Free, and On the Way to Work

Between 1980 and 1985 Keith Haring drew in chalk on the black paper that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority used to cover expired advertising panels in the subway.

He did not put the paper there. The MTA did, because an advertiser's subscription had run out. Haring noticed it, went up to the street, bought chalk, and came back down.

He was caught repeatedly. In his own words: some officers wrote him a ten-dollar ticket, some handcuffed him and took him in. He kept going for five years. Nobody has a reliable count of how many drawings he made; his foundation says only hundreds, and notes he sometimes did forty in a day.

What interests me is the audience. He was not making work for people who had decided to look at art. He was making it for people who were standing on a platform because they had to be.

Jacob A. Riis, with Richard Hoe Lawrence and Henry G. Piffard, Bandit's Roost, 59½ Mulberry Street, about 1888. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five attempts to reach people who were not coming to look

1. Haring, and a surface that was already there

The constraint set the style. Haring, on why the drawings look the way they do:

The drawings are by necessity quick and simple. This is not only for easy readability but also to avoid getting arrested.

That is a working artist describing a line that has to be legible at walking pace and finishable before a transit officer arrives. The famous vocabulary — the radiant baby, the barking dog, the crawling figure — is downstream of a time limit and a police risk, not of a stylistic decision made in a studio.

He also noticed the numbers. "The number of people passing one of these drawings in a week was phenomenal." No gallery he ever showed in came close.

2. Riis, and a chemical that let him photograph the dark

Jacob Riis was a police reporter in New York in the 1880s, working out of an office on Mulberry Street opposite police headquarters. He wanted people to see what the tenements looked like, and the tenements were dark.

In early 1887 he read a short dispatch from Germany about flashlight photography and recruited three amateurs who knew how to use it. The early apparatus fired magnesium powder from a revolver. His own description:

our party carried terror wherever it went … it was not to be wondered at if the tenants bolted through windows and down fire-escapes.

He later swapped the revolver for a frying pan, set fire to two buildings, and once blew the flash into his own eyes, saved from blindness by his spectacles.

The point of the technology was access. It meant he could photograph an interior, at night, where the people actually were. And the delivery was not a gallery. It was lantern-slide lectures to church congregations, and then a book.

3. What was actually in that book

How the Other Half Lives was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1890 and it sold enormously. It is routinely described as the first book illustrated with halftone photographs. That is wrong, and the correction is interesting.

Of its forty-three illustrations, most are not photographic reproductions at all. Twenty-one were carried over from an 1889 Scribner's Magazine article, and twelve of those are fine-line wood engravings made by five different artists from pen-and-ink drawings after Riis's photographs. The artists rearranged figures freely. Kenyon Cox signed his "After Photo." Riis annotated one of them: "This picture was smuggled into the story. It was not mine and had nothing to do with it."

Halftone in 1890 was still experimental. It became commercially viable around 1895.

Table 1. The most influential book of social photography in America is not quite a book of photographs. Established by Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis, University of Chicago Press.

None of this means the tenements were not as bad as he said. No serious scholar argues that. The argument is about method, framing and language, and Riis's own text is full of ethnic caricature that has not aged.

4. The Pop Shop, and the objection

In April 1986 Haring opened a shop in SoHo selling T-shirts, badges and posters of his own images, and a substantial part of the art world treated it as a betrayal.

His answer was that it was the same argument as the subway:

My shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art.

You can disagree with that. What you cannot do is call it a change of position, because it is the position he had been acting on since 1980.

5. The record outlives the work

Almost none of the subway drawings survived in place. They were erased, papered over, or cut out and taken. Haring: "Sometimes they erase them, cross them out, or even steal them. These are the only things that inhibit my work."

What survives in situ survives only as photographs, nearly all of them by Tseng Kwong Chi, who followed him down and shot the drawings where they were made. Those photographs are themselves copyrighted, to Muna Tseng Dance Projects, and must be credited.

So the free work made for people who were not looking at art now exists mainly as licensed images owned by a third party. That is not a scandal. It is just what happens when the work is a chalk line on paper that belongs to a transit authority.

What I take from it

Both of these are attempts to move the work to where the audience already is, and both of them changed the work to fit the channel. Riis's pictures are lit by an explosion because the rooms were dark. Haring's line is fast because the officer was coming.

The channel is not neutral and it never was. If you are choosing where something will be seen, you are also choosing what it will look like, and you are usually choosing that first.