Arts and Design

Alastair Curtis on a David Wojnarowicz exhibition


“I’m carrying this rage inside me like a blood-filled egg.” So said the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz in his memoirs, Close to the Knives. He had reason enough to rage, after an abusive childhood, years of living and working on the New York streets as a teenage hustler, and now AIDS was wiping out his world. Exclusion, suffering and violence: Wojnarowicz’s experience radicalised him. He fantasised about “tipping amazonian blowdarts in ‘infected blood’ and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians”, or loading his dead body into a car and driving it “a hundred miles an hour to Washington” where it would “blast through the gates of the White House” (after his Aids-related death in 1992, his ashes were ceremonially dumped on its front lawn).

The egg cracks and its rage seeps into all of Wojnarowicz’s paintings, photographs and films, on display at Reina Sofia, Madrid. His most shattering work to behold, Untitled (Hujar Dead) (1988-9), was provoked by the Aids-related death of Peter Hujar, his best friend and mentor. Bedside images of Hujar’s open eyes, hands and feet– photographed before his corpse turned cold– are overlapped by words that give form to Wojnarowicz’s rage: “at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame and all I can feel is the pressure… and the need for release”. Anger more often leaves you inarticulate, but words never fail Wojnarowicz. He is an elegant poet of rage.

The forcefulness of Wojnarowicz’s art derives from his sincerity, as well as the simplicity of his style. Falling men, burning houses and armed soldiers repeat in his work, as symbols of the American nightmare Wojnarowicz sought to elucidate. Pumping out the lo-fi music of 3 Teens Kill 4, Wojnarowicz’s band, lends the exhibition a suitably anarchic energy. Similarly, projecting Andreas Sterzing’s photographs of Pier 34 – Wojnarowicz’s derelict, waterfront studio – roots his aesthetic in the gritty style of East Village, where the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jenny Holzer were producing urgent activist art. Like them, Wojnarowicz’s work had a rough-around-the-edges appearance: he was more careful with the clarity of its message than the means of its conveyance.

Reina Sofia have cleaned up Wojnarowicz’s rage. For his Rimbaud in New York series (1978-79), Wojnarowicz took photographs of friends wearing a life-size mask of the vagabond poet as they passed through Times Square, 42nd Street and X-rated cinemas: seamy sites where the teenage Wojnarowicz once turned tricks. The mask captures the alienation he felt walking through a city in which his sexuality made him an outcast. Now the grubby mask is encased in perspex, drained of its diffidence by an institution that Wojnarowicz often railed against because of their censorship of queer art in the 1990s culture wars. But Wojnarowicz’s rage has never sat comfortably in the gallery setting, for its anger often makes people flinch: in 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington pulled Wojnarowicz’s short film, A Fire in the Belly (1986-7) from display, after the short of a crucifix crawling with ants offended Republican Congressmen.

Wojnarowicz’s last works strip back his busy style to uncover ultimate truths. The final room is devoted to Untitled (One Day This Kid) (1990), a photograph of eight-year-old Wojnarowicz. Looming behind his head is screen-printed text dissecting the homophobia he will suffer over a lifetime: physical intimidation, violence, a smash-and-grab on his civil rights by the American government. All this, Wojnarowicz writes, because of his desire “to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy”. The candour and clarity of his reasoning is forceful enough to unpick centuries of prejudice.

In a nearby room hangs another powerful appeal to our empathy, one of Wojnarowicz’s final photographs, What is This Little Guy’s Job in the World (1990). Cradling a baby frog in his hand, he addresses the viewer with a series of questions that test the strength of our ties to the world around us: “If this little guy dies does the world know? Does the world feel this? Will civilisation stumble?” Wojnarowicz’s empathy could be as generous as his anger: watching others in pain was too unbearable (he had a reputation for freeing turtles from pet-shops). Rage is more commonly considered impotent than ethical, but Wojnarowicz’s angry art is extraordinarily moral. It demands that the suffering of innocents stop the world in its tracks.

Wojnarowicz’s work feels timely. He found the words for his fury. He left them for us, too. In our troubled times, they give precedent and permission for anger. Be outraged, stay hopeful– even if hope is difficult, interminable, exhausting work. Like Wojnarowicz, rage because you care.



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