San Francisco Chronicle - September 12, 2008
Kenneth Baker

"The Universe of Keith Haring" reminded me of the occasional thrill of coming upon Haring's puzzling, unsigned chalk drawings in the New York subway at the turn of the 1980s, before he made a name for himself above ground.

Talking heads in Christina Clausen's documentary recall that dealers and friends exhorted Haring (1958-1990) to curtail his staggering productivity to enhance the market for his work. But he would not, or could not, or both.

"The Universe of Keith Haring" makes a theme of his generosity. In demand all over the world, he stipulated late in his brief career that any commitment to exhibit abroad would have to include him making a permanent work on a public site in the host city. Few balked.

Haring's murals and sculptures - such as the one at Third and Howard streets in San Francisco - adorn outdoor plazas and institutional walls on several continents. Haring motifs such as the "radiant child" and barking dog, and his edge-to-edge figural arabesques in tape-flat line have, with his blessing, migrated onto the surfaces of all kinds of consumer goods.

As someone notes in the film, whereas Haring's hero and friend Andy Warhol (1928--1987) took common stuff and made it into art, Haring strived to make his art the common property of society.

"The Universe of Keith Haring" gives the artist's life by-the-book documentary treatment, with help from interview footage made by his official biographer John Gruen.

We hear quite a bit from Haring himself, but also from his parents and siblings, who survived him when he died of AIDS.

Tracing his rise to art stardom from the small town of Kutztown, Pa., "The Universe of Keith Haring" evokes well the intertwining of the art and gay club scenes in the East Village of the late '70s and early '80s. The hand-drawn phallic burlesque of his coming-out years is the only material in the film that may put off prudish viewers.

Haring comes to personify both the early devastating impact of AIDS on the creative community and the wider society's incremental acceptance of gay sensibility since.

Several sequences show, at both normal and accelerated speeds, Haring's truly prodigious ability to improvise a composition - across a page or 100 feet of wall - and make it look coherent, even thematic. The name Jackson Pollock never gets mentioned in "The Universe of Keith Haring," but in his fearless address to big, empty surfaces - if only in that - Haring was Pollock's peer.

In its filmic conventionality and reliance on driving musical soundtrack, "The Universe of Keith Haring" actually makes too little of his gift for thinking out loud in images. And although generally chronological, it could have used more time pegs. Only once in a while does the film assign a year to events, keeping a viewer wondering about its narrative accuracy.

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