ART SEEN: For David Wojnarowicz, the personal was political
Credit to Author: Kevin Griffin| Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2020 19:23:23 +0000
The works of David Wojnarowicz burrow deep into the personal and comes out political. The photographs & videos of Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) before and during the height of the AIDS epidemic that eventually killed him are sometimes literally in your face: the installation has a second-story mezzanine of scaffolding on three walls that forces you up close to works that can be uncomfortable and challenging. This isn’t art that’s cool and cerebral. It’s art that’s often affective and provocative. I found many of the works very moving because of the vulnerability they reveal.
David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), pigmented ink on paper, by Andreas Sterzing. [PNG Merlin Archive]
David Wojnarowicz was a member of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group whose acronym stood for AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. The group’s powerful slogan Silence = Death meant remaining silent in the face of the AIDS epidemic equaled death. Wojnarowicz’s lips being sewn together shows an outside force disfiguring his body to render him unable to speak. The needle points toward him like an accusation. “I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,” Wojnarowicz said. He died July 22, 1992, aged 37.
David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), pigmented ink on paper, by Andreas Sterzing. [PNG Merlin Archive]
Untitled (face in dirt), pigmented ink on paper, by David Wojnarowicz.
In 1991, three years after testing positive for HIV, David Wojnaronicz was in Death Valley with friend and collaborator Marion Scemama. He said he wanted to take a photo based on a dream of his from years before. After they dug into the dirt with their hands, he took off his jean jacket and sweatshirt and laid down in the hole. She covered him except for his face. She took the photo with his body between her legs. It’s a portrait of him in, and framed by, the landscape. He looks like the earth is reclaiming him.
Untitled (Spirituality), gelatin silver print, by David Wojnarowicz.
The unfinished video A Fire In My Belly showed a few seconds of ants crawling on a crucifix among numerous scenes in Mexico such as cock fighting, bull-fighting and Lucho Libre wrestling. The Catholic League took the ant scene out of context and politicized it to such an extent that the video was pulled from a 2010 exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. The print uses the same crucifix. I don’t doubt that Wojnarowicz picked it because he was attracted to Christ’s slim, smooth body. The Catholic protestors probably were too and couldn’t stand it.
Arthur Rimbaud in New York Portfolio, silver gelatin print, 1 of 44, by David Wojnarowicz.
In the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz painted murals on piers on the Hudson River where gay men like him cruised for sex. He also identified with the 19th century poet and sexual outlaw Arthur Rimbaud. He combined the two worlds in a series of 44 photographs of friend Brian Butterick wearing a Rimbaud mask in various New York locations which show the city as decaying, crumbling ruin. The masks are jarring and alienating. They not only puncture the constructed reality of the photograph they also question what Wojnarowicz called the conventions of the “pre-invented world.”
Stills from ITSOFOMO – In The Shadow of Forward Motion, four channel video, by David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill.
You can hear Wojnarowicz describing what it means to be HIV positive in America as images flash by on the four-channel display. Inspired by the ideas of Paul Virilio on war, acceleration and capitalism, ITSOFOMO starts in a dream and then builds to an aural and visual climax. Called one of the most intense works made during the AIDS crisis, it’s almost 30 years old but seems completely contemporary. In the exhibition, the seats are the steps of the stairs to the second-story mezzanine. Speakers are nicely set at about ear level on the railings.
Around Clown, still from video, by David Wojnarowicz and Steve Doughton.
Around Clown looks like the kind of grainy video made with whatever was at hand by artists with no money. A play on ‘around town,’ the camera makes several circular views of the New York skyline from the roof of a tenement as a figure (Wojnarowicz?) in a clown mask awkwardly dances. It’s a light-hearted video much different than everything else in the exhibition. The turning camera captures a couple of views of the Twin Towers, now long gone. So much about the video reinforced for me the passage of time and how different 1987 is from today.
Untitled (One Day, This Kid), screen print on paper, by David Wojnarowicz.
I was leaving the exhibition when I was stopped by Untitled (One Day, This Kid). I didn’t at first recall why and then it donned on me: The sweet looking boy in the centre is eerily similar to photo of me at about the same age with the same kind of expression, shirt, and hair. I could identify with Wojnarowicz the adult living with the shame and pain of his desires. The juxtaposition of text and image opens up a raw, tender space between the memory of life as it was and the reality of life as it is.
David Wojnarowicz: Photography & Film 1978-1992 until Sunday, April 5 at Belkin Art Gallery, University of B.C.