Chaotic Yet Serene: David Wojnarowicz’s Confrontations with Death and Sorrow
I. “Realizing that I have nothing left to lose in my actions I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons, every bone and muscle and fibre and ounce of blood become weapons, and I feel prepared for the rest of my life.” — David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives (qtd. in Getsy, pg. 77).
David Wojnarowicz is now known as one of the iconic gay artists in the ’80s who dealt with issues around homosexuality, AIDS, and the use of art to engage conversation. Born in New Jersey, he dropped out of high school, and spent time hitchhiking across the United States. He eventually became part of the iconic late-1970s group of artists in the East Village in New York City. Largely self-taught, Wojnarowicz’s work spans a variety of formats, including mixed-media, paintings, performance art pieces, films, and writing.
An early series of work, entitled Arthur Rimbaud in New York, features friends of Wojnarowicz wearing a mask of Arthur Rimbaud, reimagining him as a part of the late-1970s queer culture of the city. This juxtaposition between this historical figure and the lived realities or simply daily lives of the modern gay population brought light to these not-so-different worlds. This work, among others, reveal his emphasis on challenging public thought, but not in the same activist way many other artists at the time did.
In Wojnarowicz’s work, there is often an intensity of emotion, without the direct “talking to the audience” method of other activist artists. His work is at once frantic but calm, angry but sad, cluttered but clear. For example, in a self-portrait created sometimes around 1983–1985 (pictured below) Wojnarowicz stares out at the audience while on fire. His face is calm, partially marred by what seems to be a colored map of the world. His eyes seem to ask “why aren’t you doing anything” but his crossed arms suggest a stand-offish attitude, resistance towards the viewer. Every stroke of red and yellow flames, of speckled paint, of the cycles of the moon, are weapons of desperation, sorrow, and anger. An extension of the weapon he sees his body as when deprived of it’s worth as a Life.
II. “I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination.” — Wojnarowicz. (qtd. in Getsy, pg. 78)
Other works by Wojnarowicz feature clean-cut but thought-provoking mixed-media collages that compile seemingly distinct and unrelated images together to engage the viewer’s thoughts in a new direction.
A headless torso and legs, all shot through with arrows, with arms imprisoned by branches, positioned in front of two trees. A black and white picture of a large, square building with a chimney. A petri dish of blood cells. Blurry black and white images of sex acts. A petri dish of blood cells overlaid with the face of a clock. A field of face down and upside down US bills ranging from $1 to $1000, in no particular order. Altogether, these images create “Bad Moon Rising” a mixed-media piece that challenges the private nature of sex and addresses the passing of time, death (and specifically the death of the body), nature, capitalism, and history. By placing all of these images together, Wojnarowicz addresses the suffering of the AIDS crisis, the profit motives of research and medication, and the associations of sex and acceptability. This allows the viewer to think about these images and their connections, without the piece directly addressing them, forcing them to simply think.
III. “To turn our private grief for the loss of friends, family, lovers and strangers into something public would serve as another powerful dismantling tool. It would dispel the notion that this virus has a sexual orientation or a moral code. I would nullify the belief that the government and medical community has done very much to ease the spread of advancement of this disease.” — Wojnarowicz. (qtd. in Getsy, 78–79).
His experience with the AIDS crisis came out in his work, especially photographs. The photograph of his friend Peter Hujar dying from AIDS (picture above) especially conveys the fear, sorrow, and mourning of the time by many people in the community. Another iconic Wojnarowicz photo, of buffalo falling to their death was actually a picture of a diorama in the Natural History Museum in Washington D.C. but the black and white rendering, and the focus exclusively on the falling buffalo and not the rest of the diorama create a dialogue with new considerations of Americanism and death. As John Sevigny describes in an article on the photograph (emphasis mine):
“The buffalo is an animal so sacred to Americana that it once graced the tails side of the nickel, and it was going off a Southwestern, Spaghetti Western cliff like a lemming, presumably driven on by hunters who nearly pushed the animal to extinction. The photograph goes far beyond representing the death of the American dream. In a simple image, it captures the forced, borderline-psycho disillusionment felt by anyone left of center during an age in which Right was right and homosexual men died because God himself had descended from the heavens to exact His revenge. This is not Death of a Salesman. This is the photographic equivalent of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, an indictment of a sick nation reeling in riches and hubris even as it feasted on the weakest, cast the mentally ill out into the streets, and blamed death on the dying.”
Again, death, desperation, fear, sorrow, and broader implications for society come to play in Wojnarowicz’s work. This implicates the audience into thinking, addressing the uncomfortable, and coming face to face with mortality.
IV. “I find that when I witness diverse representations of ‘Reality’ on a gallery wall or in a book or a movie or in the spoken word of performance, that the larger the range of representations, the more I feel there is room in the environment for my existence, that not the entire environment is hostile.” — Wojnarowicz. (qtd. in Getsy 78).
Wojnarowicz died due to complications with AIDS in 1992, leaving behind a body of work that challenges the public, addresses the private, confronts death, and in many ways brings contradictions to light. The frantic fear of the AIDS crisis, the anger and confusion, combined with the sometimes serene compositions and clean execution within his work. His collages are impeccably neat, carefully cut and pasted perfectly. His photographs are slow-moving, featuring close-ups and scenes that feel silent in their black and white presentation. And yet, they all seek to grab the viewer, hold them captive, and to think on the emotions they feel as a result.
In 2010, his name and work caused new headlines as his film, “A Fire in my Belly” caused controversy while on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery due to a scene featuring ants covering a crucifix. Groups threatened to cut funding to the Smithsonian, prompting the removal of the scene from the film and a new controversy over Wojnarowicz’s sometimes shocking artistic style and the role of “proper art” (i.e. non-political art) and arts funding (the irony here being that Wojnarowicz struggled against these same defunding threats and executions while alive, working to disrupt this practice). This situation, paired with the quote above, in which his right to exist, fully formed in a certain way, was undermined through his art, in a gallery fascinates me. It seems almost prophetic- that the desire to see oneself represented, will at once be achieved, but then dragged down, confirming a sense of hostility in the art world.
The legacy of David Wojnarowicz, the archive of his art, the controversy surrounding him and his art style, the emotion he manages to draw up in an audience all come together in the perfect storm- an artist unafraid to skirt death, anger, sorrow, sex, and humanity through a scream into the world to make people think, consider, and feel.
An exhibit on David Wojnarowicz will be coming to the Whitney Museum in New York City in 2018 (information can be found here). Also feel free to browse more of his work here.
Sources: https://www.visualaids.org/artists/detail/david-wojnarowicz# ; http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/24/arts/david-wojnarowicz-37-artist-in-many-media.html ; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lee-rosenbaum/smithsonian-clough-interview_b_811261.html ; https://paddle8.com/work/david-wojnarowicz/70342-untitled-buffaloes ; http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/DavidWojnarowicz ; and Queer: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by David J. Getsy.
