In 1984 Keith Haring traveled to Australia with the promise of working on a large exhibition, which never actually led to anything, because the organizer of the trip “flaked on the whole thing.” During his visit Haring did a mural at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, which became a contentious subject because his images reminded many Australians of motifs in Aboriginal art, leading to angry charges of misappropriation, charges that seem misguided in the lack of awareness of Haring’s work generally.
While Haring was down under, he received an offer to do a large-scale mural at Collingwood Technical School. Haring agreed and completed the entire project in a single day. Haring was right at the start of what might be called his mural period—previous phases had included the “getting arrested by NYC transit cops” period.
It is said that the Collingwood project was the first time that Haring employed a cherry picker, an idea that obviously permitted Haring to think more ambitiously in terms of wall space.
Here is Haring’s brief account of that trip, as reproduced in Keith Haring: The Authorized Biography, an oral history edited by John Gruen:
Right after my 1984 show at Shafrazi, I’m invited by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and by the Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, to go to Australia. Each wants me to do an on-site project.
The Melbourne gallery wants me to paint a huge glass wall, which has a cascade of water running down the front of it. This was the facade of the gallery, which is considered an equivalent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. So, they turn off the waterfall and supply me with a sort of scissor lift, which moves me back and forth or up and down.
I buy paints that work on glass, and proceed to do this mural with red and black paint. It takes about two days, and the whole thing is documented on film by pupils of the Australian Film School. When the mural is finished, front-page stories begin to appear in the Melbourne press, stating how insulting it was that I, an American artist, had been hired to come to Australia to make Aboriginal art. I didn’t even know what Aboriginal art was! But the Australians took real offense at what they considered to be an invasion of their artistic heritage. They got real paranoid about the whole thing.
Well, what I had painted on the glass wall was exactly what I was painting all over the world. I mean, the imagery contained all kinds of concentric circles and snakes and little figures and patterns. I had no idea they strongly resembled Aboriginal art. Two months later, I learned that someone had taken a gun and shot through the central panel of the painting––and the whole thing had to be removed.
When I was in Melbourne, somebody called from the Collingwood Technical School, which is an all-boys elementary to junior high school. This person said that they had no funds, but that there was a great wall just outside the school, and would I be interested in painting it? I went to look at it, and agreed to do it––and it’s become a permanent site!
-snip-
On the whole, the Australian experience wasn’t all that hot. What finally happened was that the guy who sponsored the whole trip––someone who seemed like a really great guy––just ripped me off. I mean, he got me to do all these paintings and drawings, which I left there because he was going to organize this big exhibition. Instead, he flaked on the whole thing. When I got back to New York, we never heard from him again. We tried to track him down, because he never paid for the art works, and there never was an exhibition. So I have all these lost works in Australia!
The yellow, red, and green mural at the Collingwood Technical School faded and fell into disrepair over the years, and a small door on which Haring had placed his familiar infant image—that motif’s formal name is “Radiant Baby”—was actually stolen. A few years ago the Aussies realized that they had a chance to save an item that was precious indeed, one of the few Haring murals left in the world.
More after the jump…