Grace Jones has been many things during her years in the spotlight: supermodel, badass Bond villain, provocative performer, singer, songwriter, record producer and style icon. Muse, however, may not necessarily be a word that comes to mind.
Nevertheless, one remarkable day in 1984, Jones joined three of New York’s most notorious artists – Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring – in Mapplethorpe’s studio. After eighteen hours she emerged, completely covered in the trademark ‘tribal’ symbols of Haring. How had Jones, a self-proclaimed ‘man-eating machine’, been transformed into an artist’s model, muse and canvas?
In 1980s New York, contemporary art was booming. Pop art emerged as the dominant movement, through which artists incorporated influences from popular culture: comic books, Coke bottles, advertising imagery and graffiti. Warhol painted his famous soup cans, while Haring drew giant doodles in subway stations; and Mapplethorpe used black-and-white photography to document queer culture and the gay club scene.
Artists were the stars of the time, and Warhol was king. His celebrity clique included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Edie Sedgwick, Madonna and Mick Jagger, with whom he partied at the legendary New York nightclub, Studio 54. It was here that reigning disco queen Jones joined the artist’s inner circle; enjoying the celebrity status which Warhol so coveted, she became a close confidante.
By the 1980s, Jones was already an inimitable icon of fashion, beauty and music. In 1966, at the age of eighteen, she had caught the attention of a scout and been signed to top New York modelling agency Wilhelmina. Moving to Paris in the 1970s, she worked with acclaimed designers including Yves Saint-Laurent, Kenzo Takada and Guy Bourdin. With her unusual androgynous aesthetic, the dark-skinned beauty graced the covers of Vogue, Der Stern and Elle magazines.
As a model, Jones used her appearance to subvert expectations of gender, race and sexuality. From the outset, she would often dress in men’s clothing to assume fluid gender roles, declaring, ‘I go feminine, I go masculine – I am both, actually. I think the male side is a bit stronger in me and I have to tone it down sometimes. I’m not like a normal woman, that’s for sure.’ She has also explored her identity on stage, through off-the-wall outfits and fantastical make-up: over the years, her outrageous costumes have included skintight metallic bodysuits, fur capes with fox tails and bondage-style dresses. On other occasions, she has courted controversy by dancing almost entirely naked with thrilling, theatrical props, from whips to hula-hoops.
In 1984, Jones was at the peak of her musical career, having just released the hit studio album, Slave to the Rhythm. This was also the year that she first met Haring. The artist, who proclaimed that she had ‘the ultimate body to paint’, begged Warhol for an introduction to his celebrity friend. Warhol not only introduced Jones and Haring, but also arranged for the artist to paint her body, and for Mapplethorpe to photograph the spellbinding results, for a published spread in Interview magazine. Founded by Warhol, the glossy magazine featured interviews with artists, musicians and icons of pop culture, earning its nickname ‘The Crystal Ball of Pop’.
Once inside the studio, Jones stripped down to her underwear, allowing Haring to paint directly onto her skin with white paint. From her face to her fingertips and feet, Haring decorated her whole body with his distinctive pictograms and abstracted scrawls; these accented, dynamic patterns perfectly complemented the contours of her towering figure.
But why had Jones allowed Haring to use her, effectively, as a site for one of his installations? What did his symbols mean? And whose agenda did this act of body-painting really meet? Let’s start by taking a look at Keith Haring and his vocabulary of ‘primitive’ signs.
Arriving in New York in the late ’70s, Haring studied painting at the School of Visual Arts, although he was influenced more by the city’s graffiti artists, and by cartoons and images from popular culture. He began drawing in New York’s subway stations, filling unused advertising spaces with chalk sketches of boldly outlined, simplified figures, from barking dogs to babies to hovering angels. Haring believed pictures could function just like words, and wanted to make art accessible to everyone. He was also attracted to the idea of ‘primitivism’. This problematic term, which runs throughout modern art history, refers to Western art that has copied or appropriated artworks and artefacts produced by non-Western cultures, such as African sculptures. Artists, including Haring, evoked the ‘primitive’ as a raw, pure form of expression, through which they could channel inner emotions, the subconscious and desire into artworks. Haring was particularly interested in native symbols, such as hieroglyphs, because they were often reduced to just a few simple lines: ‘My drawings don’t try to imitate life; they try to create life, to invent life. That’s a much more so-called primitive idea, which is the reason that my drawings look like they could be Aztec or Egyptian or Aboriginal… and why they have so much in common with them. It has the same attitude towards drawing: inventing images. You’re sort of depicting life, but you’re not trying to make it life-like.’
Haring saw a connection between these ‘primitive’ symbols and his aspiration to create art that could be ‘read’ by everyone: ‘I am intrigued with the shapes people choose as their symbols to create a language. There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines that becomes a symbol. This is common to all languages, all people, all times.’
Living and working in the East Village, Haring was also inspired by the performers who were part of the underground art scene. Disco, funk, rap, punk, new wave, hip hop and dub converged at multicultural gay clubs, at which he, an openly gay man, was a regular. The exuberant performances of Grace Jones, in particular, had an impact on Haring, who perceived a ‘primitive’ quality to her costumes, make-up, props and stage personae: ‘Of course, I had seen Grace Jones before, because she was the diva and disco queen of the whole Paradise Garage scene. But I really, really want to paint her body, because she’s the embodiment of everything that’s both primitive and pop. Being primitive and pop is something I’m into, because my style of drawing is very similar to Eskimo art and African art and Mayan art, and, yes, Aboriginal art. And to me, Grace is all of that put together.’
During the 1970s and ’80s, Jamaican-born Jones filled her performances with references to cultural and racial stereotypes associated with the African diaspora, confronting them head-on. She would frequently don totem headdresses and metal-coil bras, whilst beating drums and dancing in metal-studded skirts. In many ways, her routines can be compared with those by Josephine Baker, whom she cited as an influence in a 1985 interview with Warhol. During the early twentieth century, this Black American-born French entertainer gained fame for dancing topless on stage in a girdle of bananas. She’s been critiqued by some for reinforcing racial stereotypes, while others perceive a reclaiming of power in her performances in which she reclaimed harmful caricatures and reinvented them on her own terms.
Identifying with Baker, Jones was flaunting primitivism in front of her audience, mocking Western conceptions of Africa as a land of savagery and African women as exotic objects. She was deliberately fashioning what the art historian Alison Pearlman has referred to as a ‘futuristic-primitivist style’. And through such obvious and satirical masquerade Jones could prove that racist stereotypes were constructed, just like her costumes.
Haring wanted to work with Jones, not just because she was spellbindingly beautiful, but because he identified with the awe-inspiring, ‘primitivist’ persona she projected on stage. He prepared for the body-painting session by studying photographs of Maasai men painted with white lines on their naked bodies. Inspired, Haring then transferred his own version of these ‘tribal’ markings to Jones’s skin, blurring the boundaries between ancient and modern.
At the same time, Jones chose to partner with Haring: she had always used her body as a site for spectacle, and recognised the role he could play in cultivating this further, by painting the modern, punk, ‘primitive’ identity onto her skin. She also brought with her to the studio conical wire breastplates and a totem headdress, inviting Haring to paint these too. The input from Jones is unambiguous; she asserted herself as an equal collaborator alongside the artist, ensuring that the finished effect was divine. Jones emerged as a crowned, graffiti-covered goddess, evoking a mythical image she was keen to perpetuate: ‘Even death won’t stop me. It never has. You can find images of me from centuries ago. Faces that look like mine carved in wood from ancient Egypt… I have been around for a long time, heart pounding, ready to pounce on my prey… tripping, grieving, loving, hunting, conquering, seducing, fighting, dreaming, laughing, and I always will be.’
This presentation echoes artworks by a number of other women artists, who framed themselves with goddess-like imagery. Frida Kahlo frequently painted herself with crowns of flowers, elaborate hairstyles and symbolic jewellery. In her painting Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird she identifies with powerful iconography from indigenous Mexican culture: her hummingbird pendant is a symbol of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war.
Haring’s daring designs also freed Jones from the masculine-feminine binary, echoing the androgynous image she had cultivated throughout her modelling career, and elevating her to genderless deity: ‘It made me look more abstract, less tied to a specific race or sex or tribe,’ she said. ‘I was black, but not black; woman, but not woman; American, but Jamaican; African, but science fiction.’
This iconic day of body-painting was just the start of Jones’s relationship with Haring, who went on to paint her many more times. The pair’s next collaboration was for the music video of her single ‘I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Perfect for You)’. The video shows Haring at work on the floor, covering a white sixty-foot skirt with his ‘tribal’ tattoos. In a powerful collision between pop art and outlandish performer, Jones then brings the visual rhythm of his designs to life as she dances in the gigantic skirt on stage before her fans.
The following year, Haring embossed Jones with his white markings once again, this time for her electrifying, subversive performance at Paradise Garage. Totem poles and African masks flanked the stage, on which she strutted like a warrior queen, to once again confront, perform and explode ‘primitive’ tropes. Haring next covered Jones in his signature scrawls for her role as Katrina the Queen of the Vampires in the comedy horror film, Vamp. With her whitened face, striped body and bright red wig, Jones – albeit in a supporting role – stole the limelight. Haring’s designs confirmed and cemented her status as a seductive, sensational icon.
As their partnership developed and strengthened, Jones wore Haring’s patterns the way most celebrities don couture by Chanel, Dior or Prada. Haring became her signature look and her latest outrageous outfit. However, he was far from the first artist Jones had worked with, and far from the last. After all, this was the woman whose motto in life is ‘Make up rules for yourself.’
Back in 1979, Jones was already working with another artist, Richard Bernstein. This pop artist, who was friends with Warhol, elevated socialites, models and performers to star status on the covers of albums, posters and magazines. It’s no surprise, then, that Jones chose him to paint her portrait for the cover of her third studio album, which she called Muse. This album cover shows her confident and deliberate self-presentation as a muse. Across her head, shot in profile, is emblazoned ‘Muse: Grace Jones’ in neon contrasts of pink and green, orange and blue. This is a title which she celebrates and identifies with, and Bernstein’s portrait presents her as a technicoloured, airbrushed icon.
Jones also entered into an artist–muse relationship with Warhol. In 1986, Warhol created a grid of nine identical photographs of Jones who, wearing a dark peaked cap and fur coat, stares straight towards the camera. Later that year, he also created several of his signature screen-printed paintings of the star in luminous pink and yellow tones.
Celebrity itself was Warhol’s muse; the artist depicted many ‘superstars’, as he referred to them, including Marilyn Monroe, Mohammed Ali and Bianca Jagger. Jones, too, embodied that star quality and notoriety which attracted the artist. At the same time, joining Warhol’s wall of fame validated her as a subject worthy of turning into art, confirming her superstardom.
Grace Jones has always used her body to project her identity: ‘One creates oneself’ has been her maxim. On stage, she has paraded the ‘primitive’ persona as a means of shattering and subverting stereotypes. By allowing Haring to paint his daring designs directly onto her skin, she simultaneously parodied and reclaimed ‘primitivism’ in uncompromising fashion.
Similarly, Jones reclaimed the role of muse. Bringing a compelling, performative agency to her relationships with multiple artists, she has exploited their ability to validate her status as a superstar, and frame her as a powerful deity. Today, the photographs which Mapplethorpe took of Jones, painted head to toe by Haring, belong to the Tate in London. Hanging in a gallery, they immortalise her legacy and image as towering goddess of graffiti.