The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Keith Haring · a mural in exterior paint on a free-standing handball wall, both faces painted · the words CRACK IS WACK in large black outlined capitals on a field of strong orange, with figures in thick black line: a figure in the grip of a monstrous form, skeletal and devouring forms, money, a burning pipe, bodies bent and squeezed · painted in the summer of 1986, without permission · East 128th Street at the Harlem River Drive, Manhattan, in the playground the city named after it · the unit scored is the mural, both faces of the wall as one work, as it now stands on its site
Mode
Unsanctioned public mural with a civic warning; the street painter’s illicit wall fused with the public health poster, in Haring’s pictographic idiom
Mythos
The devourer, the hell mouth, the dance of death and money as the idol, evoked as signs read at once rather than built into a structure
Phase
The summer of 1986, the years of crack in New York; the wall adopted by the city and named into its playground
Presentation
Exterior paint on a free-standing handball wall, both faces painted; a flat orange ground, black outline, flat fills, a slogan in outlined capitals
Register
The shout of a public poster; a cartoon terror kept light by a buoyant line; one impact at first sight
Scale
One wall at the size of a handball court, three words and a frieze of figures, read from the court beside it and from cars on the highway
Governing Proposition
In the summer of 1986, in the years of crack in New York, Keith Haring painted a handball wall in Harlem without leave and was arrested for it. On a field of orange chosen to be seen from a moving car he lettered three words in heavy black capitals and set beneath them his pictographs in thick black line: a figure in the grip of a monster, skeletal and devouring forms, money, a burning pipe, bodies bent and squeezed. One face is turned to the highway and one to the court where children play. The wager of the wall is that a warning belongs where the drug is, in the public’s own space, unasked, in a language anyone can read at a glance, and that the cheerful idiom of the street can be turned against what is destroying the street.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Keith Haring painted Crack Is Wack in the summer of 1986 on a free-standing handball wall at East 128th Street and the Harlem River Drive in Manhattan. He painted it without permission, in the years when crack was moving through New York, and he was arrested for it. The wall stands in a playground beside the highway, and the city has since named the playground after the mural. Both faces of the wall are painted. The unit scored is the mural, the two faces as one work, as it now stands on its site. Since Haring’s death in 1990 restorers have conserved and repainted its surface following his design; that history bears on its survival only.
The image is a slogan and a frieze. Across a field of strong orange the three words of the title run in large black outlined capitals. Around and below them Haring’s figures move in thick black line: a figure in the grip of a monstrous form, skeletal and devouring forms, money, a burning pipe, bodies bent and squeezed. There is no modelling and no depth, only flat ground, outline and flat fill. One face of the wall is turned to the highway, so that the work is made to be read from moving cars; the other is turned to the court, where it is read by the players beside it.
Take away the words and the wall is one more Haring frieze, its figures legible as distress but not as a warning. Take away the orange and it loses its hold on the passing eye: from the highway it is a beacon before it is a picture. Those two parts are required. The figures are less so. Haring’s vocabulary is additive, a frieze of interchangeable signs that could lose a figure or gain one without the argument shifting. The monster, the money and the pipe each say one clause of a single sentence, that crack devours, and the sentence is said several times over. The whole is necessary, a warning at this place at this speed; the parts are loose.
Movement II
Three words in the vernacular of the street, rhymed, set at the size of a billboard and read in a second. As a poster the slogan would survive and the work would not. What the wall knows is where the warning belongs: where the drug is, on the street, in the public’s own space, unasked, at a scale the highway cannot avoid. The handball wall is the instrument. On one side it is a court for play under a sign of what is taking the players; on the other it is a face turned to the city’s traffic. The orange is a decision of form, legible at speed against brick and asphalt, and the pictographic line is a language that can be read without reading.
The fit of form to purpose is high, and it stops short of the highest. Within the field the frieze is Haring’s ordinary frieze, and a different arrangement of the same signs would know the same thing. The wall’s knowledge lives in its site, its colour and its words; its figures could be shuffled. What the form achieves is the meeting of a place and a message: the court and the road are part of the sentence, and a reproduction, however faithful, loses them. That is why the wall cannot be judged as a picture alone, and why it stands higher as a form than as an image.
Its elevation is a shout. A field of orange at scale, heavy black line, a slogan caught from a car at sixty kilometres an hour, and a row of figures in convulsion: there is a real charge in meeting it, and the devouring forms carry a cartoon terror. But the idiom keeps the terror light by design. Haring’s line is buoyant, and his figures dance even in their torment. The register is the public poster’s, not the dreadful. The wall rises once, at first sight, and does not rise again on longer looking: the figures do not deepen into dread or into grandeur.
Movement III
Behind the figures stand old images: the devouring monster, the hell mouth, the dance of death, the skeleton at the shoulder, money as the idol. Haring’s signs draw on the public imagery of the danse macabre and the doom painting, and on the morality emblem in which a vice is shown as a beast. The particular stays particular: a drug, a year, a wall in Harlem. But the old pattern is summoned as a sign the viewer decodes at once. It is not built into a structure in which the particular takes on its weight, as a doom painting builds judgement into the order of its registers. The myth is evoked, well and economically, and it does not bear the load.
What the wall brings into the open is that crack devours: the body, the money, the neighbourhood, the self. Everyone in East Harlem in 1986 knew it. What the wall did was give that knowledge a public voice, at the size of a billboard and in a place of children’s play, in the city’s own vocabulary, when official culture was speaking of it in the language of the police. The figures show addiction as possession by a thing larger than the body, and that is true and holds. But the wall says only what its title says. It does not open the condition of the addicted from within, nor the market, the state’s response, race and the sentencing laws of that same year.
Take the two most distant things on the wall, the festive orange with its dancing line and the subject of addiction and death, and one law holds them: the street’s own language turned against what is destroying the street. The cheerfulness of the idiom is the means of the warning, not a contradiction of it. Slogan and figures, the face to the court and the face to the highway, are one physics: flat, outlined, legible, public. Nothing on the wall breaks that law. But it is a single register held without lapse over a narrow range, and a law held over a narrow range covers no great span.
Movement IV
By 1986 Haring was a painter of international market standing, and he painted an unsanctioned wall in Harlem and was arrested for it. He risked the law and the charge of slumming, and the stake was real. The turn was smaller. In his own work it carries the subway chalk drawings of the early 1980s up to an urban wall at the scale of a billboard, with an explicit civic message. Among the traditions it inherits, the Mexican and community mural movements, the public health poster and the graffiti writing of New York, it fuses the writer’s illicit wall with the public service announcement. That fusion is its departure. But the idiom is the one Haring had already made, and the community mural with a message was an existing kind.
The line is a real command. It holds an even weight across many metres; every figure is closed and legible at a distance; the slogan is lettered to be read at speed. A wall of this size laid out and painted in a short campaign without loss of control is a demonstration of hand, and the speed and assurance of the line are the work’s claim to belong to the street. The means are deliberately few: a flat ground, black outline, flat fills, no modelling, and no relation of colours beyond the beacon orange and the black. The range is narrow by choice, and it is charged as narrow.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV. Its form fits its purpose, its line is assured and its law holds, and its survival on its site is whole in form; but its necessity is loose in the parts, and the axes of consequence stand low. It states a truth loudly rather than opening a condition, it evokes its archetype without building it, and its turn is modest. Beside the Hope poster (7.3), the closest kind, a public image with a slogan made outside the institutions for a civic end, it stands level: the poster is the sparer image and reached further, and the wall has the stake, the hand and forty years on its site. Untitled (Skull) (7.9), from the same city and decade, stands above it, since the skull opens a condition from within where the wall names one from without; Detroit Industry Murals (8.6) shows how far a civic wall can go when the myth is built.
Movement V
The wall has stood on its site for forty years, in view from the highway the whole time, and it has given its playground its name. It is one of the most reproduced walls in New York. Its form is whole. Its surface is another matter: an exterior wall in exterior paint, conserved and repainted by other hands following Haring’s design since his death, so that much of what now stands is not his paint. Its subject, too, is fixed to its moment, crack and 1986, though the mural has partly outlived that moment as a document of its years.
Its reach is real and mostly its own maker’s. In Haring’s later work it opens a line of public walls with a message, and it is read beside the work on AIDS he made in the four years before his death. By wide account it is the best known single wall in New York’s history of street painting, and it stands as a reference point for later activist street art and public health imagery, though no particular later work by another hand can be named as drawn from it. The city’s adoption of a wall painted without leave, the playground’s name and the restorations, changed how such a wall can be received. Return has yielded mainly history: the arrest, the adoption, the restorations, and the wall’s place in the story of the crack years. The image itself is read in a second, and the figures confirm it. Do the Right Thing (8.6), from the same New York and the same years of crack and policing, articulates from within the condition the wall can only name.
The orders it holds are the body and its consumption, money, death, the city and its public space, and the child at play beside the sign. Labour, the state and the family are present only by implication: the arrest, the court and the absent parents of the playground are not in the image. It holds a few orders in one sign and holds them clearly, without showing how they bear on one another, and the figure describes the form. The three words are still there, over the court and toward the traffic.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract the slogan and the wall becomes one more Haring frieze, its figures legible as distress but not as a warning; the words carry the load. Subtract the orange and the work loses its claim on the speeding eye: at highway distance it is a beacon before it is a picture. Those two are required. The figures are less so. Haring’s vocabulary is additive by nature, a frieze of interchangeable pictographs that could lose a figure or gain one without the argument shifting. The monster, the money and the pipe are each a clause of the one sentence, that crack devours, and the sentence is said several times. Necessity is real at the level of the whole, a warning at this place legible at this speed, and loose at the level of the parts: a third of the frieze could be redrawn without loss.
Score: 7.3 / 10
What the wall brings into the open is that crack devours: the body, the money, the neighbourhood, the self. Every resident of East Harlem in 1986 knew it. The disclosure is not of something hidden but of something denied a public voice: the wall puts into the city’s own vocabulary, at the size of a billboard and in a place of children’s play, what official culture was saying in the language of the police. Disclosure through image is credited fully, and the figures show addiction as possession by a thing larger than the body, which is true and holds. But the wall says only what its title says. It does not disclose the condition of the addicted from within, nor the forces, the market, the state’s response, race and the sentencing laws of that same year, that a deeper work of its moment might have opened.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The elevation is that of a shout: a field of orange at scale, heavy black line, a slogan read at sixty kilometres an hour, and a frieze of figures in convulsion. There is a real charge in meeting it, from the highway or from the court, and the devouring forms carry a cartoon terror. But the idiom keeps that terror light by design. Haring’s line is buoyant, his figures dance even in their torment, and the register is the public poster’s, not the dreadful. The wall rises once, at first sight, and does not rise again on longer looking; the figures do not deepen into dread or grandeur. Beside The Swing, whose beauty is sustained across the canvas, and For the Love of God, a single dazzle and a skull, its single impact stands a little lower. With The Bottomless Well, the lowest of the twelve after The Encompassed.
Score: 6.6 / 10
The archetype is present and evoked rather than built: the devouring monster, the hell mouth, the dance of death, the skeleton at the shoulder, money as the idol. Haring’s pictographs draw on the old public imagery of the danse macabre and the doom painting, and on the morality emblem in which a vice is shown as a beast. The particular stays particular: a drug, a year, a wall in Harlem. But the myth does not bear the load. The wall summons the devourer as a sign the viewer decodes at once; it does not build the archetype into a structure in which the particular takes on the old pattern’s weight, as a doom painting builds judgement into the order of its registers. Evoked well and economically, above Comedian on this axis and a little below The Swing.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The turn and the stake are one judgment. The stake was real: Haring, by 1986 a painter of international market standing, painted an unsanctioned wall in Harlem and was arrested for it, risking the law and the charge of slumming. The turn is smaller. Within his own work it carries the subway chalk drawings of the early 1980s to an urban wall at billboard scale with an explicit civic message. Within the traditions it inherits, the Mexican and community mural movements, the public health poster and the graffiti writing of New York, it fuses the writer’s illicit wall with the public service announcement, and that fusion is its swerve. But the idiom is Haring’s established one, and the community mural with a message was an existing kind. A real wager on a modest turn, well below Fountain, whose turn was of the whole field.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Would another form say what this one knows? As a poster the slogan survives and the work does not. What the wall knows is that the warning belongs where the drug is: on the street, in the public’s own space, unasked, at a scale the highway cannot avoid. The two-faced handball wall is the instrument, a court for play under a sign of what is taking the players, and a face turned to the city’s traffic. The orange is a decision of form, legible at speed against brick and asphalt, and the pictographic line is the form of a language anyone can read without literacy. That is a high fit. It is held below 8 because within the field the frieze is generic Haring, and a different arrangement of the same pictographs would know the same thing.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence is preferred to promise, and there are forty years of it. Return has yielded the work’s history, the unsanctioned painting, the arrest, the city’s adoption, the restorations; its place in the story of the crack years and of Haring’s public projects; and a reading of it beside his later work on AIDS, made in the four years before his death. That is yield, but most of it is yield of context, not of the image. The image itself is exhausted quickly: the slogan is read in a second, and the figures confirm it. The criticism it has sustained is chiefly historical and biographical, and it has not found in the wall what a second look finds in According to What. Above Comedian for its historical density; held below 7 because the image does not reward return.
Score: 6.6 / 10
The field is New York street and mural painting of the 1980s. Intrinsic force is modest: the wall did not reorganise the possibilities of painting; it put an established idiom to a civic use with unusual directness and at personal cost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within Haring’s own work it opens the line of public walls with a message that runs through his later murals; it stands by wide account as the best known single wall in New York’s history of street painting; and it is a reference point for later activist street art and public health imagery, though no particular later work by another hand can be named as drawn from it. The city’s adoption, the playground’s name and the restorations, is a real change in how an illicit wall can be received, and it counts.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty years. Form: legible and whole, on its site, in the park named for it, in view from the highway the whole time. Presence: wide; it is one of the most reproduced walls in New York and has given a playground its name, but fame is presence and earns at most a tenth. Fabric is the charge. This is an exterior wall in exterior paint, and since Haring’s death its surface has been conserved and repainted by other hands following his design, so that much of what stands is not his paint. The form survives; the made surface is in part replaced. Its surface is also fixed to its moment, crack and 1986, which the axis penalises, though the mural has partly outlived that as a document of its years. The lower figure of its row, meeting the bar exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Craft is read to the same anchors in every medium. Haring’s line is a real command: of even weight across many metres, every figure closed and legible at distance, and a slogan lettered to be read at speed. A wall of this size laid out and painted in a short campaign without loss of control is a demonstration of hand, and the making is partly load-bearing: the speed and assurance of the line are the work’s claim to belong to the street. Against that, the means are deliberately few: a flat ground, black outline, flat fills, no modelling, and no colour relations of any subtlety beyond the beacon orange. Beside The Swing the range is far narrower; beside For the Love of God, whose exactness was its argument, it stands a little lower. With The Inner Law, the highest of the twelve after survival.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bright, almost festive orange field with its dancing line, and the subject of addiction and death. They obey one law: the street’s own language turned against what is destroying the street, so that the cheerfulness of the idiom is the means of the warning and not a contradiction of it. Slogan and figures, the face to the court and the face to the highway, are one physics: flat, outlined, legible, public. Nothing on the wall breaks that law. But the range is not wide, and narrowness is not coherence: the coherence here is that of a single register held without lapse, which is real and covers no great span. Level with Rhein II and For the Love of God on this axis, and below The Swing.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The orders held: the body and its consumption; money; death; the city and its public space; the child at play beside the sign. Labour, the state and the family are present only by implication; the arrest, the court and the absent parents of the playground are not in the image. The wall holds a few orders in one sign and holds them clearly, but it does not integrate them into a structure that shows how they bear on one another. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: a slogan and a frieze on one wall cannot hold the orders a cycle of walls can hold, as Detroit Industry Murals shows. A low mark on a short form describes the form, and the figure clears its floor, level on this axis with It’s My Life and above Rhein II.
Score: 6.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.5, then The Made and The Inner Law at 7.8, and The Living Form at 7.6. A wall whole in form on its site for forty years, in view from the highway, its playground named for it, though its surface has been repainted by other hands; a line of even weight and full legibility across many metres, laid out in a short campaign without loss of control; one law under which the festive idiom of the street is the means of a warning against what is destroying the street; and a form in which the warning stands where the drug is, at a scale the highway cannot avoid.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.2: the body, money, death, the city and the child at play are held in one sign; labour, the state and the family are present only by implication, and nothing shows how the orders bear on one another. Next above it, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 6.6: a single impact that does not deepen, and a return that yields history more than image. Then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2: a truth everyone knew given a public voice and not opened from within, and the devourer evoked as a sign rather than built. Then The Inevitable and The Swerve at 7.3: a whole that is required and parts that could be redrawn, and a real stake on a modest turn.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.4, The Swerve at 7.3, The Unconcealment at 7.2 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.2 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.3, The Unconcealment, 7.2, The Sublime, 6.6, The Archetypal Deep, 7.2, The Swerve, 7.3, The Bottomless Well, 6.6, and Pressure on Tradition, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.2. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The twelve sum to 87.5, an average of 7.29 that displays 7.3. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the mural and its record, from wide reproduction and published accounts, not from standing before it: well as an image and in the outline of its history, thinly in its dimensions, its paint and the full inventory of its figures, so that where a judgment turns on the surface it is held more loosely. The work scored is the mural on the free-standing handball wall at East 128th Street and the Harlem River Drive, Manhattan, painted by Keith Haring in 1986, both faces of the wall as one work, as it now stands in the playground the city named after it. Conservation and repainting by restorers following his design since his death bear on its survival only. The only words given are the three painted on the wall. No statement by the painter, by the city or by any critic is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the dimensions of the wall, the paint and the fabric beneath it, the number, placing and colouring of the figures on each face and whether the two faces differ, what moved the painter to paint it, the penalty that followed the arrest and the part the press played, the history of the wall between its first painting and the present, including any defacing and any repainting by the painter himself, the dates and number of the restorations, whether he worked from a preparatory drawing, and the particular later works, his own or others’, that carry its manner.