‘Dogs of the World Unite’: Keith Haring and New York’s Canine Imaginary

Representations of dogs and dog-human hybrids featured in multiple works that Keith Haring produced after moving to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts. Topsy the dachshund, ‘cheerful playmate’ and ‘humiliation victim’, appeared in Xeroxed collages that Haring wheatpasted on lampposts and shopfronts around downtown Manhattan in 1980 (Fig. 1). He handed out badges featuring white dogs on red backgrounds on the city subway and began drawing dogs in marker pen ‘on the streets’ the same year.¹ A barking dog appeared as part of Haring’s contribution to the series Messages to the Public (1982), a Public Art Fund project which invited artists to make work for the Spectacolor electronic signboard at Times Square.

Fig. 1.

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Keith Haring, Untitled, 1980. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation. Newspaper fragments pasted on paper. 21.6 × 27.9 cm. Keith Haring Foundation collection.

Dogs featured regularly in Haring’s subway drawings, which he produced between 1980 and 1985.² While Haring said later that his early four-legged animal drawings began as images of people and ‘looked like they could have been cows or sheep’, that they were ‘symbols for animals, as opposed to specific animals’, there was no doubt as to the species that appeared on the matte black paper panels covering expired advertisements in subway stations in the early 1980s.³ Haring’s subway imagery evokes dogs through their shape and behaviour, with short rigid legs, clipped tails, and attentive ears, barking urgently. There is no hint of fur or fluff. These dogs bark at spaceships and televisions. They dance and fight. To borrow from the revolutionary funk musician and producer George Clinton, whose track ‘Atomic Dog’ was released as a single in December 1982:

Dogs, both real and symbolic, seem to have captivated New York City artists in this period. Colab, the artist collective behind the legendary Times Square Show (1980), had already curated a Dog Show in SoHo in 1977.⁴ In 1977, Colab member Tom Otterness had adopted a dog from a New York shelter, shot and killed it, filming the act for a controversial work he called Shot Dog Film.⁵ The painter René Santos held one at the Grey Art Gallery in 1985. The same year, the Massimo Audiello Gallery presented an exhibition dedicated to Chi Chi, the legendary art dealer Pat Hearn’s chihuahua, which included work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, and Philip Taaffe. Peter Hujar photographed dogs throughout the 1970s. David Wojnarowicz spray-painted dog’s heads on trashcan lids in the East Village in the early 1980s and wolves appeared in some of his screen-printed food posters. Wojnarowicz’s dogs were wild emblems of resistance in the face of urban renewal and gentrification, expressing cross-species solidarity and challenging dominant narratives of dogs as ciphers of fear and contagion.⁶ PS1 held an exhibition called Beast: Animal Imagery in Recent Painting in late 1982, which included two large black-and-white dog paintings by Keith Haring, exhibited alongside a poodle painting by General Idea.⁷

While Haring’s dogs are often interpreted as playful and universal emblems of urban life, the politically charged status of both dogs and queer people in New York City in this period suggests that something more complex, and geographically and culturally specific, was at play in Haring’s use of canine imagery. Representations of the city’s dogs were an evocative and visceral means through which to communicate with a wide range of viewers, particularly those outside New York’s galleries and museums, as well as being malleable symbols regularly deployed by municipal authorities looking to make a strong case for regeneration and reform after years of fiscal crisis and austerity. The life-sized rat posters which made up Christy Rupp’s Rat Patrol project (1979), which she placed in locations where rubbish had accumulated during sanitation strikes, were offset-printed from a citywide Department of Sanitation campaign familiar to anyone who travelled on the subway in the early 1980s. ‘I tried to connect urban ecology and anti-authoritarian sentiment’, she said later, rerouting the regulatory intent of the original image.⁸ Jenny Holzer’s contribution to the Times Square Show (which Rupp and Haring also participated in), Many Dogs Run Wild in the City …, part of her Living series, appropriated the familiar red-on-white design typically used for parking signage, a typography that evoked prohibition and municipal punishment, to warn of the threat of abandoned urban dogs in urgent and poignant terms, creatures, the sign read, which ‘tend to be frightened and vicious … unable to protect themselves or anyone else’. Rupp led workshops studying urban animals, including rats and dogs, as part of the exhibition Animals Living in Cities at the South Bronx art space Fashion Moda in autumn 1979, a collaboration with scientists from the American Museum of Natural History and local children. The show moved to ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side the following winter, where a stencilled band of multi-coloured dogs in studded leather collars by the artist Anton van Dalen stood guard in its Rivington Street window in front of a gathering of live hens and pigeons. It was part of an effort to, as Nandini Bagchee has noted, ‘explore the intersection of the animal world with the human one in the degraded environment of a neglected city’.⁹

For John Berger, writing in 1977, animals provide people with ‘an unspeaking companionship’, offered to ‘the loneliness of man as a species’.¹⁰ Animals, Berger suggested, offer a unique opportunity for metaphoric projection and symbolic representation, both general and particular. ‘[T]he first symbols were animals’, he writes, and ‘[t]he first subject matter for painting was animal’.¹¹ For Berger, while it is an attempt to fathom our closeness to and affection for creatures apparently unlike us, this tendency towards symbolism and projection in fact further separates animals and humans, rather than drawing us closer together. Indeed, in Berger’s conception, ‘[w]hat distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not merely signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves’.¹² The hypervisibility of representations of animals in the public and private spaces of late twentieth-century cities – in cartoons, advertising, and children’s toys – was, for Berger, both constitutive and reflective of a particular kind of urban alienation, from animals and from each other. Under advanced capitalism, he argued, animals and the working class have encountered a comparable and absolute marginalisation, a process that has destroyed the once-valued ‘look’ that passed between them and eroded that ‘unspeaking companionship’.¹³

Keith Haring’s work with dogs was shaped by the capacity of canine imagery to be both literal and symbolic. As Mel Y. Chen observes, writing about animals in cultural representation more generally, because of their symbolic malleability ‘[a]nimals rematerialize here and there as multilingual, interdisciplinary beings, sometimes just themselves, sometimes vitalizing fictive monsters, facing humans’.¹⁴ ‘In a way’, Chen notes,

animals serve as objects of almost fetishistic recuperation, recruited as signifiers of ‘nature,’ or ‘the real,’ and used to stand in for a sometimes conflicting array of other cultural meanings (including fear, discipline, sexuality, purity, wisdom, and so on).¹⁵

Some of Haring’s dog imagery from the early 1980s appropriated the historic figure of Anubis, the ancient Egyptian protector of the underworld (Fig. 2). Haring would likely have seen tributes to the canine icon on display in New York in this period; there are various amulets and statuettes in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum. Haring’s broader interest in the communicative potential of animal and anthropomorphic symbolism drew heavily from, in his own terms, ‘Egyptian Art / Hieroglyphics’.¹⁶ In his introduction to Art in Transit (1984), the first published anthology of the subway drawings, Henry Geldzahler observed, in general terms, that:

Keith Haring’s world is made up of symbols that speak urgently, […] that [strike] immediately and, through repetition, [becomes] a leitmotif that sees us through our days – a tuneful celebration of urban commonality. […] When we spot the radiant baby or the barking dog, we not only have seen them before and know we will see them again soon, we also know that tens of thousands of our fellows will see them as well.¹⁷

Fig. 2.

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Keith Haring, Untitled, 1980. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation. Acrylic, spray enamel, and ink on paper. 161.3 × 121.9cm. Keith Haring Foundation collection.

In a journal entry from 1978, Haring wrote that he was ‘interested in making art to be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible’.¹⁸ Accordingly, Haring’s dogs are often interpreted as universal symbols of resistance or protection, barking to call out general social injustice.

The dog is an always already overburdened metaphor, weighed down by centuries of anthropomorphic projection and the emotional labour of supporting the loneliest of species. Haraway has argued that dogs should not be deployed as ‘an alibi for other themes’. ‘Dogs are not surrogates for theory’, she writes: ‘they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with’.¹⁹ For Haraway, and for me, the ‘joint lives of dogs and people, […] bonded in significant otherness’ are ‘relentlessly historically specific’.²⁰ The contextual meaning of Haring’s dog drawings was crucial to their swift legibility in an urban environment saturated with commercial imagery and graffiti, and in places of transit and exchange like the New York City subway. Public anxiety about the number of dogs in New York, and their potential for spreading disease and disorder, exploded in the 1970s. Haring’s subway dogs might well have shared space with posters advertising cynophobic feature films like The Pack (1977), White Dog (1981), and Cujo (1983). A rise in dog horror movies in this period, what one Paramount executive called ‘Jaws with paws’, was the popular cultural expression of a public health crisis and a moral panic.²¹

While Keith Haring’s work with dogs was shaped by the capacity of canine imagery to be both literal and symbolic, he played with its communicative simplicity. While certainly intended to ‘be experienced and explored by as many individuals as possible’, the inclusion of canine imagery in Haring’s subway drawings also speaks to the experience of seeing and being seen by dogs as a queer person in 1970s and 1980s New York, an imaginative relationship which drew upon the demonisation of dogs, queer people, and other marginalised citizens in the city in this period. These were works in search of an engaged viewer; as Ricardo Montez writes, Haring’s figures were ‘an open gestural sign system that he imagine[d] as inherently incomplete and in need of an audience of individuals who will produce endless configurations of meaning in their apprehension of them’.²² Haring’s barking dogs entered a contested city space in which the ownership and treatment of dogs was a live issue, fuelled by racism, the fall-out from city budget cuts, gentrification, graffiti, and fear of the young Black and Latine writers who produced it. These dogs appeared in the early years of the AIDS crisis, when public anxiety about cleanliness, contagion, and gay sex swelled. Like the canine characters that George Clinton described in ‘Atomic Dog’, Haring’s dogs seemed to invite solidarity and encourage a knowing mode of cross-species community building in the face of what Clinton called a ‘dog-matic society’: ‘dogs of the world unite’. Reading Haring’s canine work in this cultural context, I am interested in exploring what his proliferating dog imagery can tell us about queer desire and racism in the late capitalist city, and the imaginative modes of kinship that it produced.

The Canine Menace

By the time Keith Haring moved to New York in 1978 to study at the School of Visual Arts, its canine population had doubled from that of the preceding decade, meaning that there were over one million dogs in the city, or, effectively, one dog for every six humans.²³ Although ‘curb your dog’ signs had been in place in New York since the 1930s, imploring dog walkers to direct their pets to roadside gutters when nature called, they were heeded rarely. Picking up after your dog was not common cultural practice. With little to no reprimands for dog owners who ignored these signs, there was little incentive to obey them. By 1972, given the growing number of dogs kept as pets in the city, the situation had changed. Complaints to New York’s Environmental Protection Agency (the EPA) about dog waste increased significantly. One concerned citizen, writing to the New York Times in 1972, declared that ‘the dog turd in our region is … epidemic!’.²⁴ Another, in 1976, asserted that:

[h]ordes are spitting on the street and smoking on the subways with total disregard for the law and humanity. New York’s dog litter problem is but a small symptom of the terrifying social decay that is filling our air with a far greater stench than dog feces.²⁵

The EPA proposed a new ordinance: dog owners who did not pick up after their dog would face a fine of up to US$100 or thirty days in jail. The proposal was controversial; many members of the city assembly felt that it was almost unenforceable and required more police than could reasonably be deployed.²⁶ They were also reluctant to support the bill because of reasonably well-founded fears about what alienating dog lovers might do to their electability, but they were in a bind because of growing and vocal public concern about the state of the city’s parks and sidewalks.²⁷ The ordinance didn’t pass, and New York’s dog waste problem was left to the city’s next Mayor, Abe Beame, and was displaced, in formal municipal politics at least, by the more pressing challenges facing a city on the brink of bankruptcy. But the problems were not unrelated. Beame’s austerity budget, launched in summer 1975, sparked wildcat strikes by sanitation workers over pay and layoffs.²⁸ Half the staff of the Pest Control Division of the city’s Parks Department had been made redundant earlier in the year and the city’s rat population was escalating.²⁹ Accumulating garbage in a New York City summer heightened citizens’ concerns about the canine waste ‘epidemic’ and the presence of dogs in the city more generally, adding to a widespread sense of loss of control and a failure of municipal authority at the highest level.

Haring’s subway dogs, like Holzer’s anxious abandoned dogs, appeared after a decade in which the proliferation of dogs in the city was both cause and effect of an economic and social crisis. New York City’s dog population boomed in the 1970s partly because citizens were acquiring dogs for protection as crime rates rose or because they did not trust or feared an underfunded and systemically racist police department. In 1973, one in three New Yorkers reported that they had ‘no confidence’ that they ‘could get a policeman at once’ if they needed one.³⁰ Five per cent had bought a dog or a burglar alarm in direct response to a lack of trust in the city’s police and a perception of rising crime rates, twice the number of people who reported buying guns for the same reasons.³¹ In 1974, the associate director of Mount Sinai Hospital observed that a rise in dog bites had coincided ‘with heightened public concern about street crime and burglary’.³² Dog ownership had already spiked in majority Black neighbourhoods in cities across the USA, where dogs had been deployed by law enforcement as weapons during civil rights protests and urban rebellions in the mid-to-late 1960s, a practice documented in Charles Moore’s photographs of police attacking protestors in Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963.³³ People who looked to protect themselves but couldn’t afford or acquire permits for handguns often bought large dogs instead, particularly Dobermans and German Shepherds, but many were abandoned as a consequence of poor training and cost.³⁴ In 1973, the New York Times noted that in the South Bronx, which it called ‘a jungle stalked by fear, seized by rage’, ‘packs of wild dogs pick through the rubble and roam the streets’, the image of the stray dog as evocative of urban decay in the South Bronx in the 1970s as the burned-out tenements and rubble-filled lots of Boston Road and Charlotte Street.³⁵

Public concern about aggressive dogs with their own agency catalysed into hysteria and a media circus in New York City in the summer of 1976, when the serial killer David Berkowitz murdered six women, apparently on the orders of his neighbour’s Labrador, who had, he claimed, been possessed by a demon.³⁶ ‘I love to hunt’, Berkowitz wrote with a paternalistic urgency in a note found by police before his arrest; ‘[p]rowling the streets looking for fair game – tasty meat. […] Blood for papa’.³⁷ Public panic around the case was amplified because the hunt for the self-styled ‘Son of Sam’ played out in the city’s newspapers. Berkowitz wrote to the journalist Jimmy Breslin at the New York Daily News in May 1977, two months before his arrest, and commented directly on the proliferation of dog waste in the city: ‘Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C. which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood’.³⁸

The presence of dog waste in New York City in this period, highlighted in Berkowitz’s rage-fuelled letters, testified to the presence of more and more dogs in the city and so dog shit became a symbol of this growing canine threat and ‘the terrifying social decay’ it invoked.³⁹ A state-wide dog waste law sponsored by the city’s next Mayor, Ed Koch, with heavier fines for those who disobeyed it, was finally passed in May 1978. The law was deemed a success by the New York Times, who estimated in 1984 that around 60% of the city’s dog poop was now scooped up by owners.⁴⁰ The success of Koch’s proposal after years of failed bids to tackle New York’s dog waste problem depended in large part on the work of outraged citizen-activists who used this growing frenzy around urban dog culture to foster an effective moral panic, a canine menace.

Keith Haring addressed a comparable canine moral panic in one of his earliest dog works, a collage made in 1979, a year after New York’s state-wide dog waste bill was ratified (Fig. 3). The collage follows the form of Haring’s newspaper montages, like Reagan’s Death Cops Hunt Pope (1980), where straight-faced photographs taken from newspapers acquire an unsettling and humorous edge as they are paired with mangled headlines which tell of violent clashes between church and state. These collages follow the queer anarchic logic of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up method in which ‘phrases [are] broken apart, mixed, and combined’, rejecting linear narrative logic. This kind of writing is, Gysin wrote, ‘an operation of decoding, of contamination’.⁴¹ In Haring’s canine collage, clippings from newspaper advice columns and a gay men’s health newsletter share space with anatomical drawings and photographs of dogs in domestic spaces. Visceral biomedical phraseology – ‘slimy skin disease’, ‘protozoan body rot’ – is capitalised and placed above longer screeds which detail, variously, fear of homosexuality, concern about a strange smell in the author’s crotch on hot days, and how to select the right poodle, tracing a panicked path through all three subjects.

Fig. 3.

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Keith Haring, Untitled (Diseases of Gay Men), 1979. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation. Ink and collage on paper. 29.9 × 21.6 cm. Keith Haring Foundation collection.

This collaged frenzy spins out from a letter written to ‘Ask Ann Landers’, a newspaper advice column syndicated in publications across the USA from the mid-1950s to the early 2000s, in which a young man shares his concern that a much-regretted sexual encounter with his family’s pet will turn him gay and begs for advice. ‘The thought that I may become a homosexual terrifies me’, he writes: ‘I would rather die’. Ann Landers (a pen name for the journalist Eppie Lederer) writes to comfort the author, not chastise him, by reminding him that bestiality is more common that he might think; she receives ‘dozens of letters’ from young women who are concerned that they might get pregnant through canine copulation. She does not challenge his conflation of sex with dogs and sex with other men, which he speculates is a kind of contagious degeneration that he has unwittingly set into motion. In doing so, Lederer upheld the legislative twinning of these two kinds of sexual encounter in sodomy laws across the USA, both designated ‘crimes against nature’.⁴²

Haring played up the idea of bestiality as a homoerotic contagion in several works in the early 1980s, many of which also engage with the image of Anubis (Fig. 4). Bestiality represents a humorous literalising of Haring’s interest in a shared experience of heterosexist marginalisation and the sodomitical shorthand that linked sex between men and sex with animals. After all, Haring’s dog figure emerged from his drawings of people on all fours, doggy style. In numerous works from this period, the cock that was inside a dog becomes, in Haring’s queer vision, an emblem of what Dagmawi Woubshet calls ‘renewal and regeneration’, radiating with ‘a live-giving energy’.⁴³ As well as playful reflections on the historic legislative coupling of sodomy and bestiality, both are studies in the queer reuse of urban public space, from dog playground (or toilet) to glory hole.

Fig. 4.

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Keith Haring, Untitled drawing, 1981. Keith Haring artwork © Keith Haring Foundation. Ink on vellum. 109.2 × 122 cm. Private collection.

The tone of Landers’s response to her bestial reader legitimises the author’s homophobic anxiety and nervous anthropomorphisation. It is this that Haring lampoons in his collage, bringing together letters written to a gay men’s health newsletter, which are expressly trying to provide advice ‘without reference to morals’, and family-friendly guidance on selecting the right poodle. Haring uses the cut-up method to bring out the phobic, quasi-medical subtext of the reply. In Haring’s reworked headlines, it is homosexuality that is the ‘slimy skin disease’, the ‘protozoan body rot’ to fear, rerouting contemporaneous anxieties about urban canine contagion and its implications for heteronormative cultural life.

Citizen Surveillance

The consumer advocate Fran Lee was a key figure in the fight for stricter dog waste laws in New York City in the 1970s. Lee founded a militant campaign group, Children Before Dogs, in 1972 and appeared in newspapers, on local television, and at public events and local community board meetings, as she stoked a powerful fear of contagion on the basis of anecdotal information. Lee claimed that children across the city were at grave risk of contracting serious illness from toxocara canis carried by roundworm parasites present in some dog waste. This was not supported by medical evidence, which demonstrated that it was more prevalent in rural areas and that contracting a serious illness from toxocara canis, even in children, was ‘very rare’.⁴⁴ Dogs, she argued, should be trained to use their owner’s bathrooms.⁴⁵ A charismatic speaker with a local public profile through her cable television show, Lee marched through parks with placards featuring images of dogs defecating, accompanied by groups of mothers and toddlers, and the powerful slogan ‘children before dogs’.

The heteronormative undertones of Lee’s campaign would likely not have been lost on queer New Yorkers. It echoed contemporaneous homophobic public discourse sparked by the increasing visibility of groups like the Gay Activists Alliance and public events in the city like the annual Christopher Street Liberation Day march. Police raids on gay bars and clubs occurred with threatening frequency through the 1970s, after the Stonewall rebellion, motivated by a fear of queer association and venereal disease.⁴⁶ Iris Nowell noted in her 1978 book The Dog Crisis that reports of dog bites were growing; they were the country’s second-highest reported health problem behind gonorrhoea.⁴⁷ General anxiety about rising rates of venereal disease among men who had sex with men in urban centres in the 1970s became clear in the early 1980s, as speculative fears of queer desire and gay community, of the kinds of queer cultures that cities foster, framed early popular epidemiological accounts of AIDS and its representation by journalists and politicians. An article in Newsweek in December 1981 linked the emergence of AIDS to ‘the burgeoning of bathhouses, gay bars, and bookstores in major cities where homosexual men meet’.⁴⁸ A Harvard doctor spoke more directly, blaming ‘an overindulgence in sex and drugs’ in the 1970s and what he euphemistically described as ‘the New York City lifestyle’.⁴⁹

Fran Lee’s dog control lobby was likewise powered by medical allusions and legitimised through the rage of citizens that she had stoked herself through public protests and viral catchphrases. Like Landers’ gay-fearing column, Lee’s campaign hinged upon a misuse of medical information and drew strength from a cultural context in which the moralising tenor of the concerned, self-educated individual, motivated by a commitment to normative cultural values, carried great weight. In Haring’s parodic conflation of homosexuality and bestiality as public health crises, which strikes a camp, humorous note partly because of his inclusion of the preened poodle as the aforementioned family pet, youthful erotic testing ground, the implications of Lee’s very public campaign do not seem to have gone unnoticed.⁵⁰ As one of her critics, former NYC Health Commissioner Pascal James Imperato, observed, by focusing on anecdotal cases rather than medical evidence in her fight against New York’s dog waste problem, Lee was ‘able to elevate an [a]esthetic issue’ into a moral one, in which citizenship was not a right but a privilege.⁵¹ According to the New York Times, another anti-dog waste group active in the 1970s arranged for Girl Scouts to walk around city parks handing out dog treats and ‘good citizen’ cards to those who did clean up after their pets.⁵²

In an ‘Ask Ann Landers’ column in 1973, Lederer wrote that she had been campaigning for ‘compassion and understanding and human rights for homosexuals’ for ‘18 years’, but that she remained committed to her belief that ‘homosexuality is unnatural’.⁵³ ‘Granted’, she wrote in a column in 1976, ‘some are sicker than others, but sick they are’.⁵⁴ Through his queer cut-up riposte, Haring critiques the newspaper advice column as a medium itself, as a tool for the transmission of normative cultural values and an apparatus of social control, bringing opposing viewpoints together in a collage of moral panics. The down-to-earth advice columnist, Haring demonstrates, doesn’t only mirror contemporary homophobic public fears of queer sex and venereal disease; she legitimises and sustains them through gay-fearing anecdotal narratives and moralising straight talk, which turn speculative homophobic anxieties into cultural norms, fuelled by the rhetoric of contagion and disease.⁵⁵

As the troubled passage through the city assembly of a bill banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, or public accommodation, voted down multiple times in the 1970s and not passed until 1986, makes clear, the very idea of queer citizenship in this period was deeply insecure. Efforts by gay activists to exclude trans and gender non-conforming people from the bill after its passage through the city assembly failed repeatedly, demonstrating the extent to which citizenship, even in New York, was bound up with normative ideals.⁵⁶ This fear of the queer agency that cities, especially financially unstable ones, seemed to enable continued into the 1980s as gay bathhouses and clubs, venues for queer association and safe sex education during the AIDS crisis, were closed by a state-level body, the New York Public Health Council, in October 1985 following an emergency resolution updating the state-wide Sanitary Code, though the closures were enforced by city authorities.⁵⁷ In Terrorist Assemblages (2007), Jasbir Puar argues that the language of contagion and disease ‘suture[s] together racist fears of national infiltration with cultural anxieties around queer or sick bodies’.⁵⁸ A narrative of contagion, whether applied to canine or lavender menaces, provides, as Puar notes, ‘justification for heightened surveillance […] and sets the stage for the scapegoating and attack of sexualised and racialised’ bodies in both public and private spaces.⁵⁹

Writing in 1992, Rosalyn Deutsche made a similar observation, drawing on Stuart Hall’s work on Thatcherism in Britain in the late 1970s and 1980s, that as:

political issues are displaced into conventional moral absolutes, authoritarian populism links up with anticrime campaigns and crusades for ‘public decency’ which routinely provide democratic justification for the imperatives of surveillance and exclusion in public space.⁶⁰

The success of these dog waste protests in New York City in the 1970s implicitly validated vigilante justice as a tactic of social control and cultural cohesion at a time of extensive cutbacks to city-funded services like the police and the fire service. It ushered in an era of citizen surveillance and authoritarian populist municipal policy, as well as facilitating urban redevelopment and processes of gentrification and social cleansing which were already underway by the time of Koch’s mayoral election and the passage of the dog waste bill. The vigilante group SMASH (Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals) was formed in 1976 by a group of gay men in the West Village, where, by the late 1970s, as Christina Hanhardt argues in Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (2013), ‘a concern with safety merged with the goal of visibility and increasingly fit liberal gay politics into the broader forces whose land market was ripe for new investment opportunities’.⁶¹

Practices like increased policing and street clean-ups exercised by both municipal authorities and engaged citizens, which had placed, Hanhardt notes, ‘so-called sexual outcasts at odds with redevelopment and law and order’, were later ‘recast […] as the very insurance of spatial visibility’.⁶² The Guardian Angels, a voluntary and unarmed crime prevention patrol group, was founded in February 1979 in direct response to public perception of rising rates of violent crime on the subway.⁶³ Indeed, the rising number of dogs in the city in the 1970s was in part a reaction to cutbacks to the police department and rising crime rates. The US Department of Justice engaged in some animalistic citizen surveillance of its own with the development of the character McGruff the Crime Dog in the late 1970s, a national campaign to engage members of the public in reducing neighbourhood crime which continues today. This canine Columbo, introduced at a press conference in New York City in November 1979, cast both criminals and law-abiding citizens in animal terms, entreating the latter to ‘take a bite out of crime’.⁶⁴ The cartoon McGruff appeared on posters and billboards nationwide from the summer of 1980. Indeed, a McGruff campaign poster was included in the second iteration of the exhibition Animals Living in Cities, at ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side in winter 1980, shown alongside children’s drawings of pigeons, rats, and dogs, and a Xeroxed municipal ‘Curb Your Dog’ sign.⁶⁵

Dogs played an important role in citizen surveillance in New York in the later 1980s and into the 1990s. The Tompkins Square Park dog run opened in 1990, two years after protests erupted in the park following the institution of a curfew by municipal authorities, part of a broader strategy to remove houseless New Yorkers from the area and expediate its gentrification. The run is maintained by volunteers and donations from users but was initially supported in kind by the City’s Parks Commissioner, Henry Stern, while the park was being redeveloped following the protests.⁶⁶ Dog owners acted, inadvertently perhaps, as an extra-judicial surveillance team inside the park and facilitated the ongoing gentrification of the area at no cost to city authorities. They also demonstrated publicly what good urban dog ownership and control looked like, and the dog run remained open while the park was closed for renovations in 1991. As Hanhardt notes, during the 1970s:

approaches to economic development were joined by a shift in crime control strategies that saw 1960s models of community-based solutions to structural inequality, including violence, replaced by citizen patrols and other solutions that treated crime as an act of rational opportunity and called for protected neighborhoods.⁶⁷

It is during the citizen-led dog waste campaigns in New York in the 1970s that the gentrifying and alienating practices that became known as ‘broken windows’ policing in the 1980s and 1990s first emerged and were publicly legitimised in a city plagued by cuts and strikes, terrified of the implications of growing dog ownership among a politicised Black urban working class and of the growing visibility and cultural agency of queer people. Fines for failing to pick up after your dog were still relatively low, but there had been a cultural shift. As Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt noted in 2005, reflecting on the dog waste bill’s long-term success, ‘[t]his would seem to be a case in which social incentives – the hard glare of a passer-by and the offender’s feelings of guilt – are at least as powerful as financial and legal incentives’.⁶⁸ Through practices such as canine waste control legislation and its civic implications for people, New York was effectively recast, as Sarah Schulman has written with reference to the city’s gentrification in the midst of HIV/AIDS, as a ‘[centre] of obedience’, shaped by what she calls ‘suburban values’ which are endorsed through municipal legislation and seemingly minor bureaucratic acts of civic control like fines and permits.⁶⁹ ‘Just as gentrification literally replaces mix with homogeneity’, Schulman writes,

it enforces itself through the repression of diverse expression. […] Permits are suddenly required for performing, for dancing in bars, for playing musical instruments on the street, for selling food, for painting murals, selling art, drinking beer on the stoop, or smoking pot or cigarettes. […] The relaxed nature of neighborhood living becomes threatening, something to be eradicated and controlled.⁷⁰

In the face of this paradigm shift, Haring’s subway dogs redeployed a powerful public image of the dog as a contagious threat to the heteronormative cultural fabric of a city recovering from economic collapse and demands for canine control to assert queer autonomy in a visually crowded and gentrifying space where it was otherwise obscured or denied. Proliferating on the subway in seemingly exponential fashion as a canine moral panic was stoked by the authoritarian populist energy of outraged citizen surveillance, Haring’s dogs seemed to bark to demand the right to the city, inviting collective participation and solidarity over individualism.⁷¹

Steel Dogs with Razor Teeth

In Haring’s subway drawings, dogs bark to attract the attention of citizens overwhelmed by visual material, adverts for movies, food, and clothing stores, as well as other graffiti interventions. Sometimes gigantic dogs attack humans, and human figures assume dog characteristics, putting on giant dog heads in order to assert authority and spread misinformation. While his messages were often lively or humorous statements of presence, in bringing his dog imagery into the public space of the subway, Haring used this fear of the canine menace to communicate virally with a broad public. These drawings were an aesthetic intervention in the fraught public space of the subway, ‘this chalk-white fragile thing’, Haring said, ‘in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was’.⁷²

A New York Times editorial in July 1980 argued, alluding in part to the Black and Latine graffiti writers that Haring admired, appropriated, and collaborated with, that ‘[a] subway atmosphere of insistent squalor, unpunished criminality, and a contempt for the public breeds a sense of helplessness’.⁷³ Fear of dogs was often a euphemistic and primitivising allusion to a creeping fear of wildness at the edges of the city and, like graffiti itself, of the autonomy of Black and Latine New Yorkers. This was certainly not lost on the graffiti writers themselves. One of the most popular styles of New York graffiti in the 1980s, developed by the legendary Tracy 168 in the South Bronx, was known as ‘wild style’, and the term gained wider visibility when it was used as the title of Charlie Ahearn’s 1983 film about graffiti and hip-hop crews in the Bronx and graffiti’s relationship to the Downtown Manhattan art scene. In the subway, as carriages covered in graffiti, wild style, rattled past passengers on crowded platforms, the symbol of the dog, with all it connoted of the agency of marginalised, racialised city residents, carried even greater symbolic weight. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé has suggested that in using the symbol of the dog, Haring might also have been ‘[p]laying on the multiple associations of dog in contemporary popular, and especially hip-hop, culture, where “dog”’, he writes, ‘refers not only to the animal but also to a male member of a hip-hop crew or posse’, like Fab Five Freddy, whom Haring knew through the East Village scene and the FUN Gallery, and Angel Ortiz, also known as LAII, a young Puerto Rican graffiti writer with whom Haring worked in the early 1980s.⁷⁴

Dogs played a prominent role in the policing of graffiti in New York and in subway surveillance more broadly. In August 1980, around the time Haring began his subway drawings, Ed Koch resurrected a canine surveillance plan which been proposed before his mayoral tenure but was set aside because of concerns about cost during the city’s fiscal crisis.⁷⁵ At night, the trains which passed through the stations where Haring worked on his subway drawings sat in yards patrolled by dogs trained to spot young graffiti writers. ‘If I had my way’, Koch proclaimed in a speech marking the launch of the initiative, ‘I wouldn’t put in dogs, but wolves’.⁷⁶ When one of the patrol dogs gave birth, Koch was photographed with the litter, beaming. ‘I hope they grow up to be viscous attack puppies’, he said; ‘the more the merrier’.⁷⁷ The cost of routine care for these patrol dogs was high and Koch was soon forced to use less expensive measures, protecting subway yards with barbed-wire fences. But Koch said he liked to think of them in canine terms, as ‘steel dogs with razor teeth’.⁷⁸

The racist overtones of Koch’s language and his mayoral administration’s aggressive approach to policing graffiti more generally are borne out in the practice itself of using patrol dogs. It evoked the weaponised use of dogs by police in civil rights protests and during urban rebellions in the 1960s and triggered an association with the practice of using dogs to patrol, hunt, and kill escaped enslaved people in the antebellum period. Tyler Wall has argued that ‘the patrol dog animalizes the force of law’; the ‘snarling’ police dog ‘helps unearth the importance of repression and fear in fabricating order’ and ‘starkly reveals the predatory animus of liberal order’.⁷⁹ Drawing on Mark Neocleous’s work on sniffer dogs and police K-units in the UK, Germany, and Australia, Wall ‘understand[s] the [US-American] police dog as not simply a “crime fighter”, but a potent “technology of state power” that takes us “straight to the heart of the state’s role in the permanent reinvention of bourgeois order”’.⁸⁰

The level of state violence against young Black and Latine graffiti writers, and this endemic practice of municipal animalisation, was brought home for many downtown New York artists with the killing of Michael Stewart by Metropolitan Transit Authority officers in September 1983. Stewart, a young Black artist whom Haring knew personally, was taken to hospital by police, as one New York Times reporter noted, ‘hog-tied – his ankles bound together, pulled behind his back and tied to his hands with elastic cord’.⁸¹ Haring kept Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Defacement, which Basquiat made in Haring’s studio in response to news of Stewart’s death, above his bed until his death in February 1990. As Chaédria LaBouvier notes in the catalogue accompanying her ground-breaking exhibition Basquiat’s Defacement: The Untold Story at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2019, in the painting Basquiat reconfigures this racist animalisation, depicting the police ‘as wolf-pig hybrids, with fanglike teeth and pink flesh, […] extended in violence against the figure’s exaggerated inertia; he has no arms for defense nor feet for escape’.⁸² This scene, LaBouvier argues, ‘can be read as Basquiat’s encapsulation of a police-state dynamic, with the officers exercising an extreme and unbalanced power over Stewart, who is defined by a reciprocal lack of agency’.⁸³

Like the figure who puts on a dog mask in order to assume authority, as Mayor, Koch used the symbolic capaciousness of dogs and the history of their weaponisation to further stoke a racialised contempt for graffiti which already depicted these young people as an animalistic contagion threatening the city’s body politic, necessitating renewed rigour and violence in municipal policing. A feature on the city’s graffiti culture in the New York Times in 1980 described its upsurge in the late 1970s as ‘the plague years’.⁸⁴ An article in the New York Daily News in late 1980 argued that ‘the trouble with graffiti’ is that ‘it’s a catching disease’.⁸⁵ Animating New York’s graffiti wars through the language of contagion and racialised canine symbolism connected citizen activism against dog waste and graffiti with a growing fear of AIDS and crack cocaine usage, each of them rendered in popular cultural discourse as plagues or epidemics, a loss of control, drawing on the moralising language of the preceding deployment of these loaded terms.

As photographs of Haring’s subway drawings by Ivan Dalla Tana demonstrate, some of Haring’s subway dogs address the use of dogs as tools of municipal surveillance against young crews of graffiti writers directly. One such drawing used the blank space next to a poster advertising ‘France’s humanized metro’, with Haring extending the train car in the poster with his white chalk line into a barking dog with bared teeth, rearing up before a handful of confused passengers. As Cruz-Malavé has argued: ‘[r]ather than a prolongation of the speed of the graffiti artist’s line, Haring’s subway drawings were a sobering parenthesis, a commentary: they did not so much continue the writers’ line as commented on the culture that produced it’.⁸⁶ This capacity for commentary was enabled in part by his divergent experience of anti-graffiti policing, by virtue of his whiteness and increasing celebrity, as well as the less-invasive placement of his work and its ephemerality, ‘this chalk-white fragile thing’. As Ricardo Montez writes, ‘[p]erforming his art in a space discursively produced as a racialized world of threat and criminality, Haring actively engaged a theater of otherness’. He produced ‘a tag that brought with it a visibility markedly different than that of other writers in the subway’.⁸⁷

For Montez, Haring’s starkly distinct experience of transit policing and ‘[t]he discrepant ways black and white bodies achieve visibility – and the vastly discrepant vulnerability to violence that results – is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than by the book Art in Transit, which documented Haring’s subway work’.⁸⁸ Published in 1984, the year after Stewart’s murder, the book opens with a photograph of Haring being arrested for criminal mischief, a screenshot from a CBS news feature on Haring. As Montez writes, Haring looks relaxed; ‘[t]he image registers more as a staged public-relations move than as cause for distress’.⁸⁹ In his written contribution to Art in Transit, Haring recalled various encounters with New York City police: ‘[b]y the time they let me go, most of them just tell me they like the drawing, but they’re just doing their job’.⁹⁰ Shortly after Stewart’s death, in this public forum, Haring ‘offers little in the way of criticism of the police’.⁹¹ In a journal entry from 1987, however, published after his death, Haring railed against the acquittal of the white police officers involved in Stewart’s arrest: ‘I hope in their next life they are tortured like they tortured him’.⁹² Haring also, as Montez notes, ‘expresses disgust with white men generally’.⁹³ They are ‘pigs’, Haring writes, with ‘an evil disease’, invoking an historic animalistic slang term for police that gathered momentum in the USA in the 1960s.⁹⁴ In the same journal entry, as both Montez and Dagmawi Woubshet have explored, Haring attempts to rid himself of the diseased power of whiteness, stating ‘I’m sure inside I’m not white’.⁹⁵ In so doing, Haring, Woubshet argues, attempts to ‘divest from whiteness its essentialist claims to racial difference and superiority’.⁹⁶ While Haring’s statement is naïve at best, his animalistic language and references to disease in speaking about the police are striking, echoing, even rerouting, the racist, dehumanising deployment of dogs in city policing and the much-publicised notion of graffiti as a plague or contagion.

Montez’s approach to ‘think[ing] through complicity as an alternative framework to collaboration within the world and work of Keith Haring’, how it has shaped ‘Haring’s erotic and social attraction to people of colour’, including ‘the graffiti practices of black and Latinx youth’ is instructive here, particularly in thinking about shifts in power, identification, and agency that Haring’s work speaks to and performs.⁹⁷ Engaging directly with race and desire in Haring’s work, Montez looks to ‘[frame] Haring’s relationships as scenes of complicity rather than ones of collaboration in an attempt to stress the dynamic uncertainty of intimate and creative exchange’.⁹⁸ As Montez writes:

Haring’s neoprimitive line [is] a graphic enactment, a visual-aesthetic performative, that conjures and draws subjects into a field of negotiations in which the outcome of participation and the agential terms of the subject cannot be forecast according to a perceived power imbalance or structural inequality.⁹⁹

In his subway drawings, Haring fostered and depicted a dynamic solidarity between marginalised people and dogs which acknowledges that dogs are complex symbols of moral and political authority because they are always both extensions of the state and subjects of it. At the same time, Haring’s longing to divest himself of the ‘disease’ of whiteness, articulated in his journals in direct reference to the murder of Michael Stewart by New York City Transit Police, suggests that part of the appeal of the image of the dog in the subway drawings and for Haring more generally was precisely its capacity to signify ‘a male member of a hip-hop crew or posse’, a desire for connection and collaboration with Black and Latine men, a longing to be a dog, not a pig.

As Haring’s work with dog imagery makes clear, the symbolic potential of the dog and the canine imaginary in 1970s and 1980s New York was multivalent and unstable. Mayor Koch’s violent, racist use of the language of ‘wolves’ against young Black and Latine graffiti writers who tagged the city’s subway cars was invoked by the city’s press in April 1989 when Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam (the so-called Central Park Five), all aged between 14 and 16 when they were wrongly charged (and later convicted) with the aggravated assault and rape of a white woman, Trisha Meili, in the park, were referred to on the front page of the New York Daily News with dehumanising relish as a wild ‘wolf pack’.¹⁰⁰ Such dehumanising naming is emblematic of what Che Gossett describes as ‘the devaluation of black life and racialization as [a practice of] animalization’.¹⁰¹ To wonder what might happen if ‘dogs of the world unite’ should not be a call to comparative analysis, which is, as Bénédicte Boisseron has argued, ‘an archaic way of ranking the racialised subject and the animal’ in what Frederick Douglass called ‘the scale of being’.¹⁰² Instead, it might be a way of resisting racist and dehumanising symbolic comparisons, rerouting this collective racist naming through solidarity, rather than analogy.

The multivalence of the sign of the dog in 1970s and 1980s New York City underscores, as Gossett notes, that ‘the human in the human/animal divide is [not] a universally inhabited and privileged category, [but] a contested and fractured one’.¹⁰³ In a city primed to fear dogs, to make use of them as an extra-judicial protection or an opportunity for moral education, haunted by the Son of Sam and the viral spectre of toxocara canis, watched over by the panoptic eye of McGruff the crime dog, it is hard to argue that dogs were a friendly symbol of ‘urban commonality’. While they may narrate vague political messages and represent general calls for social justice in vignettes of human–animal interaction, they do so through a visual lexicon which New York City viewers in this period would have understood as a rhetoric of contagion and control.

Using viral modes of communication to connect two menaces, canine and lavender, along with racism and police violence, united by experiences of precarious citizenship, Haring’s dog art is a creative deployment of dogs that tries to undo the erosion of ‘the unspeaking companionship’ between animals and people that Berger identified as emblematic of late capitalist urban alienation. Rendering dogs as an urban companion species with creative autonomy, that can look back as well as be looked at, that can dance and experience pleasure, in his canine subway drawings Haring tried to resist the weaponisation of dogs as tools of heteronormative cultural values and racialised social control during a period of extensive urban renewal and legislative change, while drawing upon the visual and affective impact that their demonisation generated. ‘To lie on the ground with dogs’, writes Colin Dayan, ‘is to think through what an alternative world might look like’.¹⁰⁴ Thinking through, or with, the image of the dog in Haring’s work in this period offers a new way of understanding gentrification, policing, and urban renewal in late twentieth-century New York, and the imaginative forms of resistance that these conditions produced.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Terra Foundation for American Art who funded an essential research trip to New York City. This article developed from research presented at Keith Haring: Art and Activism in 1980s New York, an impactful conference at Tate Liverpool in November 2019. I am grateful to Michael Birchall and to the other speakers and attendees for their insights and conversation about Haring’s work and its legacies. Thanks also to James Boaden, Tom Day, Laura Guy, Theodore (ted) Kerr, Olivia McCall, and Ricardo Montez for ongoing conversations about art, AIDS, and dogs that have shaped this work.

Footnotes