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  (That unpublished book, “Commitments and Consequences: Leonardo Shapiro and The Shaliko Company,” has been the source of many posts on Rick On Theater.)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