Finding a chronicler with the proper combination of familiarity and detachment can be like going on a series of bad Hinge dates, but in Gooch, Haring has met his match. Radiant, referring to both Haring’s recurrent drawing of a crawling baby and his own fast-burning star, is a faithful retracing of his steps, with over 200 people interviewed or consulted: devoted and probably definitive. (The word 'magisterial' is too stuffy to apply to its subject, who favored jeans, sneaks and bared biceps) ... [Gooch] is a poet, which shows in phrasing at once shrewd and evocative ... With licensing and replication now turbocharged — you can buy Haring wares on the sale rack at Uniqlo — Gooch’s book insists readers slow down and consider the artist’s legacy. And its cover feels like a secret handshake, done in the colors of an old-fashioned New York City taxicab.
Gooch, a seventies downtowner himself and the author of a sensitive biography of Frank O’Hara, is superb on the textures of these New York years, when a young artist seemingly couldn’t cross the street without getting ideas ... Reagan didn’t make a major speech on the subject until 1987, six years after the earliest reported cases and several after Haring began showing symptoms. Radiant never outright claims that he cranked out art in part because he suspected that he was going to die soon, but it doesn’t have to. Everybody he knew half suspected that they were going to die soon ... Gooch makes a valiant effort to present his hero as an artist-intellectual whose creations only seem shallow...Upon the single semiotics class Haring took at S.V.A., he builds a wobbly theory that the artist’s subway drawings were 'cleverly semiotic,' since they occupied space usually devoted to ads and therefore offered some comment on commercialism, though Gooch is less than his usual articulate self concerning what this comment might have been ... Haring’s style feels—is—the same whether enlisted in the cause of act up or his own bank account, of fighting racism or promoting the Pop Shop. What his images advertised was always changing, but they only ever spoke in advertising’s metallic chirp ... His admirers continue to complain that he isn’t taken seriously enough; in a way, they are correct, though this book may change things ... [a] highly entertaining biography.
Not only gives us a much-overdue appreciation of Haring as an important artist. It also paints an exhilarating portrait of a young artist finding himself and his calling ... His chronicle of Haring’s volcanic rise is deeply engaged with the culture of the time and place.
Gooch vividly evokes New York in the early 1980s, surely one of the most culturally exciting eras of all time, and Haring was right in the thick of it ... Along with numerous great pictures of Haring’s work, and Polaroids of him and his friends, the book includes his final drawing – his ultimate symbol of life, the radiant baby.
Not only a biography of the artist but a globe-trotting account of how Haring’s pictograms flooded the zeitgeist ... Some of the most vivid writing about Haring’s work comes not from Gooch (whose prose follows the neutral tone of most contemporary biography) but from the critics he cites.
Radiant’s final chapter, which depicts the end of Haring’s life, is rich, emotional, and compelling, and also features the best writing in the book ... Gooch’s book helps to fill in the crater that is the untold story of the queer art movement after Andy Warhol and before Rent—one of the largest gaps in LGBTQ art-political history and in the story of the city itself.
Brad Gooch’s thorough account of Haring’s brief time is mostly a tale of head-spinning ascent, until it drifts down into a melancholy twilight, though one made bearable by Haring’s refusal to let mere death get in the way of his life’s work.
Drawing on more than 200 interviews with Haring’s friends, family, and colleagues, Gooch captures the innovative, whirlwind creative spirit of the artist, who continued working and planning projects just weeks before dying from complications of HIV/AIDs at age 31. Shot through with details that bring to life the tumultuous social ferment of the era, this honors the inimitable spirit of a defining figure in the art world.
