Keith Haring (1958 - 1990)

Excerpts from Haring's Journals (source)

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October 14, 1978, NYC

"No artists are part of a movement. Unless they are followers. And then they are unnecessary and doing unnecessary art. If they are exploring in an 'individual way' with 'different ideas' the idea of another individual, they are making a worthy contribution, but as soon as they call themselves followers or accept the truths they have not explored as truths, they are defeating the purpose of art as an individual expression -- Art as art."

"The meaning of art as it is experienced by the viewer, not the artist.
The artist's ideas are not essential to the art as seen by the viewer.
The viewer is an artist in the sense that he conceives a given piece of his own way that is unique to him.
His own imagination determines what it is, what it means.
The viewer does not have to be considered during the conception of the art, but should not be told, then, what to think or how to conceive it or what it means. There is no need for definition."

"The public needs art, and it is the responsibility of a 'self-proclaimed artist' to realize the public needs art, and not to make bourgeois art for the few and ignore the masses. ... I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many different individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middleman trying to bring ideas together."

November 7, 1978

"I feel in some way that I may be continuing a search, continuing an exploration that other painters have started and were unable to finish because they advanced to new ideas, as I will also, or perhaps because they were unable to carry out their ideas because of the cruel simple fact of death. It seems that artists are never ready to die. Their lives are stopped before their ideas are completed. Matisse making new discoveries up until the time he could hardly se, using scissors, creating ideas that sparked new ideas until death interrupted. Every true artist leaves unresolved statements, interrupted searches. There may be significant discoveries, seemingly exhausted possibilities, but there is always a new idea that results from these discoveries
     I am not a beginning
     I am not an end
     I am a link in a chain
     The strength of which depends on my own contributions, as well as the contributions of those before and after me
     I hope I am not in vain in thinking that I may be exploring possibilities that artists like Stuart Davis, Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Alechinsky have initiated but did not resolve. Their ideas are living ideas. They cannot be resolved, only explored deeper and deeper. I find comfort in the knowledge that they were on a similar search.
     In some sense, I am not alone. I feel it when I see their work. Their ideas live on and increase in power as they are explored and rediscovered. I am not alone, as they were not alone, as no artist of the the brotherhood ever was or ever will be alone. When I am aware of this unity, and refuse to let my self-doubt and lack of self-confidence interfere, it is one of the most wonderful feelings I've ever experienced. I am a necessary part of an important search to which there is no end."