Line

 A young man finds an aptitude for drawing lines with black pen. He goes to the Big City with his black pen. Draws lines over notebooks, canvases, subways, hoardings. Draws energy: birth, life, death, dogs. Broken lines, dashes, zips, but truly one continuous [line]. With black pen he goes overseas. Draws all over Collingwood bricks, St. Kilda Road waterwall. One line at a time. Back in the Big City he draws all through his illness, over glass, flesh, sarcophaguses. The young man dies, leaving millions of lines over surfaces. He is an author who gives up words for black lines.

 

[line] Melbourne iPhone photograph 6 of 10: Entrance to the National Gallery of Victoria, St. Kilda Road, 2^nd of November 2019, 8:57 pm.

Typewriter

The twentieth century tapped away

Its final draft, its full-stop certainty;

Ink ribbon extended into eternity,

Carriage of meaning pressed against the day.

Typewriter century caps and wingdings,

A roomful of clicks dots stops raps returns

Made it quite clear what were its concerns,

Sprayed the page neatly with its type of things.

Its secretarial sincerity,

Its Olivetti confetti hi guys,

Its machine-like dream-like dexterity.

Its concrete verse on feathery paper,

Release from keeping inside justifies

Drawn to something familiar here.

Photograph: two pages of concrete poetry by Keith Haring. There is a whole room of Haring's typed writings at the NGV show. It reveals his early fascination with words as images. He has obviously encountered the extra-marginal world of the concrete poets. Some of the poems are political, others suggestive and sonorous. It seems he let go of this form when he started his city art full-time, but it's a sign of where he was going to go. Fluorescent tubes are also very twentieth century.

Oil

At impressionable speeds we have floated

Through months of our lives never lent a thought,

By waters of Babylon booked flight to Zion,

Compiled worldwide playlists that sing its dream.

Uncoiled from beneath Arabian nights

The stories assuring us of comfortableness,

Rebel yell at fresh sight it’s Texas tea

Groundwards downwards soundings everywhere.

The meaning in the arguments of parliament rows,

Black trails beneath headline’s latest ink

The word war to end all wars, for liquid.

Rock roll tycoons give the sheiks a shake

Comes washed down to us behind the wheel, sponsor

Of this month’s championship games and playoffs. 

Details of a joint painting by Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the NGV show. The two artists made several of these works on white paper. The tanker truck is by Basquiat, as we can tell from the line but mainly because of his signature crown.When Basquiat died, Haring painted a tribute. I will copy it in here from online. It is a mountain of crowns on what must be intentionally a Give Way sign.

 

Fire

Fire starts its own fire from down up

Was like this from the start, still never still

Partying small time in boyhood’s wide sky

Crackling fallen leaves boiling the billycan.

Charging trees is a matter of minutes

Flesh unprepared for these raw surrounds

Awful majesty that mayst obscure the sun

Its shadows permanent remains, seasons.

Loss inscribes its final exercise

The practical givens of eating and breathing

As columns of smoke by day drift seawards,

As downunder the humus sun desiccated

Gathers further dust flicker, another day

Surviving its own burn down, far from words.

This is a detail from Keith Haring's last painting, on exhibition at the NGV. Having immersed myself in Basquiat and Haring for some time it was moving to be confronted with this work near the exit which, like most of Haring's paintings in the show, is Untitled. He made the painting, using his trademark lines, as he was dying of AIDS. On a large gold background are outlines of an upreaching human figure in green, various kinds of red squiggle, and purple dot-dashes that obey the force of gravity. Some time was spent pondering this wonderful painting, produced in extremis.

Machine

Packs nothings, waits on humans, readies to scream

Fright box unlocked, its turn to instigate.

Instructions give no warning of its too-late.

Interruption to meditation is the machine.

Its starts jars alive itself death noise,

Valleys tense, roads jaded, everywhere surplus,

Indifferent to air or its ultimate purpose:

Pumped-up claimant, hiding how it destroys.

Constant anomaly till its job ends shut

Shears and eats distilled joy with this-but,

Wheels even, meters and other quaint graphics.

The clock passes pressed hours where it manics

Till its nothing-left, dried-out, a broken cup.

Fire starts its own fire from down, up.

Image: detail of a fluorescent work by Keith Haring at the current Basquiat/Haring show at the National Gallery of Victoria