Keith Haring's Line Race and the Performance of Desire

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"KEITH HARING'S LINE offers one of the first monographic treatments of Keith Haring's artistry, paying specific attention to Haring's engagements with non-white artists and artistic traditions. Foregrounding Haring's fetishization of men of color, Ricardo Montez seeks to challenge fixed narratives of race and power by moving from a notion of collaboration to a model of complicity. In doing so, Montez asks how we can view Haring's signature artistic line-with its appropriation of Black and Latino artistic cultures-as mobile and unfixed, rather than encased in a foreclosed moral narrative. Montez takes us into the scenes of artistic collaboration, examining how Haring's interactions with artists of color were problematic in their racialized components, but also provided new avenues for representational practice. Lastly, Montez, a performance studies scholar, seeks to examine the work that Haring's line and artwork continue to do in the world, thereby unsettling moralizing narratives that have developed since the artist's death in 1990. This book is comprised of an introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1 examines the early writing and work of Haring, theorizing the ties between the development of his signature line and his cross-racial desire. Chapter 2 explores Haring's non-sexual artistic collaboration with Puerto Rican graffiti artist LA II, and traces the process of exchange present in their relationship: for Haring, commodity and sexual fetishism, and for LA II, a way to engage with Haring's work as a means towards his own success. Chapter 3 examines Grace Jones's relationship with French photographer Jean-Paul Goude, and Goude's desire to manipulate Jones's body into the representational image of "ideal primitive beauty"-something which inspired Haring in his own collaborations with Jones. Chapter 4, inspired by both the animating force of Haring's archive and the work of Josâe Esteban Muänoz, examines the performativity of Haring's work in the present. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of art history, performance studies, queer studies, Latinx studies, and African American studies"--