to ask you to tell the story. Tony may have done a thing at MoMA with Garnica, the very famous Picasso and a can of red spray paint. I can understand MoMA being mad about that piece, but at some point you kind of have to get over it because shafrazi obviously has gone on to be that guy who is The Gallerist for so many major artists but he did a thing. Would you

not remember it because he it was a supposedly of Vietnam War protest went to Garen ACARA. And spray painted kill lies all may be nervous because he wants to say kill all lies. But said he to bring it back into the conversation. That’s great anti war statement. For this, he was never allowed in the Museum of Modern Art and that, you know, the word on the street was that that the reason they wouldn’t buy, they wouldn’t buy any work. Any artist who was represented by shafrazi and Keith didn’t like the idea that he had spray painted Garin aka you love. But it is interesting that is dealer is, again, this kind of outsider. I mean, there’s something edgy about about Tony at that time,

and Keith had been his own dealer before Tony starts representing him. And at this point to like the Soho gallery. I mean, obviously, Soho in New York now is not what it was at the time. But when the gallery scene was so low. And so what was the gallery scene, it was a really different world. And here’s shafrazi going, I have this guy. And suddenly, like everything’s kind of changing. And again, like Keith is sort of blowing up the established order. I mean, yes, he has helped from but it’s like sure, frosty in a garage with someone else going. Yeah, we’re just gonna make a thing. Right

now. No, Diego Cortez described our world and to me is like, white people in white boxes drinking white wine. And where’s the chef Razi kind of garage, open garage, kind of gallery was was something else and that but Keith again, he hadn’t really he hadn’t wanted that, that he consciously unconsciously got around. This was the Subway Art Project, right, Chuck? Man? Yeah, no one knew who he was. But York Post, they called him chalk man, someone started drawing these drawings on the New York City subway on these blank advertising spaces that will be covered over within a week or two. And this eventually becomes 5000 of these over years. I mean, it’s one of the largest public art projects ever, ever pulled off. And, and one thing that happens is the millions of people who go through the subway system every day, a number of them get hooked on, on these drawings and who’s doing them or he would do them as performance, and then people would watch him. And then he started giving up pins. So by the time he had his first one man show should browse the gallery. He already had an audience and brought this new audience into the gallery system.

And I think that performance piece is really important. He is not a performance artists, like I need to be clear about that. He’s not you know, he’s, he’s just not a performance artist. But he was doing sort of early video art, one of the pieces he does at SVU, which I would really, really like to see someday, is a piece sort of about his childhood and about his dad. Um, I just, I don’t know if it’s been displayed anywhere. I don’t think it was part of the show at the Brode. Right.

No, I think we might show it, we’re gonna do a thing at Metrograph Oh, cool. Okay, show things that haven’t been shown at one of those.

Okay, because the way you describe it, I really, really want to see it, but I do. There’s this piece this legendary piece that Keith did with the choreographer, Bill T. Jones. And you did an event I’m actually going to plug someone else’s video, but you did an event in Los Angeles with Bill T. Jones for the Keith Haring exhibit that was at the Brood it’s really good it’s on their website, go find it if you haven’t seen it. It is a fabulous conversation. I would like to hang out with Bill T Jones all the time because he’s one of the smartest sharpest dudes out there and you asked all the right questions in the audience asked all the right questions, but the energy was great but legendarily Keith painted him.

Right?

Not just Bill as a painting which he’s also done but he also used Bill as a canvas.

I mean, first he painted when they first met at the kitchen behind Bill while Bill was dancing so it was a collaboration in my way that he paints bills body which is also does to Grace Jones later and so footage of that of him painting Bill T and when you’re thinking about all the different surfaces that works on that one is body painting,

but that video to that was the when you got shouted at the conversation at the Brode that was the first time I’d seen it because there’s no soundtrack to it other than the sounds of Keith literally painting and Bill dancing, there’s no music, there’s no anything it is just these two dudes very, very focused on what they’re doing and it’s, it’s amazing it is I sort of feel like he would have done more video or I Feel like herring would have evolved. Like it felt like a thing that he would have gravitated towards had he lived longer. I mean, he died in 1990.

I mean, he did early on. So if you look, staring at SVA, when he was not painting, I mean, he and if you look at his class list, you get a sense of his temperament as well as the temperament of the time. So he’s taking video, semiotics, performance art was the conceptual art with Joseph Kosuth. So it was that kind of time and keep very interested in videotape. Also his biographer, now, treating someone from the 80s all of a sudden video was this thing. So you have all of this, I mean, now we’re completely covered with selfies but but it with writing about Frank O’Hara in the 50s and 60s, you didn’t have this kind of coverage, and you do keep loved video, and he loved Polaroid and all of this. So it helps but, you know, it would lead to social media and Keith, I mean, is sort of he was doing social media early on, and they all were in the way. I mean, there was by doing there, all these urgent messages were being sent on the street. And all these artists that you mentioned before, we’re all working on the street, communicating to each other and chant able to was doing political statements, and Bosco was doing crowns and shadows and cars is very exciting.

You can do a lot with a can of paint or magic marker, or a sticker. Right. I mean, it was it felt very guerilla very fresh, very sort of, well, you saw your first Haring in 1980 in the West Village.

I mean, because I took it personally. I was walking from the West Village to the East Village was over. Howard Brook Jr. was a filmmaker and, you know, stamped in graphite on the street was clones go home with fake organization, fags against facial hair, which keep these parted. And it was like an inside joke in the gay community that the West Village was filled with clowns who had beards and black leather jackets and a motorcycle look in the East Village was this hipper, younger artists kind of thing. I mean, you know, that’s what it was. But that he that I took it personally, Howard said to me, You should go home, you have to go home now. And then I would see everything on that I remember seeing on either prints or spring on a newsstand. Over several weeks. I mean, he’s crawling. So you would intersect with this? It was It was exciting. And the the anonymity of it at the time. That’s that was part of the gorilla aspect. I mean, you didn’t know whose cmo was it? Oh, when these people were was the opposite of making a name.

One half of SAMO was John Michel Basquiat. And I mean, they met at SVU. You tell the story of Keith, getting John shallon. And he’s running around doing his graffiti, as well. And they were they were friendly. Certainly. I mean, they were coming up at the same time. But they were also sort of blowing up the rules. I mean, there are pieces that John Michel has painted on, like discarded refrigerator doors, like he was painting on whatever he could get a hold of, and there was the sort of trajectory and obviously he died a couple of years. Yeah, a couple of years before, Keith did. But I can’t help but think sort of what kind of work they’d both be producing and what that relationship would have looked like. Because, you know, everyone likes a little friendly rivalry. And I’m sure they I mean, they both thought of each other as great artists, but at the same time, they’re boys of a certain age, there’s a little bit of rivalry.

I bet I think you’d think of I think of it in terms of them. And then I think that whole generation, like Robert maples, or is people were alive and they were 70 year old role models, or what would it be? I mean, the world would definitely be different.

I mean, that brings me to, Keith was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988. He goes public sort of legendarily in this Rolling Stone interview that he agonized over because, I mean, if we go back to that moment in our cultural history, AIDS was a death sentence. We didn’t really know what was going on. I mean, the New York Times was reporting on it like it was a gay cancer. That was that was the headline for a really long time. Certainly St. Vincent’s Hospital in lower New York was sort of the epicenter of a lot of what was happening. And Keith did share his diagnosis in this Rolling Stone pace and PWA, public person with AIDS, right, was just starting to become a thing. And it was I mean, it was radical. It was it was really a rockstar move on his part, and he partially didn’t want to do it because he knew the price of his art would go up. That’s really gruesome and gross.

No, it certainly wasn’t the normal career move at that time or personal move. I mean, rare was the obituary in the times, that admitted that someone had died of AIDS was yeah, it was a weird Rock Hudson was denying having AIDS or he was publicly denying, when basically from the grave was saying he had liver cancer or pneumonia. So for Keith to come out so openly about having AIDS was remarkable. He didn’t want his art to be valued here because of that, he founded a coalition, which was but he knew that the art market well enough. Also at that point, he was, you know, he was had different ideas. He had a secret studio. He was working on great work, right, pretty much until the end, and then he was also using his work for this AIDs messaging and doing your silence equals death painting, and also being an activist within Act Up. Peter Staley was the treasurer of Act Up and told me that he would go to Keith’s studios and Keith would give him brown paper bags with like $10,000 in cash in that woman, Peter would go to the city bank on the Guardia place and deposit it. And they’re like a third of the receipts are backed up in 1989. Keith Haring so he was doing a tremendous amount of selling.

It’s a little weird for me to sort of as I go through my day that Citibank is still there as I go through my sort of daily life. You know, hitting all of these pieces right where they’re here’s the ghost of Keith Haring, right, there’s a giant mural down by where I live on a public pool. And I get to see it every time I walk by, and it’s been there. It’s been there for forever. It probably went up right around the time he died, I think if not, if not before I don’t.

It was earlier. I mean, he painted it. Oh, he did paint it. Okay. Yeah. And the crack is wack mural is back on the FDR Drive. Yep. So a big either. So I decided to Jeffrey Deitch. And we were talking about the valuation of Keith’s art. I mean, sort of all our terms and way. And he just said, well, this doesn’t really apply to him. Because he wasn’t, he wasn’t a studio artist. And he wasn’t saying, Oh, I can’t do that. Because I have a show coming up. And I have to make work. He was also doing all of this public art. He was painting the Berlin Wall, doing it Statue of Liberty banner, so all this kind of work, that that was part of also part of his statement. And that’s not something you can hang on a wall and auction off.

I honestly get giddy thinking about just the body of work that he was able to produce in 10 years.

1000 works

Right. But still, that’s it’s not nothing. And the dude did still sleep and have a life. Although it sounds like from you that he knew how to dance and Bill Cunningham made it sound like maybe he couldn’t. So laughing about that. Okay, but the point is, the man had a life, right edition. I mean, he fed off of the energy of the city and the culture. I mean, there was this moment in New York, right? Where serendipity ruled everything. And I’m just I’m thinking of what I can remember being young in the city at the time, but like, you never knew who you were going to bump into, or where you would end up or like, where the night would take you. Right? Like, it was wild.

I mean, I partly wanted to also tell the story of that time did and one reason Keith had always been in my brain was the you can do that through him. Frank O’Hara true to both public. I mean, O’Hara wasn’t your traditional poet in his era. I mean, he was very involved in in social life and parties and Keith likewise. So the story immediately becomes the story of hundreds of other people and of a time.

Madonna is debuting a couple of singles at Paradise garage and everyone’s like, yeah, okay, because they’ve never heard her and then they hear the music. They’re like, Oh, I mean, that’s this before Time Magazine is throwing Cyndi Lauper and Madonna on to its pages going which one’s gonna win? Because, you know, apparently we can’t have more than one female Popstar.

told me that he cluelessly said Who is that when she was singing and then that’s fine. And he said she’s the next big thing. Which he was and also Larry Lavon helped break Madonna was singing like a virgin which hadn’t been album yet and he helped play that and clubs like paradise garage where people were actually dancing since music propelled them.

Well and Jelly Bean Martinez who, he’s kind of a legendary producer, he comes out of the scene as well. He’s like with Keith at Paradise garage and everything else. So it’s this moment where I’m looking back. And obviously I was not there while this is happening, I’m just conflating my New York, you know, the New York of my youth with Keith, New York and Brad, you have a couple of years on me, but just that idea that anything was possible.

I think the first line of my book is Keith Haring came to New York in 1978. He hit the streets. And those streets were the key to everything. I mean, you’d meet Bucky and Fab Five Freddy were walking down the street and saw Paradise Garage, which Fred knew about and he takes Keith there. And Ingrid See, she at some point said it was like Gauguin discovering Tahiti. Yeah. All this stumbling into things all the time, everything seemed to be random and seem to be by chance. That was part of the or all of the energy of that time.

I’m so happy that people are discovering Haring in a new way. It was wild to read the critics on the show in Los Angeles. And they were like, well, this is a long overdue, and it’s very important and all this other stuff. And I’m kind of laughing to myself. I’m just delighted that everyone’s come to the table finally, right. I didn’t know that Keith had spent any time in Pittsburgh until I read Radiant. And you were like, yeah, he always kind of leaves it out of his biography. And it’s like, Calder comes out of Pittsburgh. Warhol, obviously, famously comes out of Pittsburgh and case like, Yeah, I did some time in Pittsburgh, but we’re really going to talk about New York. And again, like, I know, he’s from Pennsylvania. I know he has this loving family that he’s very fond of to, but he really feels like he’s cut from whole cloth. Right?

I mean, well, that’s where he is. I mean, he always had this line. I mean, he was drawing as a kid, he never really stopped drawing. His sister did a graphic comic book about the boy who couldn’t stop drawing for kids. And but in New York, that really, it figures out how that line becomes his signature, I think and, and once he, once he gets that, that reflects where it is. Now Tony should probably said, Keith was a sponge. And that’s really true. I mean, you can just see him moving through these moments, a kid with color TV, and shows up at his work. And later in his life when he’s in Europe. And he’s in museums and getting taken seriously, as an artist, you see a lot more like sort of, these, these influences popping up. He’s worked so. So he’s very much you can feel especially than the city in the 80s. In that work, called On st to take it out of that and find out it’s still, I mean, radiant, to me is a good word for this okay about their work. It’s always very light.

In addition to all of the painters you just cited, as influences on Haring, I went back to Naked Lunch, the William Burroughs novel that I had not read in quite some time, because that’s also a big piece. I mean, Keith was pulling from sort of Japanese ink paintings. He was pulling, obviously from comics, and Disney and Warhol. But Naked Lunch was a big deal for him. And going back. It had been a minute since I’ve read it. So I have this new edition text. And all I want to do is finish this book right now. And I don’t have the time right, the second but reading Burroughs again. I totally get how this book influences Haring, but also I’m thinking man, there’s a whole generation of writers who owe a big thank you to Mr. Burroughs.

Right. Cuz this do you see this early, earnest, serious period when he’s trying out his art and the site? semiotics is not just a class for him, I mean, he tries to kind of figure out how do I make a language, language and he does it. And then he sees Burroughs at the Nova convention, in 78 and Burroughs thing of Kedah, then becomes also a clue or square. If you take these images, and you cut them into different patterns, they tell a different story. It’s one thing if a barking dog is following two babies, it’s different if two babies are crawling after a barking dog. And together, that becomes a lot of his storytelling and there’s always storytelling in his work to kind of have a message and a narrative that goes through. So borrows surprising to me I think was the depth of the connection to reimburse and the even do a collaboration. Yeah, this is the apocalypse work later on. Also, the relationship with Warhol was extensive. Then I thought and they really had these kind of morning after deep briefings of all the gossip before you know, but also this Warhols pop art, obviously the major influence on keep at the same time, Warhols benefiting from this kind of young energy of being was herring and Bosco. So, mutual inspiration?

I mean, isn’t that what artists supposed to do? Right? Like art begets art? Yeah. In theory. In theory, isn’t that what we’re all aspiring for? Even if it’s on a post it or chalked out on the subway? You know, I know you mentioned at the top of the show that writing this book during lockdown changed how you did biography because you were on zooms with people and whatnot. But it seems like you’ve really settled into like, biography is your thing earlier in your career, you can see all of the different places, there’s a couple of different avenues you’re going down. But it really seems like biography is the thing that you’re happiest pursuing on the page, it seems right about that.

I do know that. I had a kind of an I have a genre ADD, I guess. So. stories and novels and all these things. I mean, it’s where it comes together. Because to me, it is a novel, I mean, I in a way, and then it’s a novel with information in the language, you know, all of this. There’s kind of space for biography. And the biography is not one thing. I mean, people you read different biographies, like can be very different animals. I do I do like having, being able to do everything.

I think too, the way you write this book matches the subject and the time really well. I felt like your sentences are really breezy. I mean, you are, I mean, like, you’re also covering the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and you’re covering some really bad moments in New York’s history. And you’re covering some big challenges to for herring, and yet, I just couldn’t put the book down. And obviously, I have an affinity for the period, I have an affinity for the artist, I have an affinity for your work. But I just I felt like I was hanging out with a guy who was telling me a really great story. And then I was filling in the gaps, sort of, from my own, you know, bopping around the neighborhood kind of thing?

It is a really great story. I mean, and that’s what I think I was saying in the beginning, as part of the that the information facts that make up this story, I mean, you can’t believe that so much is happening, your wants, and then the, the breezy, is also sort of, by necessity, I mean, moving so fast. And, and you keep how you have with every paragraph, crowding in this, like, sort of Pick Me, Pick Me, like which event you’re going to actually write about and jump to next because there’s so much going on. And how he did that is astonishing, because he, you know, he kept, I mean, he was always in some way detached. I mean, even just a great scene maker, he was he knew exactly what he was doing. And he was following his work. And he was very, very work positive. I mean, in a way that Basquiat wasn’t, and Warhol was also, I mean, kind of working all the time. So you had that sort of through line, but the, the momentum of it, and then when you get to the, when he’s diagnosed as HIV positive, the momentum increases. He doesn’t melt away, he creates more and more and more art, and goes to more and more and more places. And he’s very aware of what he’s doing, and, and need and I think had a key he talks about when he was doing kids art, which he does a lot. He was doing it at a hospital, your role, there’s an interview with him where he talks about these drawings for kids, and it’s not just that they’re fun and distracting. But there’s something healing about art and can change you they you know, and I think that Keith had this sense, though, that it was keeping him alive in some way and sort of keep working that way.

The Haring foundation made their entire archive available to you. They didn’t you had seven, seven years with the archive. I mean, that’s an according to you, Keith saved everything. The dude knew he saved everything.

Okay. But some people don’t get this very, he was very aware of what he was doing.

Well, having read Radiant, I’m very grateful that he saved everything. But for you as the biographer, though, how do you know when you’re on the right path, and you’re not suddenly saying, Oh, well, that looks shiny and new. I’m gonna go that way. And it turns out to be a dead end. Like how do you have the discipline? Especially with someone like Haring who has every piece of paper he ever like every idea? I’m sure there’s a lot of posts It notes in a file somewhere, like how do you now you found the actual spine of the story.

I just think that there’s like a pulse, and you follow the pulse, and you have to feel the pulse and, and that the subject needs to be in every paragraph somehow. And I think it was that like, if I’m going somewhere, and then suddenly the pulse has gone away, then go back, right? And so kind of trust, trust your instincts in that way.

So of course, we’re bumping up against time because Keith Haring was the man. And you are a terrific biographer of Keith Haring and his work in his place in the world. But you tell a story. And this is not a spoiler, but you tell a really charming story. As we leave the book about Keith Haring and your own family, and you have a couple of kids now, I’m not entirely sure how old they are. Oh, so they’re tiny. Okay, I’m going to ask you to sort of explain how Haring is a member of your family. And it comes through this book, obviously, but it’s a really nice note to end this episode of the show on.

Well, I think what I was thinking about what to do, I was very aware of, at that time, at younger children. I mean, one was to so you know, they’re not here. But we would go around every night and we say goodnight to the art of something we did. And then, and Walter would point always at the Keith Haring, and I think, the color red. But you know, it’s also realized that I’m going to do this kind of project, it’s going to go on for a while. And is there a way for it also to be available to them? You know, and I just realized that the key kid connection really worked. So I mean, in that way, I always think Walter sort of inspired this book, he pointed me to Keith Haring and, and he is very much a part of his life. And now both kids are in elementary school. They not only do you see kids wearing Keith Haring, but in the classroom across from Walters, on the wall in the hall was a whole, like hallway length page of kids drawing Keith Haring learning how to draw right from these Keith Haring drawings, so you just realize that he’s definitely enduring I mean, talk about it next generation.

It’s a really, really lovely story. Brad Gooch thank you so much Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring is out now. And if you’re a Frank O’Hara fan, please just go get City Poet. It’s just It’s terrific. Thanks so much, Brad.

Thank you for this great conversation.

Poured Over