In East Harlem, New York, there was an empty handball court on 128th street
and 2nd avenue. In 1986, Keith Haring decides to vandalize one of its walls.
He did it in broad daylight, saying that “When you have a van, ladders,
and paint, policemen don’t even consider asking whether you have any permission,
they just assume you do». Yet Haring ended up getting arrested after creating his mural
and even risked jail time, but he got out by simply having to pay a small fine of 100$. Why?
Well, to answer that, we have to go back a couple of years earlier, at the beginning of the 80s,
during the Crack Epidemic. Crack is a highly-addictive form of cocaine,
which was extremely cheap, as it could be sold at 2,50$ a rock, and still be very profitable. The
drug grew in popularity due to it’s low cost and its potency and ended up increasing violent crime
rates, especially in poor African-american neighbourhoods, Harlem being no exception.
Keith Haring witnessed the effects of this drug through his assistant, Benny,
who became addicted to it, which greatly impacted the artist. He said: “Inspired by Benny and
appalled by what was happening in the country, but especially New York, and seeing the slow
reaction (as usual) of the government to respond, I decided I had to do an anti-crack painting.”
This is why Keith Haring got away with illegally painting this mural.
It gained public attention. Being a political statement,
the media picked up on it and would show the mural when addressing crack-related issues.
It became an icon of anti-drug awareness. Here’s what Haring has to say about crack:
“Crack is a businessman’s drug. It was invented to make someone profit. Smoking pot never made
you go poor. And crack is completely different than the mind-expanding drugs like LSD or pot.
It’s the opposite of mind-expanding; crack makes you subservient. Instead of opening your mind,
it shuts it and makes you dependent on whoever’s providing you with the drug.”
This is why the original Crack is Whack mural had a tied up man hanging from his feet,
delivering him to a monster, devouring him. The Crack is Whack message appears
in a cloud of smoke, whic comes from a crack pipe. Money is being burned to show how crack,
the businessman’s drug, was designed to take money from drug-addicts. Of course,
there are also imagery of death as skulls are floating in the air and an upside down cross
seams as if it’s being tossed in the monster’s mouth. Finally, there’s the horse, that could
be a reference to the painting Guernica, an extremely political mural made by Picasso in 1937.
If you are observant, you might have noticed how there are no modern pictures of this mural.
The reason is that it got vandalized to become a pro-crack mural and was then painted over in grey.
The city of New York then commissioned Haring to paint another mural which is now the one you’d see
on display. Though it was made in the same year and at the same location, it’s quite different.
The new mural has the same icons, the skull, the crack-pipe and the burning
money, but all of those elements are combined in one figure, the dead man.
The mural Crack is Wack is still interesting, not necessarily for
its statement, as it is well-known that crack is pretty bad. It’s still relevant,
not only as a historical reminder of the crack epidemic, but also because it’s a display of
how art can be accessible to anyone, and how it can raise awareness to social problems