Original subtitles

[drum heart beating]

- I was sort of in New York at exactly the right time

and exactly the right place.

[train screeching]

Wherever you are is the center.

But I can be in more than one place at the same time.

[drum heart beating]

Things seemed to be really happening fast.

[upbeat music]

[camera whirring]

- He was born face up instead of face down

which the doctor called sunny side up.

I guess I should have known right then

something was gonna be up, huh?

[uptempo electronic music]

[car buzzing]

- [Keith] I grew up in a really small town

in Pennsylvania called Kutztown

which is northeast of Philadelphia.

I grew up learning to draw from my father

from about the time I when I was about four years old

and my father used to entertain me

by making small drawings for me.

And I think the biggest impression that it had

was that instead of teaching me to copy

other cartoon characters or comics

he wanted me to invent my own characters.

[gentle bell music]

[camera whirring]

- We had a game where we'd see how good we could do

drawing with your eyes closed, which is a good practice

for getting the rhythm of your hand

and knowing where your hand is and what it's doing

without watching, without seeing it.

[uptempo electronic music]

[camera whirring]

- The hand is very strong, very unique.

And it's like a musician who has a particular

musical signature that even with a few bars

you know it's somebody's voice.

You see just a few lines of Keith, you know it's his hand.

[uptempo electronic music]

[camera whirring]

- Different kids will just get together

to do different things.

When you think about it, I had friends

that got together with their peers to play basketball.

I had friends that got together to play cards.

We got together to draw.

- [Keith] I was really obsessed with Walt Disney a lot.

I loved Walt Disney, I watched cartoons all the time.

- [Kermit] I think we had a fascination

with all kinds of genre if you will,

and we were taking it pretty seriously.

I mean, at that time we were fully aware of who Picasso

and all these guys were.

We were aware of the work that they did.

We were aware of how many pieces Picasso

had created in his lifetime.

And I don't think we were 10 years old.

[camera whirring]

- He was always drawing,

so it was kind of a continuous evolution.

So I always knew he was good at it.

I always knew he could draw

and do artwork as well as my dad.

And was always a little jealous of that fact,

'cause I couldn't.

[gentle music]

- [Keith] At about 12, I start delivering newspapers.

And I started a newspaper route,

which I delivered every day, including Sundays.

Every day after school, on a bicycle, usually,

and this was also actually probably interesting

because it meant that from 12 until 16,

which is 1970 till 1974,

every day I was reading the front page of the newspaper.

And this was during the end of the Vietnam War,

and then into Watergate.

And Sundays, it was also then maybe

one of the first times when I became,

or I had another thing that made me close to my father

was because on Sundays, the newspapers are very thick

because it's the comics and all those sections.

So Sunday mornings I would deliver them with my father,

every Sunday morning.

He would wake me up at six or seven in the morning

on our early get-outs that we would do with the papers,

and get done in time to go to church.

I would come home and have breakfast and go to church.

[camera whirring]

- We grew up in a family that went to church every week,

and because we were quite active, Keith and I,

and my younger sister Karen, in the youth group,

that gave us an opportunity

to really figure out where religion

maybe had a meaning to us in our lives.

- [Joan] I went to church camp for many years,

and we encouraged Keith to go,

and then the girls all went, too.

There was one of the first times

that he met people from the city.

Black people.

Mostly blacks, which we didn't have

in Kutztown at that time.

And he got to know people from Philadelphia,

which was this big city far away.

[rapid tempo rock music]

- There was a couple years towards the end of high school

that I just thought he was really

running around with the wrong kids.

- That was a tough time.

It wasn't till he was in about 11th grade

when he started hanging out with some,

hanging out so to speak,

with some guys in his class that we really didn't like.

- I had three sisters that were younger than me,

and one of them was much younger.

So when she was born when I was about 10,

so I would really spend a lot of time with her

when I was growing up,

and spent a lot of time drawing with her.

[camera whirring]

- I had no judgment of him.

I was an infant.

There was no way that I was going to be trying

to categorize him as being a good boy,

or misbehaving in school.

So I had no opinions formed of him,

and he could make a connection with me that was direct.

- I think at that time he probably was smoking pot.

- Kutztown, it was a really small town,

so because I was not, I didn't really fit in

to what the rest of the normal kids

were like, but as a I got a little bit older,

I always used to leave and hitchhike,

and by the time I was 18, and was allowed to leave school

and leave my parents, the first thing I wanted to do

was get out of that little town.

- [Man] And time it could've been worse.

I think this one's a write-off, and that one is not good.

What about this one?

- [Keith] That one's okay.

- [Man] I didn't mind those at all.

- [Keith] Oh that one's not the right form--

- [Man] Oh it was?

Oh I thought you'd done that as well.

- I'm dripping while the orange is still wet.

That one's alright.

I don't want to throw that away, though.

I really like it.

- In senior high school, he had an art teacher

who was really good.

And he devoted more time to art.

He got an honorable mention.

And he got $100 dollars.

And he was so proud of this.

It was his first money that he got

from anything, for any of his drawings.

And he said, okay, I won that $100 dollars.

And he said, I'm gonna use that $100 dollars,

and he paid his first down payment

to go to school in Pittsburgh.

[gentle rock music]

- After high school, I went to a commercial art school

in Pittsburgh for six months, 'cause at that point,

my parents were still convincing me

that I would never make any money being an artist.

And if I really wanted to make a living,

I'd have to do commercial art.

So I went to this commercial art school

on my own savings really from being a paperboy or whatever.

And after six months, realized that no matter what,

I didn't want to do that.

[camera whirring]

- I was going to school in Kutztown,

and I was good friends with Kermit Oswald,

and Kermit and Keith were childhood friends.

Kermit bought a studio down by his house,

and we used to hang out.

That was like the hangout, and Keith would come and visit

from wherever he was traipsing around,

following the Grateful Dead.

And Keith would stop in, and that's when I first met him.

And then he could always draw like a son of a gun.

- [Kermit] When I started making film in school

in like '78, '79, the Sony Camcorder

that I worked with weighed 95 pounds.

And it took 24 hours to charge it

to shoot 30 minutes of tape, reel-to-reel.

No cassettes.

It's like, this godamn thing was like a backpack.

You'd put it on your back, you're like, oh my god.

Where are we going, not far, I hope. [laughs]

Thing weighs a ton.

[gentle jazzy music]

- [Keith] When I was 20, I had my first

one man show in Pittsburgh.

While I was there, there had also been

an exhibition of Pierre Alechinsky in the museum,

which at that time had a really big influence on me

because it was the first time that I had seen

an older artist who had done an entire body of work

that in some ways was very similar

to the things that I was starting to do,

even though I was 20 years old.

There was something very common that I had with his work,

and it gave me sort of that confidence

to think that maybe I was on the right track,

and I was doing something that was worth taking seriously.

[jazzy music]

- This is very vivid in my memory

that he stood in the kitchen

and explained to my parents

that he could not be in Pittsburgh anymore,

that he had to be in New York.

- It was a big decision.

Our son was going off to the big city.

I mean, Pittsburgh was big decision.

I remember I cried and cried when he left.

But New York City, wow.

[upbeat rock music]

- I first met Keith in 1978.

It was probably my first week at school,

at the School of Visual Arts.

[upbeat rock music]

I heard this Devo music, and there was Keith in this room,

and he was painting to the beat, all these black lines,

and he was painting himself into the corner.

[camera whirring]

- The first class was drawing,

and the teacher said okay, everybody choose a partner

and draw each other.

And Keith just sort of came and sat and drew me.

- We actually had some classes together

that we were taking at SVA.

One of the classes with Bill Beckley was in semiotics.

And that I think was kind of interesting for both of us.

- [Keith] I've learned from semiotics in choosing

to repeat certain things.

In their repetition they gain importance

and significance and turn into something else,

turn into a different kind of sign.

[camera whirring]

- I first met Keith at the School of Visual Arts in 1978.

And I remember looking at his sneakers,

and his legs, and I thought he was a funny,

really funny guy.

He was in my class and then we became really good friends.

And I used to cook spaghetti,

and he used to come to eat spaghetti

all the time to my house.

- The,

the,

th,

th.

- Five.

Five.

One, two, three, four, five.

It's great to be alive, five.

- Al.

Al,

al.

- I think you can erase that.

[camera whirring]

- That's how I met Keith, while he was a student

in the School of Visual Arts.

He came to help me as an assistant.

He and his friend Kermit Oswald

came to help to prepare exhibitions, paint walls,

and install things, and take things down,

of course, and wrap and pack.

You know, as you get ready for a show,

you need some preparation, of course.

But also, along with that came a number of their friends

who helped in the opening, for example,

either the bar and various things like that.

So I met his whole circle of friends,

which were very interesting.

That's how I met Jean-Michel Basquiat for example.

and Kenny Scharf and so on.

So there was already a big group of friends

who were very close together,

and Keith was sort of the center of it, you might say.

- We needed a place to live,

so we just decided we'd get a place together.

And he found one, it was just a total rat trap.

I mean, I never saw rats, but everything else.

They called it a two bedroom.

It was like, I had a bedroom and Keith lived in a closet.

And it was like literally the size of a sleeping bag.

And he had a stereo and he just played

the B-52s non-stop, 24 hours a day,

for the entire time we lived there.

♪ Ski-doo-be-dop ♪

♪ Eww ♪

♪ Ski-doo-be-dop ♪

♪ Eww ♪

- [Keith] One of the things that started

becoming really interesting and a way that I was combining

what was going on at night, and what was happening in school

was that the subject matter of many of the drawings

that I was doing, because I was still doing

these abstract shapes,

but I started being completely obsessed

with doing phallic little,

I mean, the calligraphy became completely phallic.

Partly,

really consciously as a way of sort of asserting

my sexuality and forcing people to deal with it.

And so I sort of consciously sort of flaunted the fact

that I was interested in dicks because I could.

- And we found each other at the club baths

across the street, which was the notorious bath house.

We ran into each other there.

That's when we both kind of figured out we were gay,

since we were both at the bath house.

And he was there all the time, and I was there all the time.

- Ass, sin,

fat, no.

No, sin,

boys,

sin, art.

- I remember going to the new Saint Mark's baths

on a Saturday night, and just thinking,

god this must be like what Rome was like.

All these beautiful healthy men,

gay men doing whatever they wanted with each other.

It was like gay paradise.

[car swooshing]

[gentle rhythmic music]

- [Keith] Almost immediately upon my arrival in New York,

I had begun to be interested in,

and intrigued by,

and fascinated by the graffiti

that I was seeing on the streets.

And so it became an event for me to take the subways.

[camera whirring]

- We were just walking around together.

He would see a graffiti painting with a cartoon.

And I remember Keith would just go,

man, look at that, look at that.

That should be in the Whitney,

that should be in the Museum of Modern Art.

And Keith was just like, just totally happy.

He was just, we were absorbing it all.

It's like, look, look, look at that.

Oh that tag, I've seen that kid.

I was like, oh yeah, that's so-and-so.

He became really good friends

with that crew of graffiti writers.

He would later meet LA2,

who then he would collaborate with.

They had a very special relationship.

And LA was very successful.

It was almost like a gift from heaven

in the way Keith found him, and really was very equitable

in terms of giving him his share of the money.

'Cause some of Keith's first major exhibits

at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery and whatever,

there would be many pieces that he would

collaborate on with LA2.

♪ Keep ticking and tocking ♪

♪ Work it all around the clock ♪

♪ Everybody keep rocking and clocking ♪

♪ And shocking and rocking go house ♪

♪ Everybody say rock it don't stop it ♪

♪ Rock it don't stop it ♪

♪ Well hit me, Mr. Biggs ♪

♪ Mr. Biggs ♪

♪ Pow wow ♪

♪ Pow wow ♪

♪ G-L-O-B-E ♪

♪ G-L-O-B-E ♪

♪ The soul sonic boom ♪

[camera whirring]

- The city became a canvas,

and in many ways, a lot of the younger artists

were living off the fumes of graffiti art.

The artists themselves within the art world

took a lot of those strategies,

a lot of those expressions,

a lot of the kind of semiotic abbreviations,

the ways of signing,

the ways of creating different identities.

The forms of trespass and intervention and public art,

and worked it into their own language.

And Keith would probably be one of the best examples

of somebody who really understood the spirit of graffiti.

- [Fred] I guess the most noted painting that I made

in terms of subway graffiti

was a whole subway car painted with Campbell's Soup cans.

It was a homage to Andy Warhol.

It was also a message that I was sending

to people throughout New York City.

The message was that I am aware of modern art,

of pop art, of the culture and the art

of making art in the art world.

And it was also a message that we as graffiti artists,

we're not just the animals, the wild dogs,

the savage beasts, the way we were depicted

in the press at that time.

[upbeat dance music]

- Most artists waited to see what was their opportunity,

where could they show their work?

Where could they sell their work?

Who was there to see the work

and consider it to be interesting?

So there was a lot of waiting around, unfortunately.

[upbeat music]

Keith was never like that.

Immediately he set to work.

Where he had his own program of things he'd be doing.

So in fact, rather than the artist, or Keith Haring,

or anybody else bugging one over this,

wanting to show his work to me.

I had to ask him, time and again, curiously,

what was it that he was doing?

- Keith had a lot of different jobs.

Oh yeah, he was a busboy at Danceteria,

he worked for Shafrazi, cleaning glasses.

We worked in night clubs as well.

We all kind of got jobs in the night club,

the Mud Club and Club 57,

doorman, bartending, go-go dancing.

♪ Oh we've got another dance song for you ♪

♪ It's called the Nutrino ♪

[pulsing static] [lips smacking]

[pulsing static]

[pulsing static] [distorted screaming]

[popping static]

- Keith was very connected,

was a big part of a little club called Club 57,

on 57 Saint Mark's Place,

and Keith would put together little group shows and stuff

for all of the friends.

- When I was in the East Village,

I was friends with lots and lots of artists,

'cause I used to organize shows with this club

called Club 57 for a 100 artists at a time.

- Actually, I had the first art show at Club 57.

It was called "Celebration of the Space Age."

[electronic music]

- Space.

- [Kim] I got this job as the style editor of the Soho News.

It was kind of a radical downtown weekly.

So I was always looking for stories,

and looking for what was new and happening.

But I used to go to the Mud Club every night,

but someone told me about Club 57, so I checked it out.

And it blew my mind.

- Mud Club was more serious.

Actually, it was different drugs,

because Mud Club was very more heroin,

so everybody was all more depressed

and more down like that.

And Club 57 was just drunk and doing whatever, you know.

It was more like a ridiculous crowd.

- It was like our club palace, you know.

I was the big mouth funny guy.

Three quarters of you are,

[cheering and clapping drowns out speaker] then clap.

[drumbeat music] [crowd hysterically cheering]

Okay, this is John Sex.

[excited crowd screaming]

♪ Hey ♪

- This group of art students with this very unusual,

unusually brilliant crowd of kids.

Ann Magnuson, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf,

Tseng Kwong Chi, John Sex and they had this huge

creative wild thing going.

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

♪ Hey ♪

[crowd cheers hysterically]

- Every night was a different theme.

There was art shows there was music,

there was poetry performance, movies.

And it was basically, it really was a youth club,

in a way, for I guess avant-garde,

bohemian, East Village kids.

- Maybe we should do something about the goldfish ninja.

- [Kenny] Sex was constant, everywhere, with everybody.

It was a rolling orgy, practically.

Some people were gay, some people were bi.

Was there anyone straight?

There was like two straight people.

Drugs, sex, rock 'n roll.

We were young, we were 19, 20 years old

and we were loose in the city.

And we were just really having a good time.

And the city was our playground.

And everything was for us to taste

whatever we want to taste.

- We were free, this was Manhattan.

It was before AIDS.

- What is this preoccupation with the war.

Who really cares.

It was the Reagan era, so we just gave up, basically.

- When Reagan started,

of course we all went on a campaign against Reagan.

- We were so shocked that this could have even happened,

that a right wing Republican, actor could become president.

It was just shocking to us.

- It was a subculture, we were apolitical, anti-political.

I mean Keith was pissed off,

'cause Keith is all,

he had a conscience or something,

I just wanted to have fun, he was pissed off.

So he did all the word pieces about Reagan and the Pope.

- [Bruno] He used to cut up the New York Post things.

Playing with words and paste it all over the city.

And also in a more direct neighborhood,

politics was all the East Village.

They all used to wear beards.

All the queens and stuff,

the gay guys used to wear a beard.

And he made a whole movement

with the gay men against facial hair.

And he had a stencil and he stenciled

all over the city. [laughs]

Well, that's politics.

- So a sick society invented psychiatry

to defend itself against the investigations

of certain visionaries,

whose faculties of divination disturbed it.

Infinite belongs to us.

[upbeat music]

- Keith was living at the time,

in a little room on 12th Street.

And I was like, Keith, you need to have some more space,

so come up and share this loft with me.

That was the start of us being roommates.

- The loft was two floors and,

Keith had one area upstairs, and Kenny had another area.

And Keith's area was absolutely immaculate.

It was just genius.

It was completely tidy.

There was a little bed rolled up in the corner.

There was a little rack for magazines.

And then there were two perfectly positioned chairs

just exactly where you would like them to be,

so that when you went in,

you felt like sitting down and talking to him.

- Samantha was just a beautiful girl.

Sam and I were kind of a couple.

And we loved Keith.

And so the three of us.

We would have breakfast together,

we'd lie in bed together.

- Kenny's area was completely different. [laughs]

Kenny's area was complete chaos.

Paint everywhere, fluorescent paint everywhere.

Toys everywhere, things glued to the walls.

Cigarette packets glued to the walls.

Everything was significant.

But the division in thinking was hysterical.

Anyway it was really fantastic,

them living together actually.

- [Keith] One of my early performance pieces

when I was at the School of Visual Arts.

Was this video tape I did

which I also performed live a few times.

It was a piece dedicated to my father,

and the whole thing was just me talking in morse code.

And then it was interspersed with me stopping

and explaining that my father used to make

the morse code line, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit, da.

Da, dit, dit, da, da, dit, dit, da dit, dit, da,

dit, dit, dit, dit, da, da, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit,

da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit, da, dit.

My father, my father's into ham radio.

My father, my father always used to,

always used to tell me, tell me, this,

this is morse code.

This, this is morse code.

He said, he said this, this is morse code.

Da, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit, dit, dit,

da, da, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit,

da, dit, dit, da, da, dit, dit, da, dit, dit.

- We would call him almost on a weekly basis,

on a Sunday, just to see how things were going.

He would tell us that he had some work

that he'd put in a show at Mud Club,

and I guess he was actually running the shows, at Mud Club.

Didn't make sense to us,

didn't understand what Mud Club was.

Didn't understand what these other clubs were.

[high pitched whining signal]

- I don't like seeing myself from the back.

That was one of the first things to amaze me.

'Cause you never, you have--

- [Young Woman] You never get to see your back.

- Never close.

- That is weird. [television show chatter]

- [Woman] Hey, let's get ready for supper.

- When Keith was a student as the School of Visual Arts,

he had a couple of assignments that ended up

being brought home.

He somehow managed to get the school to lend him

a video camera for, what must have been a weekend,

when he came home.

The thing I remember about the video taping

was that he wanted me to sit in this chair

in our living room and read a book backwards.

And I was supposed to be very serious about it.

And the jump one in earth to went he so

either there sun any have not did but.

[train clacking] [train brakes screeching]

- [Keith] I really don't remember

how the subway drawings first started.

I remember when I started, but I don't really remember why,

except that I had noticed one of the empty back panels

and it just seemed to be the perfect place

to have a drawing.

And so I went above ground, bought a piece of chalk

and went back down and did it.

- [Woman] Aw c'mon get outta here.

Call the cops.

- [Man] Give him a break.

- [Keith] Drawing in the subway always had

a kind of element of fear of the unknown,

because you always had to be prepared

to get caught and getting locked up for a few hours.

- We're busy so hold on and I'll get back you okay?

- [Policeman] Yeah I think we're gonna arrest you

for graffiti in the subway.

- [Keith] Oh good, get this on film.

- [Woman] You actually like [mumbles]

- [Keith] It didn't happen that often.

Most times cops will just give you a ticket

and let you go.

But there was always sort of that edge to it.

Because you never know which kind of cop is gonna catch you.

The reason to keep doing it was that it was immediately

seeing the effect of what you were doing.

And you were immediately sort of seeing the power

of this thing to communicate and to actually touch people.

It stopped them in their tracks, et cetera.

- The main thing with him was that his animated motion

took him straight from bed, shower in the morning,

into the street, and the street became a place to work.

And the street led to the subways,

to the place of transportation.

So the world of active population, of people moving

was a ready-made audience, ready-made museum for him.

And for him it was very important 'cause he realized,

he knew that 80, 90% of these people

never went to the museum.

So he wanted to bring the museum to them.

[crowd buzzing]

- Who were you doing it for?

- For everybody I guess, I mean I don't get paid to do it.

But I do it down here so lots of people can see it.

- Good, good, good.

- Here, you want a button?

- Yes. - That's my signature.

- Okay, thank you.

- [Keith] I've gotten letters of stories from people

of specific times when they came upon a drawing

and it filled this gap that was waiting to be filled.

It made something make sense.

It made a moment for them

which will stay as a memory forever.

That's what all artists are supposed to do.

[camera whirring]

- He was so sophisticated that he could actually be simple

and appeal to children and people who were not

in the art world, as well as intellectuals.

- There were so many other things happening

in the art world and in the streets.

Seeing everything happening exactly at this one point.

That I was becoming so active in all these other things

that for my last year I eventually just,

when I came back to enroll for the third year

and take classes, she told me that maybe

there was nothing else they could do for me.

Because they couldn't give me credit

for these other projects I was doing.

And she said maybe you should just try

to be an artist, instead of a student.

And I was like, well yeah, what a great idea.

♪ In the daytime radio's scared of me ♪

♪ 'Cause I'm mad ♪

♪ 'cause I'm the enemy ♪

♪ They can't come on and play me in prime time ♪

♪ 'Cause I know the time ♪

♪ Plus I'm getting mine ♪

♪ I get on the mix late in the night ♪

- I introduced Keith to Jean-Michel.

I guess we became kind of know as the three,

I wouldn't say musketeers,

but each one had our own identity

of different from each other, but very street oriented.

And with a strong competition, a healthy competition.

Keith and Jean-Michel took off earlier then I did.

- And then in the beginning when I started,

when I first started selling work,

I was determined to not be with the gallery

and to learn everything myself.

And I started selling things for myself, out of my studio.

And after about two months I decided

I'd never ever wanted to see the person

whose buying the thing again, 'cause it drove me crazy.

- It was taking off.

People were coming over our shared space everyday.

And basically I remember, oh my god this is great.

Keith is bringing all these people in.

They're gonna see my art too.

So I had all my things all over the wall.

And I'll never forget, they would walk

past my art like it wasn't there.

And I was just like, but wait a second.

What about me?

And it was really hard.

And I remember Keith felt a little bit bad.

- He called me up, he's like, I got the show at Shafrazi.

I'm like, you did?

♪ Back caught you looking for the same thing ♪

♪ It's a new thing ♪

♪ check out this I bring ♪

♪ Uh, oh, the roll below the level ♪

♪ 'Cause I'm living low ♪

♪ Next to the bass, c'mon, turn up the radio ♪

♪ They claiming I'm a criminal ♪

- We stood out.

People could always tell.

Oh, you must be Keith's family.

You're the only people here who aren't dressed

completely in black, or who don't have pink hair. [laughs]

- And we went up and we were very proud,

and then he still didn't sell anything at first.

And then he started making some things that were more,

that people could put in their homes.

- There were people who were gonna pay

what to us were unbelievable sums of money,

for his work, even in those early days.

To go from being a bicycle messenger

to be selling a painting for $10,000 dollars,

seemed like this extraordinary amount of success.

- One time I went to his studio,

and he said, you want some money?

[laughs] And I said, why?

He's like here, he had like hundreds of dollars in cash.

And we're like, what did you rob a bank?

He said, no, this lady came here

and she wanted to buy everything and I didn't

have anything to buy, and she saw all those things

in the garbage, and so I sold it,

they'd say I want this,

but this I'm throwing in the garbage.

I don't care, I'll buy it.

- As soon as money was introduced into the picture,

it changed everything.

All of a sudden, everybody was like, oh,

we have to make money, we have to compete.

It changed the whole thing that before that,

it was art was only for art.

And it was all for each other.

We were performing and doing everything for each other.

And kinda working off each other.

And then all of a sudden the outside world

came in with all the money.

What happened was a lot of people, including me,

was like, oh shit, I'm gonna be left behind.

[upbeat music]

- I needed to find somebody to move in,

so Keith moved in, we shared a flat for a couple of years.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] During this time, again I continued

searching for something and someone

and becoming very frustrated that I don't

have a lover by this point.

And at this point I'm really tired

of only doing the baths, and so I finally

meet Juan Dubose, so I run into him and have great sex

and just decide that this is probably

the right person to me.

He's black, he's really thin, he's the same height as me,

his dick is the same size as me.

He's almost the same age as me.

- He'd been out and he had met Juan a club or something

and he was waiting for Juan to call.

And there he was, he was sitting on one of chairs,

and the room was absolutely immaculate.

And in front of the chair, on the floor,

was the telephone.

And I came in and it was very, very quiet.

And I thought, what's going on 'cause normally

there was music and stuff.

I went to him and I said, what are you doing?

And he said I'm just waiting for a phone call.

And he waited and he waited and he waited.

And I think it took Juan two days to ring.

And then finally the phone rang.

And it was Juan, and he was a great love.

[pop music]

[echoing beeps]

- Keith became an instant star within the first year.

By '82 he went to Japan, they were lining up

to come to see him, it was like the Beatles had arrived.

[crowd buzzing] [rap rock music]

♪ Brakes on a bus, brakes on a car ♪

♪ Breaks to make you a superstar ♪

♪ Breaks to win and breaks to lose ♪

♪ But these here breaks will rock your shoes ♪

♪ And these are the breaks ♪

♪ Break it up, break it up, break it up! ♪

[woman speaking in foreign language]

[crowd cheering]

[camera whirring]

- [Interviewer] What are some of the other countries

you have done some work in?

- All over the world really, Germany, France, London,

South America,

Japan,

Holland,

Spain,

um, and around the United States.

[crowd chattering]

[camera whirring]

- I'm Brazilian, and so first time Kenny came to Brazil,

and that's how he met his wife.

We were on the plane together, going to carnival.

- I get back from my trip from my trip to Brazil,

and I announce, hey everybody, I'm having a baby.

And they were like, you crazy?

And I was crazy, a little bit.

I thought hey, I'm 24 years old, I'm a grown man.

I was a kid.

[gentle chime music]

- I think there's a lot of things about art

that have a lot to do with healing

that a lot of people haven't really scientifically explored,

but I think it's definitely healthful for children

to be around art, especially when they're around

in a hospital situation, so they feel

more comfortable about being there.

But also just thinking positive about everything,

which is a part of healing and feeling better.

- [Sam] He always wanted children, and he loved children.

And I remember him saying please,

please have a baby with me.

And I was just like, you must be joking.

- I felt in a way that my having Zena

was a little bit of a gift to Keith.

Because I don't know if I thought it so much

consciously, but maybe subconsciously

I thought this is gonna help our family.

And Keith became her godfather.

And Keith was really wonderful to her.

[upbeat electronic music]

- [Keith] When I was drawing in the subways,

sometimes you do 30 drawings in a matter of three hours

or something, so I didn't wanna keep doing

the same thing over and over

so you'd invent something on the spot.

That's one reason why I really liked working

with children more than anything else,

because they still really have that freedom

and imagination to just do it.

[carnival music]

[performer singing in foreign language]

[dramatic music]

- [Keith] I suppose even just from the time

I was a little kid I had this tremendous guilt from learning

all the things that white people had done.

The more I learned, the more I learned about everything

from whether it was what they did during World War II,

to Japanese people in California.

And putting them in camps, do what they did to Indians too.

The whole civil rights movement.

I felt a much closer affinity

to culture and people of color

then I did to white culture and white.

[camera whirring]

- Who I was in the '80s was Donald Mattern,

which was my original name.

And I had changed it when I started DJing.

It came about, I just wanted to give up my identity

from coming from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

I changed it to Junior Vasquez.

Keith always told me that he'd never

felt really white inside.

I never felt that I was anything else on the inside.

[melancholic music]

- [Bill] I did an evening at The Kitchen,

which was an evening of collaborations.

And the idea was to collaborate with people,

dancers, musicians and artists.

And Keith was that artist.

Keith and I did a piece which was called

I believe, "Long Distance".

No music, just the sound of his brush.

He understood when I said I think

it should just be my body, it's rhythms,

and your brush strokes.

And I think he liked the idea.

There was something virtuosic and beautiful

and musical in the way in which he did paint.

And that was something

that we both exploited in that moment.

Long distance.

[upbeat music]

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Don't ♪

♪ Wreck it ♪

[camera whirring]

- At the time that I started working for him.

He was really interested and involved

with the hip-hop scene

and he was at that time seeing quite a bit

of his friend Madonna.

He hung around with Grace Jones.

He also stayed close to his friends

from his earlier days in New York, from SVA.

Tseng Kwong Chi, Kenny Scharf,

Tony Shafrazi through the gallery, was around a lot.

[upbeat music]

- [Bruno] Keith was traveling all over the world at the time

but he'll make sure to take the plane,

and arrive on Friday night,

to be at the weekend for the Paradise Garage.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] The music was phenomenal, Larry Levan watched

Preston's Djing there, and was like a kind of guide.

♪ I can live with music ♪

- [Keith] Never been the same since,

entering that crowd for the first time.

- [Fred] You see the Paradise Garage

originally opened as a gay club.

I had some friends that I grew up with in Brooklyn

that were not gay, that had started to go to this club.

And I was like, man isn't that a gay club?

They said, well no, Friday night is really mixed.

There's gay people, but there's straight people

and there's really hot girls.

And if the girls see that you're not homophobic,

then that's cool.

- Keith was much more interested in my boyfriend,

Javier, this really beautiful Puerto Rican boy,

then he was in me.

And he made it really clear

that he wanted to get to know Javier.

And really was kinda rude to me.

Putting himself with his back, like right in my face,

and just talking to Javier, and I was fine.

[upbeat dance music]

- [Fred] The sound system, you would hear

from when you got on the block, you would hear

this deep bass, like it was amazing.

'Cause nothing, nothing, nothing sounded anything

like the Garage sound system then, or now.

- I had started going to the Paradise Garage.

And that's where I met Adolfo,

which was Keith's assistant at the time.

Paradise Garage, Larry Levan and Keith Haring,

it was a threesome.

Because the place reeked of Keith Haring.

I mean, his art was all over the place

for almost the whole time it was open.

It was just that whole blend of the music

and Keith, what he did, and what that had created.

The music, and Keith was the forefront

of our culture at that time.

- I was at many parties and things with Keith,

and I was friends with friends of his, Martin Burgoyne,

who had been Madonna's roommate, who'd died of AIDS.

I was friends with Martin, Martin was best friends

with Keith, so it was again,

it was a very small group, very small scene.

I was on the outskirts 'cause I was younger then them,

and just coming up as a photographer.

- His own birthday, which is May 4th,

was the occasion for him to throw an enormous party

at whatever at the time was his most favorite night club.

He decided that he would name this party,

he would actually call it the Party of Life.

[pop music]

♪ You've got style ♪

♪ That's what all the girls say ♪

♪ Satin sheets ♪

♪ And luxuries so fine ♪

♪ All your suits are custom made in London ♪

♪ I've got something that you'll really like ♪

- [Bill] One night we went to the Paradise Garage.

And it was the first night that Madonna appeared in public.

Who was this girl?

And I turned to Arnie and I said, what's the big deal,

and Keith said, Andy said she's gonna be

the biggest thing ever, you'll see.

And I said, oh right, right, right.

[drumbeat music]

- [Keith] I made lots of things that are on permanent

or semi-permanent materials.

Usually paper or metal and plastic, wood, vinyl.

But I like the idea of things lasting longer

then you last, and being somewhere

where lots of people can see them for a long time.

- [Tony] I encouraged him, if he could address the idea

of how could he make something

more permanent with paintings.

And thereafter, that followed.

So he came up with the solutions of painting on tarps.

And he purposely chose tarps which industrial things

which were used in the back of trucks.

With the holes and the grommets'

so that they hold down.

So that all the goods that you're carrying

across borders and traveling, again,

very much to do with travel.

It's something very important,

even Jack Kerouac talks about it,

very important, that idea of nomadic life of travel.

[upbeat music]

- Keith had an interest in celebrities, certainly,

and I guess in some way even in his own fame

or the hope that he would eventually be a well known person.

The phone calls that we would get from New York,

would be slowly peppered with more and more references

to people he had met.

He started throwing some names around,

about meeting certain people.

In fact, you know, I think when he first said

that he met Andy Warhol, I had to ask my wife,

who's Andy Warhol? [laughs]

- Well Andy was our hero.

He was the whole reason why we moved to New York.

He was just everything.

He was like god, king.

- [Keith] The first time I'd seen Andy,

very first time I saw him, I was sitting in the coffee shop,

the community Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street.

I wanted to go in and say something,

but I had no idea what to do and so I just walked

back and forth in front of the coffee shop several times

and then decided that was ridiculous and left.

- Hi. - Hi.

- How are you?

- He really was our inspiration, and he opened up

so many doors as far as ways of thinking about art

and ways of how art could be different

then just something on a wall in a gallery.

[camera whirring]

- The first time I met Keith, was when Andy Warhol

brought Keith Haring to my apartment,

because we were having Sean's birthday.

Sean my son's birthday.

[guitar strumming]

And Keith was carrying this big painting.

It was all still wet.

And it was for Sean.

And it had a face and a number nine to it.

- Andy Warhol came to the exhibition of Keith Haring

that we had in 1982, at Mercer Street.

Warhol would rarely be seen in a gallery at an opening.

But in this case, not only did he come,

but he was riveted.

And he became very close friends with Keith.

- And they were very good friends.

I think it was a very important relationship

that Keith had with him, they gossiped,

they talked almost daily.

- So what did you do last night?

- They'd get on the phone at the end of the night

and they'd talk like a bunch of old ladies.

It was just like the way they did it.

And they were, in a way they were

these two little art world old ladies.

- Andy envied this enthusiasm that these kids had.

He envied the energy that they had,

in a way so it was an extension of what he was after.

In one aspect of what he was doing.

In fact, when Madonna got married, for example

to Sean Penn, it was Keith Haring who was invited.

And Keith took, as his date, Andy Warhol.

So Andy was invited.

And Andy liked that idea a lot.

- [Kenny] We used to call him Pop-a-Pop.

But he was definitely a father figure.

- Andy Warhol's work was creating something

in a meaningful tradition, but it was meaningless in a way.

And he liked the meaninglessness.

And Keith was creating something

that was looking at meaningless,

but actually it was meaningful.

- Andy Warhol took

normal things and made them into art.

But he wanted to do the opposite.

He wanted to make art normal.

To integrate it, to take it out of this special label.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] In '85 I needed Grace for two live performances

at the the Garage, which is the second

and third time which I paint her.

♪ Love to the rhythm ♪

♪ Live to the rhythm ♪

♪ Work to the rhythm ♪

♪ Slave to the rhythm ♪

And now ladies and gentlemen,

here's Grace.

- [Keith] The strain on the relationship

with Juan Dubose has sort of reached a maximum in '85.

In the beginning of 1986

I meet Juan Rivera at Paradise Garage one night.

And I see this incredibly beautiful boy,

who I think is the man of my dreams

and I'm convinced that if he looks at me,

he talks to me, that that is gonna be it,

and I meet him, and within a week he's staying

at the studio all the time, and within two weeks

I invite him to come with me to Brazil

where I'm going for a month.

- Juan was the new love.

And then there was another beautiful Puerto Rican man

who's name was Juan Dubose.

He separated, and the other one is now the prince.

He's everywhere.

- I think my parents have been pretty open with the whole,

they may not have liked it,

but I think they accepted it well.

- [Allen] We didn't know or want to accept

that they were boyfriends,

we called them bodyguards or just friends.

- My family knew Keith's longer term companions very well.

They were implicitly accepted.

There was not a lot of discussion about this.

Some of them, just by personality,

didn't really integrate into our family quite as closely,

but others really became close with my family,

to the point where my mother

was making Keith's boyfriend scarves at Christmas.

- In the very beginning he described him as his bodyguard

which I thought was really kinda cute in a way.

Of course this is at a time

when the early '80s was not like the present.

This isn't on the cover of magazines like it is today.

Hollywood wasn't dealing with it.

There wasn't television about this subject.

This was something that was very much in the closet.

[gentle music]

- [Kirsten] My parents were pretty conservative,

politically and socially.

But for them that has always extended to,

people have the right to do what they want,

as long as they're not hurting other people.

- I would try to, like around relationships and so on,

I would try to pull him

into adult conversation about things.

This was hard with him.

It was him impulse, perhaps not his impulse.

His impulse was to do the work and to live the life.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] I've been approached by a man from a museum

in Berlin, at the museum called

the House at Checkpoint Charlie.

Which is a museum that's dedicated to human rights issues.

And he has asked me if I'm interested in painting

the Berlin Wall, which of course I'm interested in painting.

I'm painting this continuous, interlocking chain

of human figures which are connected at the hands

and the feet, and they're alternating between red

and black on a yellow ground, was the german colors

and really about, obviously somehow

about this unity of people and against the idea

of the wall which is separating people.

[upbeat music]

- I started buying work from Tony,

and collecting Keith's work.

I have about 30 pieces of Keith's

and I just love it because it really reminds me

of a time of living in New York and growing up.

It's a very optimistic time

and everybody thought art could change the world.

♪ Hell no, hell no, hell no ♪

♪ Life is precious you better believe it ♪

♪ Crack is wack, no you don't need it ♪

♪ Life is fresh, yes you better believe it ♪

♪ Crack is wack, no, you don't need it ♪

♪ Life ♪

♪ Baby life, life, life ♪

♪ Hoo ♪

♪ Life ♪

♪ Baby life, life, life ♪

♪ Hoo ♪

- There was a sense once Keith Haring got established

in the art world, that he should change

his methodology and his approach to

not just art-making, but to the institutions

and the market of art.

- It's true that maybe the art community,

especially the establishment,

art establishment may not be that into Keith's work.

The reason being because he has done so many works probably.

[cameral whirring]

- Keith wasn't stupid, he knew exactly what he was doing

and on top of that he had a lot of really smart people,

career savvy people advising him.

And they were telling Keith, okay, you stop

making so much work, there is a supply and demand

going here, you make bigger work.

You make a set number of work for a show in New York

every year, if you're really that prolific

and you can do a show in Europe.

You can do your commissions, but for goodness sake,

stop drawing in every kid's black book.

Stop drawing on people's clothes.

Stop giving your work away for free.

♪ See if I got cool ♪

♪ If it's cool we go ♪

♪ 'Cause I'm faithful ♪

Ah Kim, check this out,

yo, you go to your girls house and I go to mine.

'Cause my girl is definitely mad

'cause it took us too long to do this album.

- [Rapper] Yo I hear what you're saying.

- [Lead Singer] So let's just pump the music up

and count our money.

- [Rapper] Yo well check this out y'all,

Eli, turn the bass down and just with the beat

keep on rocking, and we're outta here.

Yo, what happened to peace?

♪ Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace ♪

- He was extremely sensitive.

He had way of being very giving.

When we were both invited

to lunch at this certain household,

and these people at the house was all children

and adults, all sort of thing,

would you please sign this, would you please sign this.

Keith was very, very accommodating,

but also instead of just signing his name,

which I would do. [laughs]

Usually all of us just sign our names

because what else can you do?

There's so many people asking.

But he would do a drawing for each one of them.

And I thought that was very generous of him.

Because it's not like the normal celebrity doing a drawing,

he's a very highly acclaimed,

and demanded artist.

- [Julia] His images started really penetrating

people's consciousness, and so he began to notice.

And friends from all over the world began to tell him

oh, they're selling Keith Haring T shirts in Thailand,

or I saw Keith Haring sneakers in Berlin.

And I saw Keith Haring pants in Brazil.

[upbeat music]

- [Carlo] When Keith opened the Pop Shop in 1985,

on Lafayette Street, it signaled a significant shift

in the way that youth culture was going to express itself.

- Keith really advanced what an artist could do.

Taking Andy Warhol's Factory one step further

into an actual factory store.

But when you look at what's come since then,

it's particularly Takashi Murakami,

taking Keith's approach perhaps even further.

Maybe not so much conceptually further,

but pushing it more with a connection

with major merchandising companies.

- They misunderstood a lotta things that Keith did.

The Pop Shop, they thought was a commercial endeavor.

He wasn't gonna get rich off of selling

T shirts and blowup pillows

and buttons, this wasn't about money,

it was about accessibility.

It was about him reaching people

and it was about spreading

the creative energy that he had.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] Partly at the prodding of Tony,

I had become interested in trying

to translate some of my things into large

outdoor sculptures, and into public sculptures.

And Tony has arranged

to do an exhibition at Castelli Gallery.

[upbeat music]

- [Julia] He just insisted.

Okay, now this year I have a show in Paris

and I have a show in Milano, and I have a show wherever.

And that's great and I gotta produce all this work

but I insist that when I go, to be present at my exhibition

in whatever country or city,

I also want to do something lasting and meaningful

that will remain, something that will help people.

Something that brings joy.

[upbeat music]

And so that is why, even today, in any number of cities

around the world, there remain Keith Haring murals.

Because fortunately people value them.

Not for their art market value but for their spirit.

- Yeah I do all kinds of things, sometimes they're temporary

and sometimes they last forever.

[upbeat music]

There's a new museum that's just been built in Antwerp.

And they asked me to do a permanent mural

inside the the museum, in the cafeteria, which I do.

[upbeat music]

[gentle music]

And very beautiful staying in Belgium

that I spend three weeks in Knokke, painting

and I'm living while there,

inside of this house that has been made

by Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely,

on the property of the Nellens.

And in this enchanted house, I'm living with this family

and having an incredible time.

The idea of the circle, I bind myself

to exercise myself only in one way.

Beauty in a circle.

A beauty is not suddenly in a circle,

it comes with rapture.

A great deal of beauty is rapture.

- [Drew] Things have seriously changed already in New York

and in my life, but in New York in general

because we've introduced this new horror of AIDS.

Which totally changed everyone's life

and it was affecting everyone's life by this point.

The first introduction of it probably is early as '82.

Starting to hear rumors of mysterious deaths of gay men.

- Do you know the brother?

Poor brother, he's dead.

- [Kenny] People have this idea about the '80s

as being so fantastic.

I tell people no, the '80s were terrible.

AIDS arrived, and it wasn't called AIDS,

it was called gay cancer, we didn't know what it was.

But that pretty much ended the fun.

It was horrible, can you imagine being in your 20s,

and all your friends, and they're all dying?

- ACT UP was a AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power

is a political group, fighting to get the government

to take notice of the AIDS epidemic that was happening.

To get testing through the National Institute of Health,

NIH, get tests made faster, you know there's so much

bureaucracy in medical research at the time.

And through the efforts of ACT UP,

they changed the way the US government

was dealing with AIDS,

and it was a very creative way to protest.

When Keith was diagnosed with AIDS,

he became a big part of ACT UP.

[solemn music]

- [Keith] Now I fit exactly the classifications

of actually having AIDS, so for the first time

it was a reality that now it was gonna begin to happen

to me, I knew I had to deal with it.

It's like I knew it was gonna happen.

But somehow that doesn't prepare you any more

for that moment when you know that it's really, that's it.

The first thing I do was just, breakdown, whatever.

I went and sat by the river and cried,

and cried and cried and cried but then,

it's like you have to go on.

You get yourself together and you realize

that this is not the end right there,

and that there's other things and you gotta continue.

And you gotta figure out how you're gonna deal

with it and confront it and face it.

[melancholic music]

- Yeah I was probably one of the first people

to know that he was HIV.

Yeah, it was a hard thing to swallow.

But again it wasn't a surprise, like I just said.

These people were pretty crazy,

they were known to be pretty wild.

So when he came to me with that, it didn't shock me.

- Did we ever talk about it?

He did say to me, and I have so much to do.

I've so much to do.

And I remember once going to his studio

and he was working feverishly.

I was saying to him, what's going on?

He said, I just have so much to do.

[solemn music]

- When Keith did his article in Rolling Stone.

It was amazing how brave he was to come out publicly.

'Cause no one else was doing that.

And I think he was shocked a little bit

by the parties invitations stopped.

- I did see Keith, and he told me,

you know I'm sick.

It was overwhelming, but what made it not as bad

as you would think, was the way

he just was dealing with it.

The way he said, you know I was just gonna

get the right treatment and eat right and boom, boom, boom.

And he really managed it in a very heroic

and a courageous way.

- [Kermit] He looked at me and he said,

there's something I want you to do for me.

And it was like, how many times

he had said that to me by this point in our lives?

Like thousands.

There's something I need you to do.

I'd be like okay, what?

Well, I need you to tell my parents,

that I have AIDS.

And I was floored.

I was absolutely,

and I think it took me second or two to okay, I'll do it.

It's not a problem.

[camera whirring]

- We talked about whether or not

art came from within,

or came through from some other place,

and you were just a vehicle,

in a sense of this energy coming

and you would just

designated to get these things out

and create these works for people to enjoy or hate.

He exemplified what an artist should be.

[upbeat music]

- [Keith] I started having more and more need

to be with intellectual companionship to deal the situation,

because it really required a lot of mental activity

and talking about it and trying to figure out

exactly what was going on and what to do with the situation.

And I met this kid, Gil, who I fall madly in love with.

[upbeat music]

- [Bill] I never even heard of Gil, so much.

And I found it peculiar that he would fall in love

with a straight man.

Now you can have friends.

But that can not,

Keith was a very sexual person.

What did that mean?

That you were in love with a man

who couldn't love you in that way.

No judgment.

- I was fortunate enough to travel with Keith

to many countries, France, England, Belgium, Italy, Morocco.

We would go to museums together,

If he could get away with it,

he would like to touch texture.

Not only visual but actual touching.

[slow beat music]

- [Keith] I also have a problem going to museums,

knowing, trying to decide between looking at the paintings,

or cruising, 'cause I was always,

museums are some of the cruisiest places

in the world, I think.

And I was supposed to be really interested

in this painting, but the power of a hot body,

can still over power that, so in some ways

it might be, it's probably one of the strongest forces.

- Keith met Piergiorgio and Roberto Castellani

on the streets of New York.

And from that meeting,

developed an invitation to come to the city of Pisa,

which also has quite a well known landmark already.

And he was asked, this contemporary artist.

This gay artist, this very young artist.

This artist who had a HIV, was invited to paint

a mural on the outside of a church.

[upbeat music]

♪ Whoo ♪

♪ Won't be no hard times ♪

♪ And no suffering ♪

♪ When they will all be free ♪

♪ Whoo ♪

♪ Whoo ♪

[crowd cheering]

- He wanted to set up a foundation

to carry out and to continue

the kind of charitable work

that he had done all his life.

He started to really focus

on what he wanted to leave as a legacy.

- Let's just pretend you get hit by a cab.

Let's just go that route, Keith.

I know you don't wanna talk about this,

but you're throwing this whole foundation thing

on all of us and there's a certain amount

of stuff here that I felt like I needed to know.

It was a little bit like pulling teeth, at the same time.

Not a conversation that you really wanna have.

[rhythmic music]

- He was in Germany at the end of January, 1990.

He died on February 16th, 1990.

He didn't stop.

He did not stop.

- There was no one, I can't imagine anyone

being able to do as much work as he did,

in that short period of time.

It was incredible.

He was like a superman or something.

- Now he's cremated, and we had to fight,

we had to struggle or fight for the ashes.

Found out in a off-handed way that you get cremated

and guess what, it's actually disposed of

with industrial garbage.

We created these two services, two funeral services

that we had in the Kutztown area.

One at a church that his family participates in.

And the second service we ended up having on the hillside

where he used to go and hang out

and meditate after school, or maybe sometimes

during school, I'm not sure. [laughs]

- You know I have a psychic side,

so ghosts and spirits whisper to me.

- Oh it was a sad day when we brought his ashes.

It was a rough day, period.

But then Julia carried them up in a plastic container.

And then she opened them and handed them to me first.

- At the hill, they were giving out

parts of the bones, to people.

And I received it too.

- The neat thing was in all the family,

we all took some and after we had taken them,

a flock of geese went over.

It was almost like a sign.

- And I put it in my pocket.

I thought what am I going to do with it.

And suddenly, Keith just whispered to me

saying keep it, hold it, I'll tell you what to do.

So I said okay.

- It was a beautiful day though, when I think back on it,

I can still look up and these clouds

and it was this incredible kind of Hollywood sky.

It was a beautiful moment when I think about it.

- Kermit, I think, sprinkled them

in the shape of a crawling baby.

He took the ashes and sprinkled them out.

- And I ended up officiating this funeral service

for some of his closest friends,

and certainly Tony

and I think the Scharfs, Kenny and his wife, and Yoko Ono.

- Yeah, that was a big doings when Yoko Ono was in Paris.

- I went home and Keith said

that he would like me to take it to Paris.

And put it in,

you know the obelisk in front of the Ritz?

The Place Vendome.

I went to Paris, and then Keith just came again

and said do it today.

The car was going to a gallery that we know,

and it sort of passed in front the Ritz,

and I said stop, stop, I jumped out of the car

and I just put it exactly where Keith

said I should put it.

[solemn music]

- To this day, it's somebody who is still,

to me he's still present in my life.

Not only I have his artwork all over my house,

not only my children still talk about him.

I tell stories of his to my children

and not only talk to my friends about him still.

He's somebody very present.

- He would always tease me that I'd forget him.

That I would forget him soon after he passed.

And I can honestly say,

that I have thought about Keith everyday

since he passed.

- Keith's alive everyday in my life, like I said

I see his stuff on people's chat.

The weirdest times, it's like it never stops.

It's like they say, is it art or is it god?

It's like Keith is still around.

- I was sitting with him and I held him.

And I said that I knew he could understand me,

that he could hear me.

And that everything was gonna be okay

and his legacy was gonna live on.

And it was just gonna grow.

That he should just relax because he's just done

amazing things and it was gonna continue.

And he calmed down.

His agitation stopped, and I said, you know what I'm saying.

Then he died.

A couple of hours later.

[melancholic music]

[upbeat music]

♪ Painting on a canvas. ♪

♪ Painting on a canvas. ♪

♪ Painting on a canvas. ♪

♪ Painting on a canvas. ♪

♪ Painting on a canvas. ♪

I would call you a total hypocrite

if I were to say I'm totally against all brothers

'cause I think people are entitled

to do what they want with their own bodies.

♪ With their own bodies. ♪

♪ With their own bodies. ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪

♪ Music ♪