Emily Hubbard and Elyssia Bugg
“On Keith Haring, Public Art and Influence”

On 8 February 2025, artist Emily Hubbard and art historian Elyssia Bugg presented a talk exploring Hubbard's West Space Window, and its relationship to Keith Haring's 1984 mural on a public-facing wall of (what is now) Collingwood Yards.

Part art historical and part geopolitical, the talk covered Emily Hubbard’s exploration of American Pop art within an Australian context, and the government-supported import of American values here through Modern art and culture since the 1970s. Hubbard and Bugg drew out ideas around public art, its influence and political instrumentalisation.

The following is a somewhat accurate representation of the discussion that took place.

Emily Hubbard: Firstly, thank you everyone for coming today. The structure of this talk will essentially involve myself and Elyssia Bugg taking turns to speak. I will explain my artwork and its visual elements, and Elyssia will be providing information about the broader historical context that the work sits within, while raising questions about key themes that the work touches upon.

The artwork I’ve created for the West Space Window is titled West Space. The work's purpose is to encourage viewers to consider how the Australian government's support for Modern and Contemporary art has also involved the support of American influence, styles and artists. The work is a bit abstract and involves a few references, so I am now going to go through each element as a way to build the artwork.

West Space was created on a sheet of cotton material which I have stretched onto a wooden frame. The three black-and-white images on the cotton are iron-on transfer prints of images from three key moments in the 20th century which each have a connection to one another in relation to the development of the Arts in Australia:

The first image is a reproduction of a photo of the mural that is in close proximity to us today: Keith Haring’s famous mural at Collingwood Yards. This large piece was painted by the New York based street artist during his visit to Australia in 1984, organised for the inaugural exhibition of what is now known as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). During Haring’s productive stint in Australia he created various painted works, presented to students at Melbourne University's Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), and completed two large scale temporary murals – one thrown up on the windows of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), and the other painted here in Collingwood.

The second image is Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles (1952), which was acquired by Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1973. This was an extremely contentious decision debated at length in the public sphere, as it was the most expensive piece of art bought by the Australian government at the time. Priced at $1,000,000 and housed at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), it is now valued at around $55,000,000.

While researching the Blue Poles scandal, I became inspired by one particular group's response at the time, which was the South Australian based collective called the Progressive Art Movement (or also known as PAM). This group staunchly opposed the ongoing US cultural and economic imperialism which was taking place, and staged a sit-in at the entrance of the Gallery of South Australia in opposition to the government’s support for American culture. The slogan in the bottom-right corner of my work is actually borrowed from one of PAM's works and the full statement read: “Most Art today is Museum Art. Formalism would be inconceivable without an architecture of contemplation.”

The third image referenced in my work is a photograph of Keith Haring during his 1986 commission to paint on the Berlin Wall. This commission was organised a few years after his Australia visit by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum – an organisation heavily supported by the US.

The logo of the kangaroo and the circle are drawn from the first logo of the Australia Council (now known as Creative Australia). This logo was designed by Lyndon Whaite and is curiously now used for the Museum of Old and New Art’s (MONA) official beer brand, Moo Brew. The Australia Council operates as a government body that oversees, promotes and orchestrates artistic expression through various competitive grant funding schemes and as an advisory body.

The three images have all been ironed onto the cotton substrate of my work as image transfers, with the black areas being screen printed on and then iron-on patches being added. My choice of using iron-on and screen-printing techniques was inspired by graphic t-shirts and art merchandise that are produced by fast-fashion stores like Uniqlo. Some examples of Uniqlo t-shirts featuring iconic artists (such as Keith Haring, Kaws, MoMA) . I also drew inspiration from contemporary t-shirt designs by menswear brands such as Kiss Chacey (or KSCY) and Nena and Pasadena (NXP), whose designs typically include ambiguous slogans as well as tough, bold designs.

All in all, I think that using the medium and design tropes of t-shirt design became an effective way to synthesise these pivotal late-20th Century events into a familiar 21st century format that suited the window space, location, etc. And as the minimal, monochrome canvas-style also nods to some of the modern tropes of 20th Century western art, I think West Space ties together familiar elements of both pop art and high art through capital ‘A’ art images reproduced through cheap, DIY materials and techniques. Over to you Elyssia!

Elyssia Bugg: Thank you Emily. West Space specifically frames these references through the lens of artworks bought and funded by public art institutions in Australia. This framework highlights the contradictions and limitations of art that is ostensibly produced, purchased and exhibited for the public.

Jackson Pollock’s work is significant in this regard because of its frequently noted association with the promotion of American values and individualist expression during the Cold War. The artistic abstraction of these works was emphasised and promoted by the American government as a style connoting freedom of expression, in stark contrast to the explicit propagandising of socialist realism. However, the artistic and political milieu from which Pollock’s own techniques emerged was far removed from conspiratorial alliances between Modern art museums and the CIA. Pollock developed his large-scale painting format and spontaneous drip style in part as a result of the influence of Mexican muralist painters such as David Siqueiros, whose work he initially encountered through Siqueiros’ New York workshop. Siqueiros was himself a revolutionary and Stalinist who, in addition to being a leading member of the Mexican muralist movement, was later jailed for his involvement in a plot to assassinate Trotsky. In his artistic practice, Siqueiros used a variety of non-traditional painting tools such as “quick-drying cement and automobile lacquer shot from a commercial spray-gun”1 to imbue his depictions of working class struggle with a formal sense of spontaneity. This quality, in addition to the imposing scale of many of Siqueiros’ mural works, directly impacted the development of similar experimentation in Pollock’s practice – aligning these artists stylistically despite the divergent ideological intentions and interpretations of their work. This alignment emphasises the means by which the formal qualities of these artworks do not in isolation suggest a specific kind of politics, but are nonetheless primed to be used politically.

The question that then arises is how artworks come to embody the political. In his book Art and Revolution, Siqueiros asks:

Should it be considered of importance that contemporary Mexican painting has a definite ideological, and at times frankly political content, in direct contrast to the vehemently maintained apoliticism of European painting and in general of contemporary Western culture?2

This “vehemently maintained apoliticism” is pertinent to the Cold War co-option of abstract expressionism, but it also comes into play in Haring’s practice. Today Haring is remembered for his work focussed on AIDS activism, such as the 1989 work Ignorance = Fear / Silence = Death. Yet despite these instances of overt political engagement, often when discussing his practice Haring identified the public nature of his work as fostering a kind of pluralism that necessitated his own intentions be apolitical beyond a sentiment of broad unity. In his journals he writes:

I am interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible with as many individual ideas about the given piece with no final meaning attached. The viewer creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely the middleman, trying to bring ideas together.3

As we walk down to the Haring mural that is preserved on site here, we might consider the ways that this ‘apoliticism’ is maintained by the artworks themselves, or rather by the context they are commissioned and exhibited in, and what purpose this intentionally or unintentionally serves with regards to capitalist and imperialist interests.

The group walk down to Keith Haring mural, at the Johnston Street entrance to Collingwood Yards

Emily: When I was trying to work out what to create for my piece in the window, I was drawn to think about the history of this place that we now know as the Collingwood Yards. Before it was the Yards, it was a polytechnic school, and on my first visit here I remember seeing the Haring wall covered with some pretty gnarly graffiti and tags sprayed on it. The next time I came back it was cleaned up to its original state.

It was funny to think of Haring painting on the windows of the NGV, how his work there was only ever intended to be temporary and wiped away after a month. I feel like this Collingwood mural would have been painted with the same intention of being temporary. And its funny to also think that at the time it was a school on a public street, like surely Haring wouldn’t have thought that this mural wouldn’t remain for longer than a month. But here we are, 41 years later, chatting in front of a clean, un-graffitied street-art piece in Collingwood.

Elyssia Bugg: Haring created this work in 1984. I will return to this mural and its legacy in a minute but I want to contextualise it first in terms of the later work that Emily’s installation addresses––Haring’s 1986 mural on the Berlin Wall. This later mural featured the artist’s signature linked figures, rendered in the colours of the East and West German flags, stretching across a 100 metre length of the wall. It was commissioned by the Checkpoint Charlie Museum which sought to promote a concept of freedom characterised as much by America’s imperialist interests as it was by genuine investment in human liberation. Haring’s intentions as an artist most likely aligned with the latter. Yet in the case of this work, what is particularly notable is the way that this notion of ‘freedom’ is expressed through the image’s representation of indiscriminate ‘unity’ that maintains a kind of apoliticism. Just as a lack of specifically representational content in the American Abstractionists’ work was associated with “an open and free society”4, Haring’s intentionally vague depiction of connection refuses explicit propagandising and in doing so becomes propaganda. Reporting on the inauguration of the mural, The New York Times quoted “a young Berliner” as saying, “This is Valium, there's no provocation in it. In every third toilet in Kreuzberg you can see the same graffiti.”5

This is perhaps an unfair assessment, as the content of Haring’s work more generally is not without social commentary. In murals such as this one at Collingwood Yards, and the Berlin Wall work, Haring’s scenes of interlaced figures suggest collectivity. Moreover their installation in an array of public contexts and communities furthers this egalitarian sense of interconnectedness. In contrast, a work like Pollock’s Blue Poles was able to be instrumentalised by the US during the Cold War because it was absented of this sense of communality and integration, and instead exemplified a highly individualised notion of artistic freedom and self-expression. This is not a critique of Abstract Expressionism, but rather a demonstration of the means by which an eschewal of politically engaged content cannot necessarily liberate a work of art from its political context.

The shared context that Emily’s collage identifies between these works is the way in which they were bought by the Australian state as commodities, that the US directly and indirectly markets to its allies. In both cases it is the works’ ‘apoliticism’ – achieved in Haring’s case through a conception of art that is ambiguous and thus for everyone, and in Pollock’s case through formal openness and a mythology of artistic individualism – that sees these works that are purchased ‘for the public’ reflect back at the public interests that are not in fact their own.

This process is evidenced in the controversy that surrounded both works, not because of their content but because of their cost. At the time of purchase, Blue Poles was the most expensive work ever purchased by an institution of the Australian government. Likewise as Emily said, Haring’s work has faced ongoing criticism due to the cost of conserving a work that was not constructed with longevity in mind. Some of these critiques reflect a right-wing sentiment that the purchase of art-historically significant work for public view is inherently a waste of taxpayer dollars. Such arguments problematise the value of art while those broader societal structures that generate this sense of scarcity and need for frugality go unremarked upon. But strawmen aside, these debates do go some way to identifying the fact that these works are ultimately commodities. This aspect of the works means that they cannot ultimately be detached from any defining meaning in the manner Haring idealistically wished his art to be. This is particularly true of art like this mural. The work’s state-sanctioned presence ‘in public’ means that it is negotiated within and through the processes of hegemony – processes of co-option, limitation and opportunism – that this space is defined and regulated by under Capitalism.

In such a context, the Progressive Art Movement quotation that Emily appropriates in her work upstairs can be taken as a useful starting point for reading these works. The quoted text reads: "Formalism would be inconceivable without an architecture of contemplation". We can extend this sentiment beyond the context of the 20th century, to ask of art we encounter in the world today; What architecture of contemplation is erected for us, the public, by whom and to what ends? And how might we direct contemplation towards this architecture in a manner that subverts or dismantles that which does not serve our interests?

Commissioned to accompany West Space in the West Space Window, 25 Jan → 5 Mar 2025.