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 (That unpublished book, “Commitments and Consequences: Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company,” has been the source of many posts on Rick On Theater.)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.”
