30 October 2018

“Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,” Article 4


[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll post on Rick On Theater over the next few weeks.  Article four in AT’s “Light the Lights”  series, Jerald Raymond Pierce’s “Yes, Lighting Design Has A Diversity Problem,” is an examination of the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in the field of theatrical lighting design.]


Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

YES, LIGHTING DESIGN HAS A DIVERSITY PROBLEM
by Jerald Raymond Pierce

Their instruments can evoke every color of the rainbow, but the designers are still overwhelmingly white and male.

It’s about time we shine a light on those shining the light. Theatre has a diversity problem and lighting design is not exempt. While American Theatre takes the time this summer to celebrate the great history and future of the field, it’s important to acknowledge where the field is now. And right now the field is incredibly white and incredibly male.

For one, it’s sobering to see how few women work in an industry that boasts such illustrious forebears as Jean Rosenthal and Tharon Musser. One of the starkest indicators was the 2017 HowlRound article from Porsche McGovern, which laid out, in painful detail, exactly what its headline suggests: “Who Designs and Directs in LORT Theatres by Gender.” The study, which looks at the 2012-13 through the 2015-16 seasons for League of Resident Theatres companies, shows that two-thirds of all LORT designers in that period were men who took almost three-quarters of all design jobs. Costume design is the only area where women held a majority of the design slots. In fact, costume design is the only area where women had more than 20 percent of the positions or made up more than 25 percent of the hiring pool.

Lighting design, meanwhile, clocked in with 16.1 percent of jobs going to women, with women making up 20.7 percent of the lighting work force (or 78 out of 377 lighting designers hired in four-season span).

After first seeing the statistics, lighting designer M.L. Geiger admitted that she felt angry. She never let it affect her work, but seeing the actual statistics laid out made her reconsider how she had been thinking about her industry.

“I denied for years that there was any real gender thing,” said Geiger, whose credits include Off-Broadway productions at Atlantic Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, and Primary Stages, as well as the Broadway production of The Constant Wife at Roundabout Theatre Company. She said she “just assumed it was somehow failing on my part, or luck. I thought there was something (going on) but I didn’t really think it was that bad.”

Studies like this solidified a feeling that Geiger remembers having as far back as the early 1990s. There had been a shift in a field largely founded by women to a practice dominated by men. Around 1991, Geiger turned to her Yale mentor and fellow designer, the Tony-winning Jennifer Tipton, and questioned if their field was changing or if it was more sexist than she previously thought.

“We kept feeling like there’s fewer and fewer women,” Geiger said. “I don’t get it. Then the League of Professional Theatre Women study, and then also Porsche McGovern’s LORT study—we’re like, well, we’re clearly not imagining it. We may have thought we were for a while.”

A study from the League of Professional Theatre Women released in February 2018 found that, between May 2010 and April 2017 in the 23 Off-Broadway theatres they analyzed, an overwhelming number of lighting design positions were given to men. The low point was during the 2011-12 season, when only eight percent of the positions were held by women. The high point was the most recent season, the 2016-17 season, which still only saw 21 percent of lighting positions go to women.

Broadway doesn’t fare any better. Between June 2017 and April 2018, according to Broadway by the Numbers, with data collected by Alexander Libby, Bella Sotomayor, Florian Bouju, and Serene Lim, only 19 percent of Broadway lighting designers were women.

“It’s pretty scary, the statistics,” said Kathy Perkins, a lighting designer whose work includes productions at St. Louis Black Rep, Arena Stage, Victory Gardens, and The Goodman. “It’s gotten a little better, but it’s still pretty bad given that about half of the MFA programs in lighting [comprise] women. Where are these women going? I know in my generation, there have been women who just completely left the field because they couldn’t find work.”
Geiger, seeing the difficulty she was going to have as a woman in this industry, went into teaching, since she needed another income. Now, as the head of the lighting design program at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she’s making sure her students are prepared for what they may encounter.

“We’re also very direct about providing them other ways they can apply their [theatre] training,” Geiger said. “We’ve got people in architectural consulting, architectural design, television, theatre, events. So there are lots of ways they can apply what they know to something that pays. We’re trying to encourage them in all of those directions.”

Where have the women in lighting design gone? They’re doing whatever they can, said Lisa Rothe, co-president of the League of Professional Theatre Women. There’s a misconception that Rothe noted—a vicious circle that makes some observers think that because they see so few women working in lighting design, women must not be as good as their male counterparts.

“Well, that’s not true,” Rothe said. “They’re just not getting hired. They’re not being considered. If you’re a theatre and your community is interested in actually having a conversation about parity,  you have to begin to look outside of your small little realm of five or six people that you tend to work with all the time. People are like, ‘Oh, I just don’t know any female lighting designers. I don’t know any designers of color.’ Well, guess what? They’re out there. And they are out there in droves, and would be thrilled to have a conversation.”

That conversation can be hard to get started. Rothe, a director, recalled working with a female artistic director who was uncomfortable with Rothe bringing on a design team with no men.

“When I asked her why, she said she didn’t know,” Rothe said. “She couldn’t even articulate it, except to say that that was something that made her uncomfortable. So there’s unconscious biases there. I think that that’s changing, but certainly there were many all-male teams that were never an issue.”

The process of choosing these design teams, as Kelvin Dinkins Jr. explained, is a spectrum. At one end are companies that have a quota to assure that directors consider options beyond the usual suspects. This may mean that directors won’t get all of the choices they want (or think they want). At the other end of the spectrum are directors who may be a bit more open to suggestion, or who feel that their work is invigorated by diversity and new voices. Artistic directors may come with their own list of possibilities who they have worked with before and work with the director to match aesthetics.

But when it comes to the best way to introduce more diversity to theatrical design teams, it’s about theatres making the effort to find new talent, said Dinkins, who recently became the assistant dean and general manager at Yale School of Drama and Yale Rep.

“Some of the same designers are holding some of the majority of the contracts because everyone knows them,” Dinkins said. “I think it’s our imperative to start introducing our artistic leaders and directors to young designers who are women of all races and people of color. I think that is our imperative is to start doing a little bit of that matchmaking earlier on so we don’t become complacent in our selection process.”
It’s also the responsibility of those working with and within individual organizations to hold leadership accountable, Dinkins said. It’s up to the boards to look at the makeup of seasons, staffs, and casts. It’s up to directors who are hired from outside to come in and demand a more equitable way to work. It’s up to everyone to be thinking about equity and equality when they enter a theatre.

“My belief is that the next generation of folks who come through and start taking over these theatres in the next five to 10 years will come with that already in mind,” Dinkins said. “It will be such a part of how we function as a field and part of their own advocacy, that it will be a no-brainer. Their default will be to be more equitable and inclusive, thereby in the end providing diversity.”

Xavier Pierce (no relation to this reporter) admitted that sometimes it’s hard to know what went on behind the scenes of the decision whether or not to hire him on as a lighting designer. He can’t assume it’s about race or personality or anything else, but it’s hard to ignore in a country that has a history of systemic racism. Starting four or five years ago, however, Pierce did notice a push from artistic directors to see more people of color in the industry, and this led to him being more actively sought out. Early in his career, though, it was fellow people of color who encouraged the now-35-year-old designer.

“I wouldn’t ever be in the place where I’m working at right now without people of color who looked after me,” Pierce said. “That gave me a platform to actually do my art and put my work on. From that, I think other artistic directors of color, and other artistic directors who wanted to see people of color in the industry, saw the work that I was doing and started hiring me. But I think that came from the push of wanting to see more people that looked like me.”

Pierce said he feels like it’s his responsibility to be the same sort of advocate for other people of color. Finding mentors as a person of color in lighting design can still be difficult. Pierce said he could immediately think of only two African American lighting designers working at his level or higher: Kathy Perkins and three-time Tony Award nominee Allen Lee Hughes, who mentored Pierce.

“That’s 25 years between top light designers generationally in the industry,” Pierce said. “There’s not that disparity with white light designers. I think the 35-year-olds and the 25-, 27-year-olds suffer because of that gap. We don’t see a lot of people who look like us in the industry, so we don’t know what we can and what we can’t do, what to strive for or what not to strive for. I feel like that’s part of the reason why there’s not a lot of people of color, especially in the lighting design field.”

One value of these mentorships is preparing the younger generation for what they may experience when they enter the field. This includes teaching early career female designers and designers of color about the behavioral disparity they may experience. For Pierce, he knew there was a level of professionalism and a way he needed to carry himself to get where he is now.

“People were going to look at me based on the color of my skin,” Pierce said. “Not seeing a lot of people that looked like me in the industry, I had to carry myself in a way. I had to be better. I had to submit things on time. I had to be on point. I had to be always on. I had to look better than everybody else. I had to look like I belonged.”

Geiger echoed similar sentiments in her teaching to her students: She tells them they can’t yell at the crew, for instance. But it’s always better if everyone is nice to the crew, so she teaches that to all her students, not just the women. She recalled having a conversation with a white male lighting designer in his mid-40s who said that every once in a while he found it was okay to yell at his crew.

“I said, ‘You know I can’t yell at the crew, right?’” Geiger remembered. “Well, no,” he responded. Geiger continued, “I can’t yell at the crew or else I will never work there again, and Allen [Hughes] seconded my thought. It was clear that [this white male designer] hadn’t thought of it that way. So I will say there is still this prejudice that if you are sharp with people in the way that often white men are all the time, there is no way that can work for us.”

For many, conversations like this may be the only real solution to this obvious problem. Across the board, a conversation needs to be had. To encourage these discussions, Rothe and LPTW are rolling out #OneMoreConversation. The movement takes after the National Football League’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams hiring head coaches and senior operations positions to interview at least one minority before they make a hire.  “We have to just constantly be putting it at the forefront as a conversation, and figuring out what it is that we can do to try to change it and up the numbers,” Rothe said.

For his part Dinkins bristled at the thought of a Rooney Rule-like procedure at theatres. Though most of his displeasure with the rule comes from the systemic issues within the NFL itself, he does see a similar issue within the power structure of theatres. His hope, he said, is that in addition to implementing something like a Rooney Rule, theatres will also address the internal power dynamics that lead to having issues of diversity on design teams in the first place.

“It will change the optics,” Dinkins said of the Rooney Rule concept. “But those folks (hired) are under an immense amount of pressure. It’s not equitable. I think the Rooney Rule leads to diversity. It doesn’t lead to intentional changes of best practices. It doesn’t lead to equity. It is a stopgap.”

For Dinkins the hope is that as younger generations receive Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) Training, they take that training with them to new theatres.

“My hope is that they find folks that are like-minded out in the field and folks who haven’t done this work, and they start to push and interrogate the practices,” Dinkins said. “That they start to work with folks who are keeping an eye on EDI essentially, who are being proactive about doing diverse new and exciting work.”

Perkins also sees a light at the end of the tunnel. But in her mind, that will come with changes in who is doing the hiring at theatres, specifically a new crop of artistic directors.

“As you get in more people of color in these positions, that’s where you’re going to see the change,” Perkins said. “If we get in, not even necessarily younger people, but people who are more open to diverse people working in their theatres.”

Whether through mentorships, advocacy, hashtags, or studies, it’s crucial now to not lose the momentum behind this work. Rothe said she hopes the work of LPTW can keep this renewed interest in EDI from being a flash in the pan.

“When the last count came out, it got a lot of attention, and there was a change in the numbers,” Rothe said. “Then the following year, they went down again. It’s not going to just be paid attention to for one year. This is something that needs sustained attention.”

[Chicago-based writer Jerald Raymond Pierce is a former intern of American Theatre magazine.

[This American Theatre forum on lighting design and designers includes four more articles.  I hope readers will return on Friday, 2 November, for the next in the series, a profile of the Dean of American Lighting Designers, Tharon Musser, who worked on more than 150 Broadway productions and is considered one of the pioneers in the field of stage lighting.]

27 October 2018

“Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,” Article 3


[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll post on Rick On Theater over the next few weeks.  The third article in the AT series, “Cutting Through The Haze: A Response To A Foggy Argument” by Cory Pattak, is a response to  William Youmans’s “A Hazy Shade of Theatre,” Article 1 of “Light the Lights,” posted on 24 October.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

CUTTING THROUGH THE HAZE: A RESPONSE TO A FOGGY ARGUMENT
by Cory Pattak

What was missing from a recent op-ed? A sense of how lighting designers actually work to tell visual stories and create stage space.

As a lighting designer who often uses haze (and sometimes doesn’t), I want to respond to Williams Youmans’s recent article (“A Hazy Shade of Theatre: The Case for Clearer Design’ [posted on ROT on 24 October]), which really paints lighting designers in an unfavorable light. (Bonus points for a pun?)

I realize it was meant partly as a humor piece, but while we can all stand to take ourselves less seriously, we take our work and our craft very seriously. I’ve enjoyed Bill’s stage work over the years, but this seems to me an odd topic for him to write an op-ed on. It would be a bit like me writing a piece suggesting performers use less vibrato or pick up their cues. I might have an opinion on these, sure, but it doesn’t really feel like my place to give notes on how other artists create their work.

But he did write it, and by no fault of his own, the timing is somewhat unfortunate. Designers all over the country are fighting for credit on multiple levels: on theatre websites, press releases, reviews, articles that feature photos of our work, even in this magazine. We are in a constant battle for respect and recognition and are always trying to better educate the public about what we do (help tell the story, convey emotion) and what we don’t (we are in fact, not the backstage crew). And let’s not forget those couple years the Tony Awards felt sound design wasn’t an art. So if my response seems a bit disproportionate, it’s only because it touched a nerve.

This article was bizarrely included in the latest issue of American Theatre, featuring articles on lighting design and the virtues of that particular design discipline. An accompanying piece this condescending toward that same industry only serves to discount the good reporting done in those pieces. To that end, I would like to address some of Youmans’s points:

1. “Stage ‘fog’ is generally of two kinds: Let’s call them ‘fog’ and ‘haze,’ respectively.” I’m not here to quibble over semantics, but since he brought it up, yes: Haze is the atmosphere that hangs in the air. Fog generally refers to low-lying fog that hugs the ground, and there is also smoke (think of the Wicked Witch melting). I only bring up the terms because later in the article he says that “stage fog has been essential in every production with the budget to afford it.” That is obviously not true. Perhaps he means haze in this case? I can’t remember low-lying fog in any of the recent productions of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. If we’re going to define the terms, let’s use them correctly and be consistent so we’re all on the same page. I’m only discussing the use of haze in the following.
2. “I always thought light was supposed to illuminate the thing being lit, not draw attention to itself.” This is a bit of outdated thinking only held by those who still view design as a secondary art form. There are certainly shows where you shouldn’t notice the lighting. But the generalization that lighting should never really be noticed is archaic and narrow-minded. Great theatre artists understand that every design element—set, lighting, costumes, sound, projection—work in service to each other and the text to help tell a story. Sometimes that means the lighting should be purely utilitarian. Sometimes it means the lighting should be completely divorced from the action onstage. Sometimes it means the lighting and scenery function as characters in themselves. But the notion that each or any of these elements, no matter what the piece, should always perform a specific function isn’t just outdated thinking—it’s destructive to a collaborative process. Consider some of the recent Tony winners for lighting design: There was the beautifully understated The Band’s Visit (Tyler Micoleau), Indecent (Chris Akerlind), and Once (Natasha Katz), the technically jaw-dropping Harry Potter (Neil Austin), the lush and painterly South Pacific (Don Holder) and American in Paris (Natasha Katz), and yes, the high impact and flash of Great Comet (Bradley King) and Hedwig (Kevin Adams).
3. “But I have never met a director who wasn’t at least a bit enthralled by gorgeous gestures of light…” I would tend to agree. And let’s remember that aside from helping tell the story, the designer is there to help shape and realize the director’s vision. We often love large lighting gestures because directors love large lighting gestures, and we like making our directors happy and creating for them the show they see in their head. If they were concerned about lighting distracting from their play, I’m sure they would be the first to speak up.
4. “You can’t just have [haze] in one scene for which it might be appropriate—a rest stop outside a power plant on the New Jersey Turnpike, say—and then clear it in time for another scene where it might not be, like on a desert plateau in New Mexico.” This is an extremely literal way of thinking about haze, something we rarely do. Lighting designers (and by extension our lights) don’t just tell the audience, Where are we and is there a smoke stack nearby? We also help convey the feel, smell, taste, tone, and personality of any given scene. To me, a desert is dry, dusty, hot, and sandy. A sense of atmosphere helps convey all of that and transport the audience. Hot and relentless sun is assaulting. If you can practically feel (by seeing the atmosphere) the oppressive wash of light beating down on the characters, then we have helped tell the story.
Contrary to the impression Youmans gives, lots of shows don’t use haze at all. And lots of shows definitely shouldn’t have haze. And yes, there are undoubtedly high school productions of The Music Man that feel like the launch of Apollo 13. But haze, when appropriate, is a powerful tool that serves multiple functions. Light is inherently invisible. When a beam comes out of a fixture, you will only see that light when it A) hits an object like a person, scenery, or floor or B) you see it reflecting off of particles in the air. Many if not most shows often have limited resources. Not enough scenery, cast too small, small amount of lighting fixtures, etc. When you want to make a big impact with lighting if you have nothing to light, then the impact of the cue is minimal, especially for those audience members who can’t see the floor.

So designers often consider “air architecture.” It’s a way to create something out of nothing. Haze allows the lighting to make the stage feel fuller. It helps fill in the gaps made by small budgets. When a director says, “This cue needs to feel bigger,” they are talking about contrast, the difference between Point A and Point B. If you can see the beams move, or change color, or turn on, it’s a more dynamic action, thereby making the moment feel stronger. A lone performer on an empty stage with no haze feels very different than that same performer with a shaft of light backlighting them from the high corner of the back of the stage, barreling its way down to the back of their head. The decision to make that beam visible says something, makes you feel something different, and reconfigures the space in a completely different way. The geometry of the space is always something designers are considering.

Believe it or not, haze can actually assist the performers in garnering more applause. It’s like an alley-oop from a great point guard. Ask any lighting designer who’s been forced to sit through a show where the haze wasn’t working (as I did recently on an opening night at the Kennedy Center) and they will tell you it feels like half the energy has been sucked out of the room. Big musical theatre buttons, key changes, and builds are accented and punctuated by lighting (along with musical dynamics and orchestrations). If you see those visual accents at the same time you hear them, it’s that magical combo that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

Just think about the final image of “Defying Gravity,” Kenneth Posner’s hazy beams all ablaze, and then the intensity in which the blackout slams in on the musical cutoff, or the final moment of “The Room Where it Happens,” when Burr is left alone down center in a single white backlight, snapping even smaller with the gun click button (design by Howell Binkley). Those visible beams make big theatre moments feel even bigger and make an audience rise from their seats. We’re not showing our work to distract; we’re there to propel the performer to the ovation they surely deserve.

Directionality is one of the main properties of theatrical lighting, and we think a lot about where light comes from. Consider Hal Morey’s famous Grand Central Terminal photo, with the shafts of light streaming through the window. The only reason that photo has become so iconic is because of the strong (and visible) directionality of the light source. It elevates the photo to something ever greater. Of course, not every scene calls for “Game of Thrones”-style shafts of light. But having a sense of the source of the light often helps tell the story. Is it the sun, the moon, an offstage room, a lighthouse, a spaceship, a candle? When you can’t see where the light is coming from, we have less access to directionality as a tool in our arsenal.

Visible beams can also help draw the eye of the viewer. Film and TV have the camera lens to tell you where to look. In theatre, the audience can choose to look anywhere. Great care and attention by the director and the designers is placed on telling the audience where to look. Every good stage picture should tell you where the focal point is. The use of haze can act like a camera lens: panning, tilting, and zooming, leading the audience to focus on exactly what we want, and telling a clearer story.

Sometimes haze is used to intentionally conceal stage business. Paule Constable’s use of haze in War Horse and Angels in America, or Neil Austin’s deft use of it Harry Potter, allows characters to slip in and out of the stage picture. The haze creates a “gauze,” as Youmans mentioned, allowing greater control of what the audience does and doesn’t see, thereby creating magic right before your eyes. If there is a more breathtaking moment onstage of seeing young Joey turn into an adult horse through a thin wall of atmosphere, I’ve yet to see it.

Haze can also be crucial in productions performed in a thrust space or in the round. As these shows often have little or no background, the “background” is sometimes just the audience on the other side. There is nothing worse than watching Desdemona pour her heart out while a guy on the other side of the theatre checks his text messages. The use of haze in these spaces creates a virtual backdrop. It puts a layer of light between the stage and the opposite audience and keeps your attention drawn to the stage. This can be seen in practice in the current production of Once on This Island (lit by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer) or in the recent production of Fun Home (lit by Ben Stanton), both performed in the round at Circle in the Square.

As you can see, there are many uses for haze, and we spend tireless hours trying to dial in just the right amount. Keep in mind that this can be extremely difficult in theatres where the air temperature and current is impossible to replicate unless you have a full house of warm bodies. The use and amount of haze is thought out and considered. It may not seem that way from the other side of the footlights, but it’s a design tool to be wielded with great care, just like anything else.

An opinion piece about haze use peppered with some light humor and industry jokes would not normally merit a response of this length. But in the context of all the other ways our work is being marginalized, and all the ways we keep having to stand up for ourselves, it takes on greater significance when we are told how we are doing our jobs thoughtlessly. This article paints all lighting designers with a broad brush, making them seem lazy, ambivalent, and unoriginal in their use of haze, and even seems to suggest that we might be working against the performers and distracting from their work.

Lighting designers are by definition and practice collaborative artists. We cannot work on our own or in a vacuum; we are wholly dependent on bodies in a space before we can begin to work. We are there to assist and elevate the work onstage, and make sure the audience walks away with a night that will stay with them. In a time when the arts are being attacked by an administration that would rather see more troops than trumpets, we all need to stick together and lift each other up. I’m all for having a good laugh at the expense of podiatrists, professional curlers, or yacht owners, but the theatre community is a small and tight-knit group, and this article, however satirical its purpose, feels like it’s punching down on some of our own. Let’s save the criticism for the people and organizations interested in keeping us down and try to respect and support those in our own community a little more. If you want to create a better “atmosphere” onstage, that feels like a good place to start.

[Cory Pattak is a New York City-based lighting designer and host of the design-themed podcast “in 1.”

[The AT series on lighting and lighting design is just getting underway.  Please come back for the rest of the discussions, continuing on Tuesday, 30 October, with an examination of diversity in the field of lighting design.]

24 October 2018

“Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design,” Articles 1 & 2


[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll post on Rick On Theater over the next few weeks.  First up are two pieces: one is a general introduction to the series and the second, a possibly unusual article for a discussion of lighting: “A Hazy Shade of Theatre: The Case for Clearer Design” by  William Youmans, a stage actor and singer, is about fog and haze on stage.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

WHAT SHINES THROUGH
by Rob Weinert-Kendt

To tell the story of theatrical lighting design, we need to get beyond adjectives and surfaces.

“Dusky.” “Stark.” “Versatile.”

These are some of the adjectives I’ve used most frequently to describe lighting design in my former (and still occasional) life as a theatre critic. Designers must know this drill all too well: Most stage reviews focus on the work of the playwright, with some reference to the lead performances and the work of the director, followed by a sprinkling of somewhat obligatory mentions of set, lighting, sound, and costumes. Typically the most these hard-working folks receive in a review, if they’re mentioned at all, is an adjective next to their name attempting to suggest the competence of their work (“deft,” “resourceful,” “fluid”) or to characterize its special qualities (“glaring,” “wintry,” “mottled,” “creepy,” “sepulchral”). In my partial defense, in my reviews I have very occasionally devoted whole sentences to the work of designers, and even used other parts of speech—verbs, nouns, adverbs—to capture what I think they’re doing. But I confess that I, like many of my critical colleagues, have mostly raided my thesaurus and imagination to come up with succinct one- or two-word summations of what I’ve seen. (Real talk: When it comes to lighting I apparently have food on the brain, as I’ve variously used such descriptors as “egg-dye,” “oven-baking,” “deliciously rich,” “marzipan,” and, getting right to the point, “edible.”)

Indeed, while lighting design is seen as so central to movies it’s called cinematography, the work of stage lighting designers may be the most imperceptible to the average theatregoer (and hence to professional theatregoers, a.k.a. critics). Sets and costumes are three-dimensional, often pictorial things, and sound design unmistakably greets our ears; even projection design, a cousin of sorts to lighting, is right there before our eyes. But lighting designers work on and over those palpable surfaces, directing our attention and framing how we see more than what we see. Their closest analogues in the film world, funnily enough, may be sound designers: You may not quite be able to point to their work—it seems like a simple sensory given, that there is light onstage and sound on film—but you’d certainly miss it if it were gone. Perhaps music is a better analogy: As the fin de siecle producer/playwright David Belasco, no slouch in the lighting department, once said, “Lights are to a drama what music is to the lyrics of a song…No other factor that enters into the production of a play is so effective in conveying its moods and feeling.”

Belasco’s heyday stretched from the 1880s through the 1920s, which means that he got in on the ground floor of a fundamental change in theatrical lighting: from gas to electric. The field now seems to be on the cusp of another huge transition, from incandescent to LED, as reporter Jerald Raymond Pierce details in a story in this issue. American Theatre doesn’t typically delve too deeply into stage tech, but for this issue on the theme of stage lighting, we found that to do the subject justice we had to go beyond talking about the art with such masters as Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer or such emerging talents as Know Theatre artistic director Andrew Hungerford. Like lighting designers, we felt the need to reckon with the how as much as the what, all the better to expand our vocabulary beyond mere adjectives. You might even say we’ve seen the light.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.  He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theater for the New York TimesTime Out New York, and the Los Angeles Times.  He studied film at USC and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.]

*  *  *  *
A HAZY SHADE OF THEATRE: THE CASE FOR CLEARER DESIGN
by William Youmans

Stage fog and haze are great tools for the right occasion. But must they be a default design element?

During a performance of Bright Star, the superb Broadway musical of two seasons past by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, a cast member was momentarily engulfed by a cloud of fog. Stephen Bogardus, playing Daddy Cane, was “frog gigging” on the bank of a river in North Carolina, and all river banks are always completely covered in fog, as anyone who has ever been to one knows. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you cannot show a river in a play unless its banks are shrouded in fog; it just wouldn’t feel like a river. The fog gives the impression of dampness, a quality hard to convey on a dry stage—unless it’s covered with fog.

Bogardus completely disappeared for a few seconds, just like Isaac Hayes did on the Oscars that one time, earning him the nickname Isaac Haze. Eventually Stephen was able to dispel the fog with a few vigorous waves of his arms; we could see him again, and the play went on, after a few adroit improvised lines from Stephen’s voice within the cloud (“Who started the car?” and “Is the sausage burning?”).

Legends of stage fog vanishings are legion. One tale has it that after the fog cleared in Phantom of the Opera one night in the late 2000s, an actor completely disappeared, only to turn up the following week in a touring company of Jersey Boys. This is almost certainly exaggerated. (It didn’t add credibility to the tale that the allegedly apparating actor’s name was Rosco Fogg.)

Stephen Bogardus, at any rate, did not report any ill effects from his submersion. He was called on to roll over in the fog every night, breathing in quite a bit of the stuff, and so far has not reported any symptoms.

Stage “fog” is generally of two kinds: Let’s call them “fog” and “haze,” respectively. The fog that enswathed Stephen, and on which the cute angels can be seen sitting in in the current Broadway production of Carousel (sometimes it sits on them), is produced from a compound made by a German company called Look Solutions. It’s a mixture of water and triethylene glycol (a plasticizer used to make vinyl polymers, brake fluid, and air fresheners like Prestone; it’s also a disinfectant, a side benefit if an actor happens to have a sore throat). It may also contain propylene glycol, found in things like polystyrene, which is used to make styrofoam (and gives a nice kick to a mimosa). According to Wikipedia, the acute toxicity of these is very low, and large quantities must be ingested to cause “perceptible health damage in humans.” Imperceptible health damage is of course nothing that need concern us.

Haze, on the other hand, is made of “white mineral oil,” a highly refined petroleum-based substance. The haze which permeates every scene in Hamilton, and with it the entire Richard Rodgers Theatre, for example, was made by a Canadian firm, MDG Fog Company, “Generateurs de Brouillard,” according to Max Frankel, the show’s electrician. The spec sheets available on the company’s website, mdgfog.com, report that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, (OSHA) does not consider the product hazardous (a “keep out of reach of children” triangle with a black exclamation point on the canister notwithstanding). No significant critical effects or hazards are known from inhalation, eye contact, skin contact, or ingestion, though I’m not sure I’d want this oil in my Dijon vinaigrette.

I’ve never met an actor who liked working in this gloomy pea soup; you don’t hear actors exclaiming, a la Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now, “Ahh, I love the smell of theatrical haze in the morning!” It’s not pleasant, haze, though most of the time you don’t notice it. And since it appears not to be bad for you, no one complains. But bear in mind, “no known hazards” is not the same as “good for you.” You won’t see hospitals administering tanks of stage fog to the elderly.

I was a subject in a study of the effects of haze during the late 1990s, as a member of the cast of Titanic, the musical. The study examined our vocal cords before and after performances of that moderately hazy show, and several others, and found no signs of irritation worth mentioning.

So no, I will not be attacking the use of stage fog from the standpoint of health concerns in this piece. I, like the EPA under the current administration, wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. The fog of theatre is clearly not as deadly as the fog of war, although it might be used to depict it scenically.

Nor do audiences find fog hard to take, despite the occasional cough. When I was a stage manager for CSC Repertory’s 1974 production of Edward II, I forgot to turn off the smoke machine one matinee, and the audience and actors were forced to evacuate the theatre amid much coughing and gagging. But that was the old days, when powdered smoke was burned in a coiled ceramic heating device. This medieval procedure may have been effective for Edward, but whatever health risks were involved don’t apply to the modern methods.

No, as much as I dislike breathing the stuff, my objections here will not be medical, but aesthetic.

It has been quite a while now—maybe three decades?—that stage fog has been essential in every production with the budget to afford it. Lighting designers love it. It makes their beams of light cut lusciously through the atmosphere; it shows off their fancy vari-lites and computer controlled multiple beams, as they split, come together, and perform spectacular motions in the air. Dappled light from gobos shows up with great effect; candy-colored light beams can dance in the space above the stage, a dazzling display for the viewers.

So what’s the problem, if fog supposedly isn’t harmful, and it makes the stage pretty?  

Well, first of all, maybe it’s just because I’m an actor, but I always thought light was supposed to illuminate the thing being lit, not draw attention to itself. In a few productions I have found myself admiring the luminous beams, and missing for a few seconds something that was happening in the play. This is simply distraction, and as Shakespeare might say, it’s “villainous,” showing a “most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.” The designer is showing you their genius, but you are watching the air above the stage, not what is on the stage.

Distraction is one of the things directors have to worry about, and, to be honest, it is usually actors, myself not excepted, who perpetrate it. But I have never met a director who wasn’t at least a bit enthralled by gorgeous gestures of light, which are usually larger than any actor’s arms by several orders of magnitude.

Now, fog dissipates pretty rapidly. In Carousel’s wharf scene, the fog is so dense at the top that the scene might be mistaken for a musical of Backdraft, but it is mostly gone in time for Renée Fleming to sing her gorgeous rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” without looking like she she just exhaled a drag of a Virginia Slim. But haze, which is used more often, is designed to hang around so that the lights will be equally dazzling in all the scenes. This is fine if your play has a single set. But since haze lingers longer, you can’t just have it in one scene for which it might be appropriate—a rest stop outside a power plant on the New Jersey Turnpike, say—and then clear it in time for another scene where it might not be, like on a desert plateau in New Mexico. No, with haze, every scene, regardless of location or atmosphere, is equally smoky.

And smoky is the right word. A glance at the beams shows the mineral oil, in haze form, swirling around in the light, like the smoke from Edward R. Murrow’s cigarette in Good Night, and Good Luck. A gesture within a gesture, you might say.

This in turn creates a gauze effect. At times a gauze drop is brought in downstage in a proscenium theatre, as something to project images or printed information onto. The action of the play is still visible behind the drop, but there is looking-through-a-veil effect, as if there were greater distance between the actors and the audience, like blurry memory scenes in movies. With theatrical haze, you get a kind of constant virtual gauze. And since the density increases with distance, the farther you sit from the stage, the more blurry everything becomes.

To be sure, this is sometimes desirable. But what if it’s not? What if you want to minimize, not increase the sense of distance from the action? You may have a fight with your lighting designer on your hands.

Finally, there’s just the truth that stage fog is already passé. It has been for decades. It’s just so…’80s. It’s so Les Miz. So Cats. Someday soon a lighting designer is going to light a show without using it at all, and it will be like a revelation. Critics will rave: “The crystalline clarity of the production is as refreshing as a dry martini.” “There was such definition in every moment!” Audiences will cheer: “I could see the actor’s faces, from the back row!”  “I didn’t cough once!”

Come on, lighting designers and directors. I dare you to break the mold. It’ll make your name. You can always go back to it, if you’re doing a play about the Battle of Gettysburg; you can smear cannon smoke all over the Winter Garden Theatre. But if you’re doing, oh, I don’t know, a revival of On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, maybe try showing an actual clear day? The actors will sing your praises, for what that’s worth.

Really, we will. If we wanted to work in smoke, we’d have joined Ladder Company 54, the Broadway district fire department. As it says on the engine, they’ve never missed a show.

*  *  *  *
Since it was posted, the preceding piece inspired a lot of feedback, to put it mildly, reported AT’s editors, not only in the comments section but on social media. They decided to publish a response, which you can read in the next post. Below are some of the comments submitted to the website:

KJ Hardy • 4 months ago
Next week William Youman[s] covers the controversial subject of Tap dancing, and why decibel levels from the shoe’s can be dangerous! What is the OSHA rating of a Kick, Ball, Change? "But bear in mind, “no known hazards of Charleston” is not the same as “good for you.

Kate McGee • 4 months ago
I think we all need to have a hater party every now and again (preferably at the bar :P). It's just like, dang bro, did you really need to write this in a major trade publication? Is the industry better because you used your considerable platform to air (ha!) a pet peeve?

Aaron Copp • 4 months ago
Haze is a tool of the theater, like any other. Done right, in the right place, it's awesome; done badly, it's egregious - like jazz hands, or vibrato. I think the author is engaging in a bit of hyperbole - in reality there are shows with and without it, and while it might be a default choice for a certain style of Broadway musical, it's not the default choice for most other shows. Having been at the table for plenty of these discussions, I can assure you that it's not something lighting designers do unilaterally or take lightly. It's a design choice that is made like any other stylistic choice - in collaboration with the team, for good reasons. Frankly, it's often directors who ask for it, and they're not wrong to do so. I just wish there could be a little less snark directed towards designers who are often being underpaid and under-recognized for their efforts, and who frequently are uncredited in press releases and reviews, including by this magazine.
Aaron Copp - Lighting Designer, NYC

mplsbrat • 4 months ago
This article is incredibly uninformed about the use of fog and haze, and insulting to the entire field of lighting design. It's not true that "every production with the budget to afford it" uses fog or haze. And to describe that "Lighting designers love it" is to accumulate them all into one homogeneous body. Which they are not.

The self aggrandizing tone of "In All My Years In The Theater..." is undercut by what is clearly a lack of actual knowledge. This article has a citation from Wikipedia, a crowd sourced and notoriously unreliable source of any information, let alone health information. Publishing this is article is absurd.

[William Youmans is best known for originating the roles of John Jacob Astor in Titanic: The Musical (1997-99), and Doctor Dillamond in Wicked (2003-present).

[There are six more articles in this series.  Please come back to ROT on Saturday, 27 October, for the next installment, a response to Youmans’s column.]

19 October 2018

'History Keeps Me Awake At Night'


I was first introduced to the artist David Wojnarowicz when I worked with Leonardo Shapiro on Collateral Damage: The Private Life of the New World Order (Meditations on the Wars), a 1991 anti-Iraq war collage the director presented at the LaMaMa Annex in Manhattan’s East Village.  I served as dramaturg for the production and Wojnarowicz was one of the artists who contributed texts to the script.  (His was a piece called “Monologue,” commissioned for the performance but compiled in part from some of Wojnarowicz’s previous writings.  The artist was about a year away from his death from AIDS and was too ill even to come to the theater.)  A year or so later, Richard Schechner, the editor of The Drama Review, asked me to write a profile of Shapiro and his Shaliko Company.  That effort was published as “Shapiro and Shaliko: Techniques of Testimony” in issue T140 (Winter 1993), but I decided to expand the article into a book-length essay and I started extensive research into some of the figures Shapiro named as influences inspirations, and mentors over his career in theater; David Wojnarowicz (who had died by this time) was one of these artists.  (That unpublished book, “Commitments and Consequences: Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company,” has been the source of many posts on Rick On Theater.) 

I read most of what Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-na-ROH-vitch) had written (he was a prolific, and very effective, writer), studied the catalogues of art shows in which his work had been shown, went to a number of galleries where his art was on exhibit while I was doing my research, including Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (at its original location on lower Broadway in SoHo), the first retrospective after the artist’s death that ran from 21 January to 20 June 1999, and an exhibit of some of his papers and personal possessions, from his bequest to New York University, Reality and Realism: The Vision of David Wojnarowicz at the Fales Library and Special Collections (within NYU’s Bobst Library on Washington Square), 4 February-23 April 1999.

When I read the New York Times review of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Gansevoort Street in Greenwich Village (13 July-30 September 2018), I decided to walk over and catch the exhibition, the first retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work since the 1999 Fever.  It took me a while to get over to the museum, so I didn’t make it until Friday afternoon, 28 September, but I spent several hours in the fifth-floor Neil Bluhm Family Galleries reacquainting myself with David Wojnarowicz’s art.  Some of the pieces I’d seen before at the NMCA or some of the other, smaller shows I went to in the ’90s, or were familiar from illustrations in catalogues of other Wojnarowicz exhibits, such as the controversial David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame at the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal (23 January-4 March 1990).  (I also went to Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, a group show of portraiture by gay and lesbian artists in the 20th century at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., 30 October 2010-13 February 2011.  Work by Wojnarowicz was featured, including a video which was removed after protests that it was blasphemous; the video, A Fire in My Belly, made between 1986 and 1987, was shown in the Whitney’s History.)

(I have written several times about this artist on ROT, beginning with “David Wojnarowicz,” which includes a brief report on Hide/Seek, posted on 15 March 2011.  Mentions of the artist also appear in “The Return of HIDE/SEEK,“ 4 January 2012, and “Words with Pictures/Pictures with Words: David Wojnarowicz (1954-92),” 16 September 2014.  “David Wojnarowicz” provides general background, which I won’t repeat here, and includes a brief biography of the young artist—he was only 37 at his death in 1992—but I suggest readers have a look back at the post, accessible at https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2011/03/david-wojnarowicz.html, to understand some of Wojnarowicz’s history, which had a huge impact on his art as well as his politics—which you’ll see are inextricable.)

David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, organized for the Whitney by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director for the Collection, and David Kiehl, Curator Emeritus, contained 144 works of photography, painting, music, film/video, sculpture, writing, performance, and, on audiotape, activism.  (In the New York Times Magazine, contributing writer Christine Smallwood called the show a “polymathic totality.”)  History actually began in 2001 when Kiehl, then the Whitney’s curator of prints, conceived the idea of a David Wojnarowicz show at the Whitney.  He began a program of acquiring Wojnarowicz works that led, eventually, to this retrospective.  (A few weeks later came the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.)

As brief as his life was (he really only produced art for around 20 years), Wojnarowicz was prolific in his output and eclectic in his choice of materials.  Arranged chronologically, History was spread over 11 galleries and included some artifacts of Wojnarowicz’s life—such as the one-dollar check he won from Rev. Donald Wildmon (b. 1938) and his American Family Association in 1990 for misappropriating images from some of his paintings for anti-NEA propaganda.  (The check and other items from this episode are in NYU’s Fales collection and were displayed in 1999’s Reality and Realism.) 

History Keeps Me Awake was an exhausting show, not just because of the large number of pieces it comprised.  So much of the artist’s works are experimental and innovative—Wojnarowicz was largely self-taught as an artist and had to try out different methods and materials, not to mention use whatever came to hand because he couldn’t afford store-bought conventional art supplies, that reading the wall panels was, if not a necessity, then an enticement—at least for me.  (Regular ROTters will know by now that I’m a compulsive wall-panel-reader.)  There were several images in History about which I’ve always wondered how Wojnarowicz made them (Untitled (Buffalos), 1988-89; Bread Sculpture, 1988–89; Untitled (Silence = Death), 1990; Untitled (Face in Dirt), 1991); the curators’ captions finally explained some of them to me. 

Wojnarowicz’s works themselves take extraordinary focus: many contain multiple, disparate images and symbols, more and more as his art grew in sophistication and scope.  Further, many of the pieces contain text as well as visuals (which is the subject of the Wojnarowicz section of my “Words with Pictures/Pictures with Words”) so that it’s necessary to read the canvases while contemplating the images.  The breadth of Wojnarowicz’s interests as reflected in his art is vast, and widened as he matured as an artist and activist (the artist’s politics was an integral part of his art from the start, though it became more pointed over his 20-year career) and just keeping up with his points and messages is demanding. 

Perhaps the most straining (and I don’t mean that as a complaint or disparagement) aspect of a large Wojnarowicz show is the artist’s intensity—the very passion with which he imbued his art.  Most artists show what they see, sometimes filtered through their unique perception (that’s Impressionism in a nutshell).  David Wojnarowicz showed what he felt, not just in his heart, but in his gut, his very soul.  In each work on display in History Keeps Me Awake, Wojnarowicz has stripped himself bare and flayed his own skin from his body.  Smallwood, in her Times Magazine feature on the artist, asserts that Wojnarowicz’s art “mixes text and image, autobiography and political action, tenderness and rage.”  I don’t think he knew any other way to do it; his writing reveals the same total exposure, and, if you listen to his orations, you can feel it.  This was an almost painfully shy man who was poked and stabbed so often that he was forced to rise up in anger and hurt, and his pain is visible in his art and audible in his prose—he was a true street poet and philosopher—and his speeches.  Seeing and listening to this in a limited time is heart-wrenching and draining.  And exhilarating.

(I’ve said that I regret that I didn’t meet Wojnarowicz when we were both working on Collateral Damage in 1991.  I don’t know if I could have had the opportunity, because of his illness, but I assume he and Leo met during that time.  David Wojnarowicz was a truly fascinating man and our lives almost intersected near the end of his, but never quite met.  Learning what I have about him since then, I wish circumstances had been otherwise.  Leo Shapiro said of him in December 1990:

One of the things he sets a clear example of is the function of the artist in this society.  You know, they always talk about like the canary in the mines—the ones that die first, that run out of air. . . . .  This is what Wojnarowicz’s function is: he was literal cutting edge.  It’s very brave work.

(When I met British playwright Christopher Hampton in July 1969 and he said something that revealed that we were the same age, I had an immediate sense of inadequacy.  Here I was, literally sitting at the feet of this young man, all of 23 at the time—he was giving a talk to a group of American theater students in London—who already had a list of accomplishments, when at the same age I hadn’t even begun to do anything at all.  I imagine that I’d have had the same response to David Wojnarowicz, who was eight years younger than I was. Ironically, by the way, at the time I met Hampton, he had just had a successful début of his play Total Eclipse, which is about the relationship between French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine.  We’ll see that Rimbaud is a significant presence in History and in Wojnarowicz’s life.)

Usually, though not always, I find political art, whether it’s theater or prose or visual art, less than compelling.  Most of it, I find, is better politics than art.  David Wojnarowicz’s art, whether expressing his feelings about our society’s insensitivity to poverty; neglect of the AIDS crisis; repression of thought, speech, and expression; America’s greed, violence, and imperialism; the loneliness and separateness of the outsider in our culture, is always compelling.  It’s thought-provoking, enraging, and painful; it makes you confront ideas and truths many of us would rather not think about—which is Wojnarowicz’s point.  “People should witness things,” insisted the artist.  “They should, at the very bottom level, be witnessed.”  It was a sort of credo and Wojnarowicz lived by it and made his art for it, as History Keeps Me Awake patently reveals.

From the artist’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series (1978–79), a photographic representation of the ultimate outsider artist observing the hidden and quotidian life of New York City from afar, or serving as a silent guardian angel to its bereft denizens, to his later, more direct (and angrier—Rimbaud is almost sad) work like Americans Can’t Deal With Death and Untitled (One Day This Kid . . .) (both 1990), both deeply disturbing, heartfelt cris de coeur indicting our society, which Wojnarowicz condemned as the “pre-invented world.”

The show’s title artwork, History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz) (1986), for instance, combines such images as a gun-range pistol target in the image of a thug pointing a gun at the viewer, U.S. currency, an alien creature in a barren landscape, an industrial diagram, a toppled Greek column above a peacefully sleeping man all painted on a map of the world.  (Rilo Chmielorz is a multi-media artist who was close to Wojnarowicz from his early days.)  Some of the images are painted, some stenciled, and others pasted in from cut-out or found sources.  The collage/painting, which hung in Gallery 5, evokes fear for a world falling apart. 

As many art reviewers pointed out, the return of David Wojnarowicz to the spotlight at this moment—and in addition to History Keeps Me Awake, there were two other large shows in New York City at the same time: The Unflinching Eye: The Symbols of David Wojnarowicz at NYU’s Mamdouha S. Bobst Gallery (in the library), which ran from 12 July to 11 October (extended from 30 September), and Soon All This Will be Picturesque Ruins: The Installations of David Wojnarowicz at P·P·O·W (on West 22nd Street in Chelsea), from 12 July to 24 August—is timely, relevant, and necessary.  In the New York Times, for example, Holland Cotter opened his review by stating, “Like an irate guardian angel, the American artist David Wojnarowicz was there when we needed him politically 30-plus years ago.  Now we need him again, and he’s back . . . .”  (The interest wasn’t only local.  Peter Hujar & David Wojnarowicz ran at the Loewe Gran Via Gallery in Madrid from 4 June to 26 August 2018.)

The exhibit began in the corridor outside the galleries as museum-goers got off the elevator on the fifth floor.  In front of us was Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz (1983-84), made with Tom Warren (who took the black-and-white photo on which the self-portrait is based).  Wojnarowicz is facing us, looking straight ahead with his arms folded and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.  The right side (his right, our left) of the artist’s face, neck, and upper chest is formed by a map of the United States; there’s a tattoo of the globe on his right bicep and on his forearm are nine tiny clocks.  At his right elbow is a running man in flames, one of Wojnarowicz’s iconic images.  The left side of his face and body is ablaze in bright red and yellow flames.  The image, for me, is a man inflamed, burning with passion and anger—despite the placid countenance with which he meets us. 

The application to the exhibit to which Self-Portrait is an introduction, is that this is not only an exhibit of David Wojnarowicz’s art, but of David Wojnarowicz himself.  In this artist’s case, that’s über-appropriate because, as I observed earlier, his work and his life are inseparable.  You can’t appreciate the first without knowing something about the second.  You can’t learn about the second and not see what he put into his life’s work. 

If, as Shakespeare tells us, acting holds the mirror up to nature, art holds it up to life around us.  History Keeps Me Awake at Night is a self-portrait of David Wojnarowicz’s life.  If it’s not always pretty, that’s because Wojnarowicz’s world wasn’t.  But even if his art as displayed in this Whitney retrospective is disturbing and frightening—the truth can do that—if it doesn’t move you, than I fear there’s something wrong with you.  Like the David Wojnarowicz in Self-Portrait, it should make you burn.

Starting with Rimbaud in New York (Gallery 1), a series of simple black-and-white photos of three of Wojnarowicz’s friends posed individually wearing a life-sized mask of the poet’s face in various locations around the grittier parts of New York City (a subway; a late-night diner; the Hudson River piers west of Greenwich Village, right near where the new Whitney Museum now stands; masturbating on a bed), we see Wojnarowicz, who strongly identified with Rimbaud (1854-91—ironically, the poet also died at 37), casting himself as the outsider, observing but not participating in the life around him—an outcast or possibly holding himself aloof because he doesn’t feel he belongs.  (The gallery also displayed one of the original masks the artist used for this series, Rimbaud’s face from a well-known photograph, by Étienne Carjat in 1872, probably the one Wojnarowicz had seen plastered all over Paris when he went there to visit his sister and which inspired this series.)

Another photo collage from this same period, Untitled (Genet after Brassaï) (1979), depicts another of Wojnarowicz’s artistic heroes, the iconoclastic French writer and political activist Jean Genet (1910-86) as a saint with a Renaissance-style halo in the nave of a church, flanked by angels; over his shoulder hangs a picture of Jesus with a syringe in his arm—an image excerpted later for Donald Wildmon’s anti-NEA campaign brochure over which Wojnarowicz sued the American Family Association and it leader. (A third of Wojnarowicz’s personal heroes, William Burroughs, 1914-97, is featured in Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream, 1978, on display in the first gallery.)

In the second gallery, exhibiting work from the early 1980s, several of Wojnarowicz’s earliest visual symbols and media could be seen.  Untitled (Burning House) (1982) is stenciled with spray paint, a technique he initially used right on the sides of buildings because passersby would tear down his posters, advertising his band, 3 Teens Kill 4 (one of which is on display in this gallery), to take home. (Music from 3TK4’s 1982 album on Point Blank Records, No Motive, played in Gallery 2.  The band, whose name came from a New York Post headline, made its music on toy instruments and recordings; David Wojnarowicz “played” the tape recorder.)  True Myth (Kraft Grape Jelly) and Jean Genet Masturbating in Metteray Prison (London Broil) (both 1983) are silk-screened on supermarket posters.  Wojnarowicz used scrounged material throughout his career, but in his early years, maps, posters, trashcan lids, and other found surfaces served as his canvases. The burning house and the falling man were leitmotifs of Wojnarowicz’s early street art, reappearing frequently in his later pieces as well, in the same way as the radiant baby and barking dog were recurring symbols in Keith Haring’s street work. 

Something else about these works: they’re playful for the most part, sometimes even inside jokes.  They’re brightly colored in neon and primary colors, almost childlike figures, without much detail.  In a few years’ time, after the loss of Peter Hujar and his own HIV diagnosis, this seeming happiness would sour and the playfulness would turn into anger and deadly seriousness.  As the exhibit progressed, the change becomes very apparent.

Gallery 4 contained several photographic portraits of Wojnarowicz by Peter Hujar (1934-87), whom Wojnarowicz met in 1980.  Hujar (HOO-dzhar) was already established in the New York art world as a sensitive and perceptive photographer and he became a friend and mentor to the younger artist.  (The outlines of the two men’s early history were remarkably similar, which probably led Hujar to empathize with his younger friend and caused Wojnarowicz to look on Hujar as a kindred soul who understood him.)  They were briefly lovers, but Hujar’s most significant role came as Wojnarowicz’s closest friend and adviser, encouraging the insecure younger man to pursue his art, including returning to photography, and recognizing himself as an artist.  From the point when Wojnarowicz met Hujar, his art changed from parochial, insular objects like the posters for his band, to a broader, more expansive palette. He took on larger topics and issues and broadened his artistic vocabulary.

The two artists frequently appeared as subjects in each other’s work; Hujar’s photos of Wojnarowicz are iconic examples of his work in the field, and show a less-public soft, sensitive, and contemplative side of Wojnarowicz not always revealed in his own art.  Befitting the notion that History was an exhibit both of David Wojnarowicz’s creative output and the man himself, devoting a portion of a gallery to portraits of Wojnarowicz by another artist was unusual but apt. 

Also in this same gallery were some of Wojnarowicz’s paintings in which Hujar appears as a subject (Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: Saint Sebastian, 1982).  More famous depictions of his beloved friend were in Gallery 9: the photos Wojnarowicz took of Hujar’s dead body in his hospital bed right after the photographer’s death from AIDS (on 25 November 1987), all called Untitled (1987).  Wojnarowicz was with his friend at the end, and when Hujar died, Wojnarowicz asked everyone to leave the room so he could film and photograph his friend for the last time.  History displayed pictures of Hujar’s head, his feet, and his hand, showing clearly the ravages of the wasting illness that killed him.  Because of Hujar’s influence, Wojnarowicz devoted a considerable portion of the rest of his artistic life (he himself was diagnosed as HIV-positive the next year) to photography and writing (which is where he started), even as he continued to paint and sculpt.

Gallery 5 held the exhibition’s titular painting, which I described earlier, and several more of Wojnarowicz’s complex, symbol-filled paintings from the mid-1980s, the kind of large and multifarious works that dominated the rest of the artist’s career.  His criticism of American culture, indeed the whole of human society, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, became more pointed and direct, less oblique, and fiercer.  He’d seen so many friends die of what he deemed societal neglect and dismissal, culminating with his dear friend Peter Hujar, he could no longer hold his peace.  (The uncompleted video A Fire in My Belly, which ran in the next gallery, was made during this period as well, and his vocal activism became not only a feature of downtown New York City protests, but a significant part of his life.)  Works like Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water (1986), Das Reingold: New York Schism (1987), and The Death of American Spirituality (1987), show the nightmare of AIDS, societal violence, and capitalistic greed.  The bright colors, almost cartoon-like, are reminiscent of Wojnarowicz’s graphic autobiography, Seven Miles A Second—the most disturbing comic books I’ve ever read!—created with comic-book artist James Romberger and published by DC Comics in 1996. 

The images of humanoid, skull-like heads in Das Reingold echo the decorated cast-plaster alien-like heads in Gallery 3, the Metamorphosis series (1984) which are intended to evoke the horrors of the various Latin American armed conflicts (including the Nicaraguan Contra War, the Salvadoran Civil War, the Dirty War in Argentina) ravaging that region in the ’80s.  Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water is a precursor to the four monumental paintings Wojnarowicz made in 1987 called The Four Elements.  Earth, Wind (For Peter Hujar), Fire, and Water, each 6'x8' of dense symbolism and allegory, were displayed in Gallery 7 and placed Wojnarowicz’s art in the long line of Western tradition by evoking the timeless subject of the four mythical components of life and nature in images of his own time: violence, destruction, decay, greed and capitalism, unfettered industrialization, and other targets common to Wojnarowicz’s art and writing.  The collage-paintings are not only large in size and complex in content—I could have stood in front of any one of the four for hours and still not deciphered all of the artist’s symbols—but disquieting and unsettling. They’re also largely prescient looked at from 30 years on.

Galleries 6 and 8 were set up to show some of the artist’s film, video, and spoken/written work.  Gallery 6, as I indicated, included A Fire in My Belly, the video that got Wojnarowicz once again in trouble, posthumously this time, when it was shown in the Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek exhibit and then removed under protest from conservative religious activists (principally the Catholic League and Bill Donohue—who had also gone after playwright Terrence McNally and Corpus Christi).  (Wojnarowicz, like McNally, was raised Catholic and had some very pointed criticisms of the church and its guardians and leaders.)  Other films and videos by the artist were also run here, and in Gallery 8, museum-goers could sit and listen to samples of Wojnarowicz’s writing as he read selections at various public appearances.  Both the passion and the poetry of his words, as reflected in the many paintings that contained text, was clearly demonstrated here.  In fact, some of the passages we could hear in these taped sessions also appeared in artworks displayed in History Keeps Me Awake.

Gallery 9, which held the death photos of Peter Hujar, also returned to Wojnarowicz’s more wide-ranging work.  One painting, 1988-89’s Untitled (Hujar Dead) features nine of the Hujar photographs overlaid with an all-over text (later published in Close to the Knives, 1991) that articulates the artist’s feelings surrounding the death of his friend and others who died of AIDS, the rage he carries with him “like a blood filled egg.”  This piece was first shown at Artists Space in 1989’s Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group show of the artistic response to the AIDS epidemic.  Wojnarowicz had contributed an essay to the catalogue, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” that so enraged conservative politicians that they campaigned to have the NEA withdraw its funding for the exhibit.  (It was Wojnarowicz’s first appearance on the political right’s radar; he became a target thereafter, in the same league as Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and the “NEA Four” (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes).

Another canvas in the gallery was Something from Sleep III (For Tom Rauffenbart) (1989), dedicated to the artist’s long-term lover, which depicts a dark silhouette of a man peering into a microscope; against a cloudy blue background, we seem to see through the man into space with planets and stars as if he were a window into the cosmos.  According to his own explanation, it’s a dream image inspired by the birth of Wojnarowicz’s niece expressing a notion of his passing—he’d been diagnosed with HIV by this time—beyond solid, earth-bound mortality.  Also on display here was 1988’s Childhood, which employs a technique that Wojnarowicz would use more and more in his late work, the peephole: tiny circular insets embedded in the larger painting with collaged or painted symbols that comment on or contrast with the main work.  One aspect of these two works that differentiate them from much of Wojnarowicz’s other art is that they are less frightening and foreboding, demonstrating that he could produce art that was beautiful.

In 1990, the year the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal mounted the only retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work during his lifetime (Tongues of Flame, which later came to Exit Art in New York City from 17 November to 5 January 1991, along with other galleries around the country), the artist made a series of four large paintings (He Kept Following Me, I Feel A Vague Nausea, Americans Can’t Deal with Death, We Are Born into a Preinvented Existence).  (It was because of Tongues of Flame, which was partly supported by an NEA grant, that Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association launched his campaign against Wojnarowicz which resulted in the federal lawsuit the artist brought against the reverend and AFA.)  Each painting (all 2'x5' or larger) depicts a flower in almost botanical detail—a sort of hyperreal reflection of Georgia O’Keeffe—with a panel of text and small black-and-white peepholes (square ones, this time—like little Polaroid snaps).  The flowers (on display in Gallery 10), in their uniqueness and delicacy, express Wojnarowicz’s view of the AIDS victims he saw all around him in the art and gay communities, seeing in the beautiful flowers the fragile bodies of his friends (and now himself, of course). 

Also in Gallery 10 was one of Wojnarowicz’s most iconic and familiar pictures, the untitled photograph of buffalos falling off a cliff (1988-89).  (The photo seeped into our pop culture not long ago when it appeared under the credits of Westworld’s second season on HBO earlier this year.  The photo also appears as the cover art of the CD of U2’s single “One,” released in February 1992, four months before Wojnarowicz died.)  Actually a photo the artist took of a diorama of American Indian hunting techniques in the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, Wojnarowicz saw it as another evocation of the AIDS crisis.  It’s one of the simplest and most straightforward pieces Wojnarowicz ever made: the simple black-and-white picture is unadorned, without text or peepholes; it’s just presented as it is.  In her Times magazine feature, Christine Smallwood comments: “It is a very simple picture—a critique of heedless speed, as civilization stampedes to its future destruction—and one of his bleakest.  There is no turning it around for these buffalo.  They can’t save themselves.”  (This was one of the works whose origin always intrigued me and which the Whitney show revealed to me.)

History’s last gallery contained two more pieces about whose creation I wondered: Bread Sculpture (1988-89) and Untitled (Face in Dirt) (1991).  (There’s a fourth piece, another photo, that has always confounded me, but it’s not actually by Wojnarowicz.  Untitled (Silence = Death) is a still from the AIDS protest film Silence = Death (1990) by Rosa von Praunheim, with Phil Zwickler, in which Wojnarowicz appeared. The black-and-white still shows the artist’s head photographed straight on while the hands of an unknown person sews his mouth shut with thick string.  Assuming, as I do, that Wojnarowicz didn’t actually have his lips sewn together—later pictures don’t show any scars, for instance—how did the movie’s producers create this image, which became one of the most provocative of the AIDS activist movement.  The Whitney’s curators didn’t explain the technique.)

Bread Sculpture is very simply a loaf of bread, cut in two, stitched together with a needle and red string.  The bread may symbolize our broken, or divided society (how apt that image is for today!) and the string, heavy twine but still tenuous, an attempt to reunite the disparate factions—which, after all, are parts of the same whole.  What intrigues me is, if it’s made with actual bread—and it not only seems to be, but the list of materials in the artwork states that it is—how has it not rotted in over 30 years?  Would even varnishing preserve baked organic material forever?  I wonder . . . .  Untitled (Face in Dirt) is also a photograph of Wojnarowicz’s face, taken by his friend and traveling companion Marion Scemama in the Death Valley desert.  They were on a road trip around the Southwest and Wojnarowicz had planned this photo and knew exactly where he wanted to do it and how; he instructed his photographer collaborator exactly what to do, according to Wojnarowicz’s biographer Cynthia Carr:

[Wojnarowicz] had been there before and knew exactly where he wanted to stage this.  “We’re going to dig a hole,” he told her, “and I’m going to lie down.“  They began digging without saying a word, a hole for his upper body and a bit for the legs.  They used their hands.  The dirt was loose and dry.  He lay down and closed his eyes.  Marion put dirt around his face till it was halfway up his cheeks and then stood over him, photographing his halfburied [sic] face first with his camera and then with hers.

The image is from a dream Wojnarowicz said he had in 1979 (he described it in his journal at the time).  The artist never explained whether he’s sinking into the earth or rising from it—and I suspect he didn’t want to define that aspect of the work explicitly.  And even though the dream came a decade before his diagnosis as HIV-positive, the photo project is clearly some visualization of his mortality since it came three years after the diagnosis.  (A few months after the picture was taken, Wojnarowicz tested positive for AIDS, a death sentence in 1991.)  As for the methodology, Carr’s description explains a lot, except it’s still hard for me to figure how Wojnarowicz could lie with loose dirt in his eye sockets, even if his eyes were closed!  Ick! 

Also in this last gallery was probably the artist’s most iconic work, Untitled (One Day This Kid . . .) (1990-91).  It shows a photo of Wojnarowicz as a young boy, probably about 9, looking like the kind of portrait schools used to take of every student each year.  It’s a completely innocent image, all buck-toothed and jug-eared surrounded by text that starts: “One day this kid will get larger.  One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis.”  It’s an increasingly ominous statement about the future life of not only young David, but many, many kids like him who will suffer horrendously because they are queer (or black, or fat, or migrants, or Muslim, or . . .).  It’s a powerful and poignant condemnation of societal homophobia (and, by extension, all kinds of marginalization, disempowerment, and disenfranchisement of “others”).  The artist created One Day This Kid while he was preparing Tongues of Flame in Illinois, where it wasn’t shown, but it became a frequent illustration for announcements of many later exhibits of Wojnarowicz’s work. 

The press interest in David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night was great, including several daily papers from both the New York region and outside it—abroad and domestic.  The art press is represented as well as a significant number of cyber journals and blogs.  Reviews were almost universally positive and laudatory, comparing Wojnarowicz’s reception today, with shows at the prestigious Whitney and elsewhere, with his outsider status in his lifetime.  Because Wojnarowicz is not as well known among the general public, even the museum-goers, almost all the reviewers spent considerable space on his bio and general commentary on his work.

The London Guardian’s Jake Nevins (in the New York edition) declared that “now America, or at least its art world establishment, is ready, a quarter-century after his death, to acknowledge Wojnarowicz’s rightful place in the canon of contemporary art, not just ‘gay art’.”  Though he covers gay subjects and issues in his art, Nevins insisted, Wojnarowicz’s “work is really about America, a place he had described in his 1991 essay collection Close to the Knives as an ‘illusion’, a ‘killing machine’, a ‘tribal nation of zombies . . . slowly dying beyond our grasp’.”  As many of his colleagues pointed out, the Guardian reviewer observed, “The retrospective . . . could not be more timely, arriving in a charged political moment not unlike the one from which Wojnarowicz emerged as a voice of searing honesty.”  Nevins mused, somewhat ironically considering the origins of this exhibit, “one wonders how Wojnarowicz would react to the retrospective at the Whitney, the epitome of the art world establishment that has been slow to recognize the gravity of his contributions.” 

In the New York Times, Holland Cotter labeled History “a big, rich retrospective” and said that the artist “was one of the most articulate art world voices raised against the corporate greed and government foot-dragging that contributed immeasurably to the global spread of AIDS.”  Cotter admonished us, however: “Yet he was far from a one-issue artist.”  Wojnarowicz was “an artist deeply invested in dealing with mortality and spirituality,” the Times art reviewer believed, “huge subjects rarely, and usually only obliquely, addressed in American contemporary art.”  The Timesman asserted that “Wojnarowicz’s formal means—stenciling, spray painting, collaging—are anti-academic.  But his fact-and-fantasy images of existential violence and degradation, past and present, are in an old allegorical mode,” comparing him with a Renaissance painter and a member of the Hudson River School, artists who “addressed contemporary politics in a classical language of mythology and landscape.”  After Hujar’s death, Cotter felt, Wojnarowicz “collapsed political, cultural and personal history” and “took his outsider citizenship as a subject and weaponized it.”  The Times reviewer’s summation of this artist’s life and career rings particularly true:

In his lifetime, Wojnarowicz became a star, though an unconventional one, unsmooth, unpredictable, unstylish even, with his clotted paint, uncouth symbols, and jabbing ideas and words.  There’s little about his art I would call sublime, yet I think of him as angelic.  I think of him as being something like the Angel of History, as imagined by the philosopher Walter Benjamin, an omniscient being who looks back to the human disasters of the past and sees them repeating themselves in the present and future, which is exactly what’s happening in this country right now.

Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post asserted, “By showing the richness, breadth and intensity of Wojnarowicz’s full career, [History Keeps Me Awake at Night] underscores how relentless the demonization of his work has been, how . . . suppression operated while he was alive, how it continued after he died, and how tawdry, cruel, cynical and successful, it was.”  Further, Kennicott deemed, “The most powerful moments of the exhibition have a moral grandeur rare in contemporary art, as it becomes clear that not only was Wojnarowicz fully cognizant of the tools being used against him, he made the onslaught the subject of his work.”  The Post art reviewer called the Whitney retrospective an “absorbing and comprehensive exhibition” and he capsulized his sense of the artist’s importance:

His feelings, and his art, would harden in later years, as his friends died, his body failed and he was subject to attack by bigots and opportunistic politicians.  He ended as a fighter, but as this exhibition makes clear, that was only one of the several Wojnarowiczes who inhabited this world for just 37 years, and it is by no means the most dangerous of them.  The young man who loved Rimbaud, hated war, defended women and unapologetically slept his way through New York and Paris was far more of a threat, and that’s why most people today still know only the angry artist losing his war against a virus.

The Village Voice, in an article attributed to the “Voice Archives,” said History “coalesces into a sum greater than art,” continuing, “Rarely has an artist’s life been as intricately entwined with the objects on view—a visual life story.”  (The rest of the Voice’s article was about past coverage of the artist.  The Village Voice officially ceased publication on 31 August.)  Clayton Press wrote in Forbes that the Wojnarowicz show, which “focuses (almost exclusively) on the output of a single artist across an exceptionally broad range of media,” should be a reminder “of inherent tensions that prevail in the United States.  They are certainly not new issues, and they most certainly are unresolved ones, whether the discussion is race, gender or identity politics.” 

In the Brooklyn Rail, Danilo Machado described History as “an urgent, stunning retrospective of an artist who, across media, coupled rage with tenderness to create images and calls to action that reverberated with viewers in the 1980s just as much as they do with visitors to the Whitney Museum today.”  He continued that “the show immerses you in Wojnarowicz’s world of sound, sculpture, photography, and painting” and, detailing some of Wojnarowicz’s techniques, Machado observed that “the physical demarcations of process and material convey a kind of generosity and assert personal subjectivity.”  In the end, the BR reviewer wrote: “History Keeps Me Awake at Night, and exhibitions like it, tell a critical history of resilience while reminding us of the continued need for community and action.” 

The New Yorker’s Moira Donegan proclaimed:

Because Wojnarowicz was so vivid and uncompromising in his moral outrage, and because his writing about the injustices, bigotries, and abuses of power that led to his own death is so searingly lucid, it can be uncomfortable to admit that some of his artwork is not very good.  His paintings, in particular, can be disappointing, drawing heavy-handedly on Frida Kahlo magical realism and the pop-art sensibilities of artists such as Richard Hamilton and Keith Haring.  It may be more accurate, and more fair, to judge him as a moral crusader, whose indictment of government indifference and hostility toward its most vulnerable groups resonates as urgently today as it did during his lifetime.

(I’m not sure what Donegan meant by “good”; perhaps she meant “pretty,” which much of Wojnarowicz’s work is not.  If “good art” means “expressive” or “effective,” I’d have to disagree with her statement.  I’d recommend that the New Yorker art reviewer read some Susanne Langer, the aesthetic philosopher, who defined “beauty” as “expressive form,” by which she maintained that it affects its audience in some way.  “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” Langer wrote.  There’s also Aristotle’s admonition that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we’d regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.  Aristotle, of course, was discussing tragedy, and imitative tragedy in particular, but the broader application to art in general, even in its more abstract forms, seems apt.) 

In New York magazine and Vulture, Jerry Saltz called History Keeps Me Awake at Night “an astonishingly relevant, urgently important retrospective” and admonished readers: “Miss it, and you miss transcendental levels of incredulity, indignation, vulnerability, lamentation, fighting back—ultimately, what it means to be human in a time of encroaching political darkness.”  Saltz, however, felt that Wojnarowicz was a “better, more lucid freedom fighter than he was an artist.” 

Joseph R. Wolin of Time Out New York labeled the Whitney show a “beautifully curated retrospective” which “does more than just give us the raw power of his jeremiads: It balances them with the romantic, poetic and visionary side of his work that is too often forgotten.”  Sukhdev Sandhu remarked in Apollo magazine that “this is a show where the line between the work and the man behind the work is—and perhaps has to be—smudged.” Sandhu dismissed Wojnarowicz’s “large-scale, colourful canvases” as “mulligatawny messes full of hyperreal colours, scribbles, vaguely Mexican motifs, grids and garish animation.”  They are “the show’s loudest, least successful pieces.”  Sandhu’s final analysis is that History “adds up to a melancholic, angry, sometimes gorgeous exhibition that does a valiant job of conveying why Nan Goldin called the artist ‘a moral conscience of our time’.  The exhibition seethes with energy and militant drive. It’s restless and relentless; hopeful and hopeless. It feels absolutely of the present moment.”

Art in America’s Jameson Fitzpatrick warned, “A certain level of cognitive dissonance is required to enjoy the Whitney Museum’s long-awaited retrospective of” David Wojnarowicz.  Reason: the artist “was an exacting and unabashed critic of institutions, including museums such as the Whitney.”  Fitzpatrick continued to ponder: “In one sense, Wojnarowicz’s recent canonization . . . is both an artistic and a social good.”  But he goes on to wonder, “with the institutional recognition that his retrospective signals, a question emerges about the cost of his inclusion: what does it mean for the outsider to be invited in, and what, perhaps, gets left behind?”  Nonetheless, Fitzpatrick decided, the show “crafts a compelling narrative of the artistic and political development of an exceptional and yet quintessentially American figure.”  Wondering what Wojnarowicz might make of the current exhibit and his own acceptance, the AiA reviewer observed, “Fittingly, it’s members of ACT UP (of which Wojnarowicz was himself a part) who have assumed this work, having recently staged a protest at the Whitney calling on the museum to recognize both the legacy of Wojnarowicz’s activism and the fact that the AIDS epidemic is not over.”  The journalist concluded, “By framing the artist’s activist spirit as historical, this otherwise impressive exhibition betrays that spirit, leaving us not just to marvel at all Wojnarowicz made, but also to wonder what critiques he would have to make, what interventions.” 

On WNYC, a New York City outlet for National Public Radio, Deborah Solomon proclaimed that because Wojnarowicz’s “moment and his message remain unequivocally urgent, . . . the Whitney Museum is to be commended for bringing us this beautiful and much-needed show.”  The NPR reviewer added, “The retrospective allows us to finally glimpse Wojnarowicz whole; it is a must-see event for anyone who believes in the necessity of love, empathy, and moral rightness.”  Solomon complained that while the artist’s photographs “are more memorable than his paintings, the latter of which are never contextualized in this show.”  She found it “odd that the Whitney fails to acknowledge the historical artists who interested him,” affirming that “Wojnarowicz was no naïf.”  In her conclusion, Solomon found:

You could say that Wojnarowicz’s accomplishment, as a painter, was to infuse the upbeat and innocent forms of Pop art with a sense of political menace and impending death.  In retrospect, his vision was prophetic.  He saw that America had a mean streak and, had he lived, he might not be surprised to see that today, the meanies rule.

John Reed on Slate called History a “thoughtful, extensive exhibition” but he noted that the Whitney places examples of pre-HIV and post-HIV work together, seeking to overcome the chasm,” but isn’t successful, noting that the dynamics of Peter Hujar’s photo portraits of Wojnarowicz and the paintings of Hujar made by Wojnarowicz, though both groups hung in the same gallery, clashed.  Reed was surprised at “the immediacy and originality of Wojnarowicz’s color, and the meticulous technique in everything he did.”  On Hyperallergic, Zachary Small reported that History “tactfully highlights the artist’s most confrontational pieces while giving sometimes too-brief, tantalizing glimpses into his vulnerabilities.”

Bemoaning the return to “the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s,” Joshua Sanchez of Lambda Literary proclaimed:

Seeing much of Wojnarowicz’s best-known photographs, paintings, films, audio recordings and writings at David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art feels like a punch in the gut in today’s political climate.  It’s both a reckoning with what he called America’s ‘ONE-TRIBE NATION’, and a call to arms for society’s many wounded minority communities.

Sanchez found that the Whitney “exhibition shows, with dignity, power and beauty, just how intensely David Wojnarowicz wanted to lift the veil of[f] this American myth, or the ‘pre-invented world’ as he called it.”  The LL writer, a filmmaker who’s developing Fire in the Belly, a movie about the life and times of David Wojnarowicz, concluded by stating: “In 2018, we are far from this reveal.  But as long as David Wojnarowicz’s work exists in this world, more and more people will find it and begin to peek behind the curtain.  And this is where change can occur.”