All images © Keith Haring Foundation
Untitled
1984
acrylic and enamel on canvas
The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles
This 10’ high by 15’ wide rectangular painting is in landscape orientation and is mounted directly on the wall with screws and grommets. The painting has a bright peach background. It features a creature with a pig snout and teats and humanoid figures with very long noses. The figures emerge from an all-green stream of the creature’s consumer-goods-filled vomit. They suckle on the creature’s teats.
Dominating the painting is the large distorted head of a pig-snouted creature in profile facing left. It has two blue, bloodshot human eyes stacked atop one another with stars at the centre of their pupils. Its dull pink skin is riddled with curving lines, a human ear and wrinkles. Motion lines indicate that it’s head vibrates with movement. Its snout has slits for nostrils and is open, displaying large square teeth as it vomits. Just right of centre, the back of it’s head is connected to two muscular appendages ending in pigs feet. Beneath these are pairs of conjoined teats with pig nipples in a vertical stack of 6 pairs which stretches down to the lower right corner. Thirteen yellow-dotted grey humanoid figures with long noses vie to suckle from the teats. All seemingly identical, two are positioned in a way that shows their long or erect penises. At the bottom of the painting, the figures emerge from the green stream of vomit with cash, people and items including space rockets, fast cars, Christian crosses, guns and stereos which flows out of the creatures snout and down along to the right.
Exhibition label text:
During the 1980s, wealth inequality in the United States grew significantly under Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal trickle-down economics policies known as Reaganomics. Haring criticized greed and capitalism in several works featuring the image of the “capitalist pig.” This tarp painting portrays a pig spewing money-green vomit made up of computers, televisions, clocks, airplanes, and other modern-day objects. The green bile pools on the ground from which little figures climb, suckling the sickly pig’s teats. This work is a monstrous depiction of the struggle of production in an era when everything was deemed consumable.