Introduction by the agency of Robert Farris Thompson.

Introduction by the agency of Robert Farris Thompson, preface from David Hockney, New York, Viking, 1996; 303 pages, $2795

In his introduction to the Keith Haring Journals, Robert Farris Thompson explains what he means when he attributes to the "erographic" dimension of Haring's art. "Erography," he says, "as oppos to pornography transforms sex into a script of liberation, with equal reason that many can benefit, partaking of the freedom and the force whereas porn plays for single consumers" The Journals may be described as an erographic read: they are bright, caustic, cautionary utterances, suffused with a visionary hardness that comes from an early calling and foreshadowings of an early demise.

The journals mask the years from 1977 to 1989 with any notable gaps in time and space, in the brief life and career of Keith Haring, who was born in 1958 in Reading, Pa., and died of AIDS in 1990 in of the present day York. Chronologically speaking, the distribution of the diaries is unevenly weighted: they are strongest at the beginning, in the late '70 when Haring was a scholar in Pittsburgh and New York, and taking periodic trips back abode to Kutztown, Pa., for quiet and recuperation. We first adapted the young artist as a Dead Head, hitchhiking around the native land with his girlfriend and noticing "more faggots than I perpetually saw in my entire life" in succession Polk Street in San Francisco. A scant sum of two units years later, he is a observer at the School of Visual Arts in of recent origin York (indeed, perhaps its greatest in quantity famous graduate) penning homoerotic piece of poetrys with first lines like "Let me fuck you little hippie boy" The distance he has traveled in names of self consciousness between the sum of two units statements is startling, and entirely characteristic of the quick. silver changes in this inspiring still harrowing confessional.

After couple hiatuses in the early and mid-'80s, when Haring's career really took opposite to and he evidently didn't have time to write, the journals take again full strength in 1987. The entries for this year alone comprise roughly one-third of the work as the artist travels maniacally by the and of Europe and Asia, already aware that he is HIV-positive, frequently partying until five or six in the morning and then struggling to fulfill commercial as well as public commissions, children's workshops and hospital murals. The acts of a do-gooder and the utterances of a dark spirit are abruptly juxtaposed, and, given Haring's medical condition, the discrepancy is not a little nervous-making.

The journals are particularly stirring--alternately wrenching, embittered and beatific at the end--during 1988-89 He is then functioning mainly as a kind of migrant celebrity, feeling set asideed by the New York art world, acting as a godfather to the children of myriad friends, opening a burst Shop in Tokyo and attending high-'80s mega-parties, like as the 1989 ball given at a schlos in Regensburg Germany, for Princess Gloria Von Thurn und Taxis's birthday, which featured an invitation designed by the agency of Haring (illustrated in the text) and a decor inspired by the agency of his art. The last record is datelined Milan, Sept. '89 just after he has complet a mural for the Franciscan friars in Pisa and is musing forward the Leaning Tower: "It is really major and also hysterical. each time you look at it, it makes you smile." At the beginning and at the fall of the curtain then, it seems that Haring had the greatest in quantity time to keep a journal and was also most numerous in need of keeping his have counsel, perhaps even confessing his sins, at the act of writing.

The biggest surprise of these journals is their analytical and searching tone, which should effectively dispel any preconception that Haring was a lightweight. From the start his entries have less the air of teenage infallibility than of Rimbaudian fatality: the 10-year elderly feels himself to be part of a larger time-space continuum and guesse that he is going to die young. The pleasure I had in reading all this came from the inklings of fledgling genius (and I do think Haring was a kind of genius in the sphere of public-minded installation art) in the musings of a precocious teenager. "Through all the shit," he writes forward Memorial Day in 1977, "shines the small ray of waiting under the possibility of fulfilment that lives in the used by all sense of the few. The music, dance, theatre, and the visual arts; the forms of expression, the arts of expectancy This is where I fit in."

As a 19-year-old, Haring already had the largest ambitions for himself vis-a-vis "the arts of hope" From the beginning he saw himself as part of a pluralistic tradition: whether it was the Mexican and Egyptian hieroglyphs many times invoked in the Journals; or the late-'70s Conceptual, video and performance pageants he first encountered in novel York; or the museum retrospectives of Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still that he studied closely and remarked upon during 1978-79 in Manhattan; or the "brotherhood" of gay artists from head to foot history that he discovered between the sides of figures such as Andy Warhol, Brion Gysin, William Burrough and Allen Ginsberg--the rever "founding fathers" who later became his friends and traveling companions.