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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Fiona Anderson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
For as long as there were radiant babies, there were barking dogs. Dogs feature prominently in Keith Haring’s subway drawings, and in collages, paintings, and badges Haring made after moving to New York in 1978. While his dogs are often interpreted as universal symbols of resistance and protection, barking to call out general social injustice, the politically-charged status of both dogs and marginalised people in New York City in this period suggests that something more complex, and geographically and culturally specific, is at play in Haring’s use of canine imagery. Public anxiety about the number of dogs in New York City, and their potential for spreading disease and disorder, exploded in the 1970s. Haring’s barking dogs entered a contested city space in which the ownership and treatment of dogs was a live issue, fuelled by the fall-out from city budget cuts, gentrification, police violence, graffiti and fear of the young Black and Latinx writers who produced it. Public health campaigns in the city in the 1970s advocated for taxes for dog owners and for citizens to clean up after their dogs or face steep fines. Dog waste activist Fran Lee urged New Yorkers to think of ‘children before dogs’. The heteronormative subtext of Lee’s campaign was not lost on many queer New Yorkers; it echoed contemporaneous homophobic public discourse around gay sex and venereal disease, sparked by the increasing visibility of gay liberation movements. Anti-dog waste campaigns represent the emergence of a neoliberal citizen surveillance culture and municipal politics which shaped urban renewal and gentrification efforts in the 1970s, 1980s, and after. Reading Haring’s canine work in this cultural context, this article explores what his proliferating dog imagery can tell us about queer desire and racism in the late capitalist city, and the imaginative modes of kinship that it produced.
Author(s): Anderson F
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Oxford Art Journal
Year: 2024
Volume: 46
Issue: 3
Pages: 451–469
Online publication date: 26/02/2024
Acceptance date: 26/09/2023
Date deposited: 05/05/2023
ISSN (print): 0142-6540
ISSN (electronic): 1741-7287
Publisher: Oxford University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcad031
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/kcad031
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