Heartland Monument #2. Value Life.

Keith Haring junks his brushes, moves to New York, descends into the subways, crayons his iconic gestures on black advertisement boards, leaves a semiotic equivalence, a message for democratic posterity. Here, a middle-class artist seeks not to identify with plebian voices, knowing the outcome is only an artificial communality that hides the condemned individuality of the bleeding-heart gentry marked by Xs. Instead, he steers his condemnation unto the alleyways of the transiting masses, adopts the methods of graffiti guerillas and inscribes his disfigurement unto fleeting, blackened walls. He valued life, too much, and died for the lack of response and responsibility towards a latter-day scourge. We wear him today on our t-shirts and accessories, scarcely remembering the man and the scandal of his political performances smudging beyond our conceptual limits.

Ignorance = Fear, 1989

NEL pre-empts the gesture of the descending artist, filling the empty spaces of the subways with art in transit for the tired masses; empty, nostalgic measures of local space and time to quell the restless native. Here, a disjuncture tears into the subconscious of the dawn sojourner. An official graffiti on a raised platform of a feeder light-rail station before one descends into the vacuous signs of memorial subway art: Value Life. Act Responsibly. The capital letters, a separating full-stop for emphatic disconnection, the backdrop of neighbors' homes bathed in morning blues. The middle-class bureaucrat identifies with the plebian soul, seeing his own benevolence through the imagined grateful eyes of the heartlanders who begs for his dispensation. He must steer his wisdom unto the tramways of the desolate, inscribing his love unto bare, concrete walls. Value life. Act Responsibly. And if you don’t understand, he repeats it in three native languages. We wear the love nonchalantly in our deadened eyes, scarcely knowing the responsibility of acting to value our lives beyond the raised platform of wise announcements, the monument to our conceptual servitude.