100 Yards of the Wall: Keith Haring and Berlin

so this is obviously an academic paper, but it is pretty good, and worth a read if you have the time...

The piece was directly to the right of Checkpoint Charlie where the wall runs east to west for a short distance, parallel with Friedrichstraße. It spanned three hundred feet of the wall, taking up the whole, twelve-foot vertical space. The background was painted with a thin layer of yellow, under which one could see the outlines of past graffiti. The subject was a horizontal chain of human figures, their forms defined by seemingly single lines, characteristic of the artist's style. The figures (around 25 in total) were about twelve feet long and sequentially red then black, turned ninety degrees counterclockwise from standing position. The bodies were connected to each other by their limbs- only the one on the right end had feet, only the one on the left end had hands, while the rest were connected to the next body, wrist to ankle.

The bodies had no facial features. The only detail upon them was a circle, sometimes with a dot in the middle (ocular but not necessarily eyes, nor necessarily placed on the head of the bodies). The contours of the body were framed with accent lines, which like the circles, were black when the bodies were red and red when the bodies were black.
The 13th of August Group, acting curators of the West Berlin Wall museum, commissioned Keith Haring to create the project, completed on October 23rd, 1986. Almost immediately after completion, other artists began to paint over the piece. When the wall was destroyed in 1989, so was the mural, which by that time, was only visible in small fragments.
The piece was impermanent. Although the press was present during its making, it was not a mural which had a profound lasting effect on the art world. It was not one of Haring's finest works, nor is the image particularly important in the scope of 1980s Berliner art. But the piece is significant as a representation of street-art and its roots in New York, as a representation of street-art and its effect on Berlin, as a representation of street-art and its roots in social activism, and its roll as a voice of protest for demographics who from otherwise are unheard. With Haring’s Berlin Wall mural, two art cultures which ran parallel for a while, met and culminated, appropriately unsung and temporary.

The Cold War was the central theme in international politics at the time, and really, throughout the second half of the twentieth century; creating a worldwide divide. Dozens of wars and conflicts on almost every continent were fought across this divide. Nuclear weapons were toted by both sides, aimed at the other. American communists were blacklisted. Russian cynics were executed. The sense of bipolarity was the only sense, at least on the world stage. And at the center of it all was Berlin. And in the center of Berlin was the wall, very much a physical wall, but representing the aforementioned divide which split humanity for half a century. Furthermore, if one had to assign a finite epicenter, it would be Checkpoint Charlie, directly next to Keith Haring's mural.
By the date of commission, Haring was one of the best-known living American artists. He was an icon, even amongst a circle of celebrities (Madonna, Basquait, Warhol, etc.). His style, still recognizable by millions, had a profound and lasting effect on fashion and art. And even eighteen years after his death, he is arguably the most celebrated street-artist in modern history. And it is this pedigree that made his work in Berlin so significant.
By street-art, we basically mean graffiti; a term coined by the New York Times in the early seventies. Most historians trace the roots of modern graffiti to the mid 1960s in Philadelphia and New York. It was use by both gangs and activists, as a means of marking territory and spreading social messages, respectively. New York became the hub of graffiti culture in subsequent years. Graffiti has always been associated with vandalism, crime, and hip-hop, and as the art form rose in popularity, New York began to crumble. "It (connotations of the word graffiti) denigrates the art because it was invented by youth of color. Had it been invented by the children of the rich or the influential, it would have been branded avant-garde Pop Art."
As graffiti expanded in popularity over the next decade, it wasn't until Jean-Michel Basquait, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring started doing work that the form garnered broad respect in the high art world. "Keith (and Jean-Michel) were never true subway artists. People had an easier time digesting what they did because they could refer back to art history."
Keith Haring (1958-1990) was born in Reading and grew up in near by Kutztown, Pennsylvania. Artistically ambitious from an early age, Haring was inspired by the cartoons of his childhood later stating that, "they (cartoon figures) were similar to the way I started to draw- with one line and a cartoon outline." In 1976, he enrolled the Ivy School of Professional Arts in Pittsburgh. After two years, Haring left Pittsburgh for New York, where he took classes at the School of Visual Arts. Over the next two years, Haring etched out a place for himself in the alternative art and club scenes, which were (at least in Haring's case) very much intertwined.
In 1980, Haring did his first pieces of street art- a series of spray-painted stencils on the streets comprising the border between the East and West Village reading "Clones Go Home" referring to the community-based fear of gentrification through West Villager expansion eastward. Later that year, Haring began tagging in the subway. But it was his 1981 decision to start drawing with chalk on vacant advertising panels (covered with black paper) in subway stations that solidified Haring's role as a street-artist, and in the history of graffiti, even if that was a culture of which he, admittedly so, was never fully a part.

"With this form of naive genius, Keith Haring disseminated simple truths that needed no precise explanation."
Haring's art, while it borrowed the arenas, and vandalistic and activist aspects of graffiti, its form had more influence drawn from, and more in common with pop art. The repetition within his paintings and thematically across his repertoire are inline with methods of Warhol and Liechtenstein. Haring's subway art was always destroyed, suggesting that Haring saw it as dispensable, a commodity. His work was kitsch, marketable even before any of it was sold.
Keith Haring's place in the art world, visible at the periphery graffiti and as a pop icon allowed him to act as a liaison between the graffiti world and the greater public sphere. "Keith Haring would tell you he was not a graffiti artist, but he was based, rooted, and inspired by it. He was very conscious of the racial dynamics of fitting in with the black and Puerto Rican kids. And he did it."
The artist's first solo exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982 solidified his standing as a famous artist. Within the years leading up to the Berlin Wall Mural, Haring's work was exhibited across the world, in galleries and commissioned public projects. He took the responsibility of his role as a public figure and artist seriously. Although his work was not "restricted to general or socio-critical aspects", his art and person advocated for a number of relevant causes; around drug use, safe sex, HIV/AIDS awareness, ending South African Apartheid, among others. He often worked with children, or on behalf of charities, or both.

The Berlin Wall was ideal for Keith Haring. It was technically under the authority of the German Democratic Republic. Painting upon it was the ultimate act of graffiti, vandalism against a representative of the Eastern Bloc, the epitome of authority. It was the ultimate political canvas, and yet he was commissioned, surrounded by cameras while painting, as only a pop icon could be.
In a less mainstream and tangible way, this mural holds gravity. The tradition from which graffiti, and Haring's artistic roots stem is one of a criminal act of protest.
German art, particularly in the twentieth century, was very concerned with the socio-political. Germany formed as the Prussian Empire in 1871, authoritarian until WWI (1914-1918). The defeat of the Central Powers coincided with an internal revolution in Germany (1918-1919). The 1919 Treaty of Versailles forced the newly formed Weimar Republic take sole responsibility for WWI, concede territory and pay reparations to the Allies. The depression happened. The Nazi party, under Adolf Hitler, seized power. National socialism. WWII. The Holocaust. The quartering of Germany. The formation of the DDR. The construction of the Berlin Wall. German artists and their art had had no choice but to provide a social commentary, and they/it did.
For instance, the early expressionist school of Die Brucke was committed to changing social and artistic conventions. Or, although the early work of Paul Klee deals with a variety of subject matter, his work from the 1930s speaks primarily on the artist’s opposition to the Third Reich.

Mask of Fear. Klee, Paul (German, born Switzerland), 1932. Oil on burlap, 39 5/8 x 22 1/2" (100.4 x 57.1 cm). Nelson A. Rockefeller Fund. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
This opposition was a two-way street. The Third Reich effectively outlawed modern art. Paul Klee and all the artists in Die Brucke, with the exception of Fritz Beyl who left in 1916, and Otto Meuller who died in 1930, were defamed by the Nazi regime as degenerates. The Bauhaus school of art was closed. Artists like Wassily Kandinsky were expelled. Because of the feud between progressive art and the Nazi authorities, all modern art, even if it was apolitical in subject matter, became a form of protest.
As expelled artists returned to Germany after the end of WWII, most of the radicals, particularly those who belonged to the Association of Revolutionary Artists or ASSO, returned to Soviet controlled Germany as it was considered the most progressive section of their country. The newly formed German Democratic Republic, however, did not see the art of ASSO members as suitable for the GDR, as it went against Stalinist doctrine, which claimed that true socialist art could not be created under a capitalist system (such as the Weimar Republic). Furthermore, East Germany was somewhat paranoid of cryptic artistic criticism of the state by its own artists. Although less stringent after the death of Stalin in 1953 and a pair of Wolfgang Hutt’s essays in 1957 and 1958, socialist realism- or in Gerhard Richter’s words, “criminal idealism”- was the only accepted style in the GDR, and therefore all outside of it (works by Altenbourg, Baselitz, Metzke, Sitte, Mattheuer, Pfeizer, etc.) was a form of protest, a de facto political statement.
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961. In the first fifteen years, the occasional messy political slogan or name would be painted on the wall. “The bad quality of the stone blocks and the first concrete segments prevented… the artists, from doing any paintings,” wrote Thierry Noir, a French street artist who lived in US controlled Mitte neighbourhood (Berlin). In 1975, the fourth generation wall was constructed with neat, flat, interlocking concrete slabs. In the early eighties, graffiti culture came to Germany, by way of documentaries like “Wild Style” (1982) and “Style Wars” (1983), and books such as “Subway Art” (1984). “The first so-called writers were heavily influenced by the New York City scene.” The street level cityscape of West Berlin, and after 1989, the whole city was/is dominated by graffiti. Berlin is generally considered the European, and sometimes the world, capital of graffiti. A German graffiti artist, who gave only the name Mason, explained, “We (Germany) took quickly to graffiti. It seemed like it was made for us.” And it is not difficult to see why.
Graffiti is undeniably American, but it is abreast with the main twentieth century Artistic traditions of Germany- expressionism, post-expressionism, and neo-expressionism. These styles, like graffiti, were not necessarily political (although they often are) in content, but in form, they were actively opposed to authority. Progressive art was illegal under the Third Reich, and repressed in the GDR. The Federated Republic of Germany or FDR (West Germany) mandated no such censorship. The only way that West German art could remain akin with its East German counterpart or its recent artistic history, not in style, but in the (poetic) sentiment of protest, was to find a medium that the deemed authorities found unacceptable; graffiti. Coincidentally, just as Haring’s found success through guerilla art, the community and administration in West Berlin embraced graffiti, even putting photographs of Wall-paintings on tourist pamphlets.

Graffiti has continued to flourish as an art form, across the world, and in New York and Berlin. It has been further commoditized, finding its way into galleries and numerous mainstream cultures. The urban renewal of New York under Giuliani and later Bloomberg didn’t stop or even slow graffiti. But perhaps as the city became more livable, the original intention of graffiti as a means of protest became less pressing. In Berlin, the transitional authorities of the 1990s had intensively lax vandalism policies. The explosion of graffiti and general counter-culture, notably in East Berlin, acted as a symbol of rebirth, of long-overdue freedom of expression and victory over the powers that be. As a reunified Germany has regained its footing, street-art continues to flourish throughout the city and country, but like graffiti in New York, it does not have the same magnitude or conjure the same sense of urgency that it did before the fall of the Wall or directly thereafter.
In “Keith Haring” by Jeffrey Deitch, the artist speaks rather matter-of-factly about the Wall mural. “I knew it had to be political…I picked red, yellow and black because they were the colors of both (the FDR’s and the GDR’s) flags.” The entire project took only three days. It was not perceived revolutionary or monumental. As it works out, however, the piece embodies its time, place and medium; a time capsule, even if it only still exists intangibly.