Nivea, posters, 840 x 594 mm, 1999

Haring plays with the pose of the white pin-up girls. She questions the borderline between woman and animal as well as the idealised beauty of women. In Hollywood cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, white, blonde women played a prominent role and were a compliant projection surface for sexual desire. Haring picks up on these fantasies by satirising women’s alleged proximity to nature and the animalism in their existence by humorously confronting the two posters, namely a naked blonde and a woman covered in hair. Testing the limits of a female subject-position in the arts was also a frequent provocation in Haring’s work in the collaboration Halt+Boring (1991–2003, together with Catrin Bolt). Their pieces like Corrections and Call Boys (a video installation which displayed film of the artists having sex with male prostitutes they hired with the money they received for their contribution to an exhibition in Salzburg, Austria) repeatedly take up the male-connoted genius-gesture and give it short shrift with a wink of an eye and without a warning finger.

Rosa Reitsamer: ‘Who wants to be a feminist?’ (Art in Sight, London, January 2005)