IGNORANCE=FEAR, SILENCE=DEATH

        

 IGNORANCE=FEAR, SILENCE=DEATH

    Keith Haring created this painting in 1989; Keith Haring was a famous artist in Pop Art and Graffiti Art. Apparently, this painting is about encouraging those people and Keith Haring, himself who have AIDS illness to face their own status on this illness, whether or not they are negative or positive.

   This painting’s name is IGNORANCE=FEAR, SILENCE=DEATH, it is really a meaningful painting. There is a famous saying says: “Silence is always golden,” but looking at the bottom of this AIDS awareness picture, it says: “Silence=Death,” it is very clear to see that Keith Haring does not believe silence is golden. A professional analysis says: "there are three human figures and each represents a certain type of silence or behavior of ignorance. The left little yellow human figure is covering its eyes, the middle one is covering its ears, and the right one is covering its mouth. These three human figures represent the way humans cover their eyes, ears, and mouth and pretend problems like AIDS illness does not exist because they do not accept the truth that they have AIDS and refuse to learn more about it and get involved."

       Unfortunately, they will have a costly consequence of their ignorance. Look at the three human figures have some little curved black lines bursting around their sides. These black lines seem like the dying urge that those seriously sick persons really want to speak out, listen to, and see the things that are about AIDS.

     Keith Haring’s works were quite controversial; some scholars thought that his pictures were concerned with concrete cases of murder, power and threat, sex, AIDS prevention and these works often moved between the genres of history painting and political placard. The professional analysis from Jeromede Noirmont Gallery claimed:

“Up to his death in 1990 Keith Haring redoubled his efforts to bear witness to the value and richness of life, love and sex, and become aware of the importance of time and the urgency of his work. Generations of kids growing up now have the advantage of knowing that it [AIDS] is out there. Before it existed, it is something you never would have thought about, that you could associate love or blood, or sperm, with the carriers of death. [...] The only good thing to come out is that it has put this real intensity to the time, that forces people to really rethink why they’re here and why they’re alive, and to appreciate every second.(Keith Haring sic.) Illness then led Keith Haring to become a militant in associations such as Act Up. (Sentence in the painting) In parallel, he devoted himself ever more actively, in his art, to AIDS prevention, as in his painting Safe Sex, to the need for information, fighting against silence and ignorance,and increasing performances throughout the world.”

       Obviously, this painting was created by Keith Haring to encourage people to learn more about AIDS illness and to act up and fight with. In the middle of the human figures, there are “X”s and they are also representing the virus, which is one that the immune system cannot fight off. The latest data show that there are about 3.34 million people live with AIDS in the world and most of them are from Sub-Saharan Africa. Many people seem are from the Third World Countries and they are less educated and responding to this illness in a negative way. So the audience of this painting is the people who have AIDS, but they are lack of the education of this illness, and preventing themselves from speaking out. This illness is like a terrible stigma to them; they are afraid of talking about this illness to anybody, even their family and afraid of being judged or being shunned from society.

       Almost the end of the 1980s, Keith Haring created this painting to correct those stupid thoughts about AIDS illness. Just as Keith Haring did, he admitted he had AIDS; he redoubled his efforts to bear witness to the value and richness of life, love and sex, and became aware of the importance of time and the urgency of his work; he also helped with his company in distress through his painting works and his foundation. Be positive to your life and fight with the problems, it is just what this painting’s aim, no ignorance and no silence.

       Keith Haring was a really typical pop art star (some people might think his works were more like Graffiti, but he usually had fun with some pop art artists, like Andy Warhol, so he was a part of them), even the pop art mogul, Andy Warhol was jealous of his talent. Pop art is an art movement that started from British and then in the late 1950s. This type of art presented a challenge to traditions of fine art, it seemed like the Rock Roll did to the traditional music at the same time period. The concept of pop art refers not as much to the art itself as to the attitude that led to it. (de la Croix, H.; Tansey, R., Gardner's Art Through the Ages) I feel that pop art is really similar to Dada, (roots in Dada) which has almost the same utilization of found object and images. The usage of mechanical means of reproduction or rendering techniques in pop art aimed to employ images of popular as opposed to elitist culture in art, emphasizing the banal elements of any given culture, most often through the use of irony. (de la Croix, H.; Tansey, R., Gardner's Art Through the Ages)

       According to the development of pop art, it is a kind of rebelling against the esoteric vocabulary of abstract art, the artists wanted to express their optimism after so much hardship and privation in a youthful visual language. (Pop art-art history 101basics) Later, in the peaceful, modern and party 1990s, the whole society were full of energy and preferred to try the new and simple things rather than those more conservative and complex things; they wanted to think and behave out of the box, so pop art were gradually encouraged by the whole society. 

TS Zhang