'Keith Haring: Languages,” a Symposium and Exhibition at , December 12, 2013

New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections presents an afternoon symposium, "Keith Haring: Languages" on December 12, 2013 from 3:00pm to 6:30pm, Fales Library, third floor, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, (at LaGuardia Place). [Subways A, C, E, B, D, F, M to West 4th Street; 6 line to Astor Place; R train to 8th Street]. At the conclusion of the symposium, the exhibition, "Keith Haring: Languages," curated by Andrew Blackley, which focuses on archival objects and rarely-screened video artworks made by Keith Haring (1979-81) will open to the public. Please refer to the Fales website for a more detailed schedule of events. (http://www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/fales/eventstest.html)

Beginning at 3pm, the symposium, introduced by Fales Director Marvin J. Taylor and curator Andrew Blackley, will be composed of two panels of participants presenting papers which offer new approaches to Haring's work from variety of academic and professional disciplines.

Drawn from the materials maintained by the Keith Haring Foundation, the participants -- curators, art historians, filmmakers, critics and scholars -- were asked to look at Haring not simply as a visual artist, but as a figure engaged with, among other things, semiotics, mathematics, and language-both verbal and visual.

"We've aimed to create a platform for the production of new scholarship - at once speculative and historical - applicable to this interesting and important moment in Haring's career," said panel organizer and exhibition curator, Andrew Blackley.

"The Keith Haring Foundation is committed to utilizing its archive to generate new perspectives on Keith Haring's career," said Julia Gruen, Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation. "The opportunity to do so with NYU's Fales Collection is particularly satisfying, since the library, curator Andrew Blackley and several scholars are exploring and offering insights into some of Haring's least-known and rarely investigated earliest work. We couldn't be happier with this initiative, and hope that it inspires others to conduct similarly deep exploration into other facets of Haring's practice and philosophy of art."

"Keith Haring was one of the most important artists to rise out of the explosion of creativity that was the downtown New York Scene of the 1970s and 80s, but his popularity came with a price: He has, to some, been largely considered a pop culture icon," said Taylor. "Haring was much more than that. Andrew Blackley has delved into Haring's work with language and opened a whole new way for scholars to approach Haring's work. The scholars at this symposium have followed Blackley's lead and will take us to new understandings of this complicated and ever-fascinating artist. We're especially honored that the Keith Haring Foundation chose the Fales Library as the site for the symposium and exhibition."

Presenters and their affiliations: Johanna Burton - New Museum of Contemporary Art, NY;
Anthony Elms - Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania; Maria Engberg - Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden; Alex Fialho; Diarmuid Hester - University of Sussex, UK; Laura Hoptman - Museum of Modern Art, NY; Ryan Purcell; Amy Raffel - City University of New York; and artist Scott Treleaven.

The symposium coincides with Keith Haring: Languages, an exhibition focusing on early (1979-1981) and rarely-screened video artworks made by Keith Haring. These titles include Lick Fat Boys, Machine, Phonics, and Videotape for Two Monitors, among others. Each video features a distinct composition and structure, utilizing strict, exhaustive structures of predetermined repetition and replacement. Others appear to be "live edited" as performed from memory.

The exhibition will explore the textual content developed behind these video artworks and their transitional use in Haring's early performances and installations. The textual artworks within the exhibition hold unique positions as they individually occupy multiple categorical qualifiers - drawings, verses, plans, poems and exercises. The exhibition draws from and showcases selected materials from Haring's archive as modular; together composing a matrix of exchangeable but specific data. Rather than highlighting individual documents as representative, the exhibition is organized to allow for each of the 130+ items to interact within the syntax of matrices. Each model is allowed to exist and function both autonomously and as a key component of a set.

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