David Wojnarowicz
1954–1992

Nan Goldin: David also speaks about this destruction of communities by the Far Right, by the Government, with AIDS also pertained to IV drug users and homeless people and lesbian community. He doesn't just talk about gay white men which is really important. And he was on that then. It wasn't like something he had to learn over the years.

David Breslin: Wojnarowicz reserved his angriest criticism for conservative politicians who stigmatized people living with HIV and blocked measures—medical and educational—to prevent its spread. When the NEA learned of the essay, they withdrew support for the exhibition. After much debate the funding was partially restored, as long as none of it was used for the catalog. Wojnarowicz agreed to remove some expletives describing Senator Jesse Helms and Cardinal John O’Connor. But he was furious at the censorship—and at Artists Space for accepting NEA money at all. He refused to go to the opening, saying “I don’t feel that civil or constitutional rights are a worthy trade for money.”

Narrator: Like Earth, which is also on view in this gallery, Wind (For Peter Hujar) is one of the Four Elements paintings that Wojnarowicz painted in 1987.

David Wojnarowicz: This is Wind, this is painted for my friend Peter Hujar who died later that year. Again, I was thinking of all the associations of wind. At the time that I did these four paintings, I just would exhaustively list hundreds of associations with each element, and then pair those associations down into a small set of them and then create the painting from that.  This is more about an evolution; the bird wing is painted on a large photograph of an airline, an airplane control panel. If you were to get close to it you’d see the dials and the gauges underneath that wing. It’s also, it’s copy of a Dürer etching or watercolor of a bird wing and it was [the] wing that my friend who was dying had always wanted tattooed on his shoulder, but never got around to doing it. I was also thinking about birth and death, and that window came from a dream I had had about an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in a year in the late 70s. It involved a nightmare that was very beautiful but it actually became nightmarish towards the end of the dream. I wrote him a letter and I asked him how he was, and it turned out his baby had been stillborn the same day that I had a dream. So, the baby has an umbilical cord that goes through the window, seeing the window is a symbol of death. Then it goes to these two army men jumping out of an airplane. I was thinking of what birth is: moving through portals interior to exterior. There are associations of birth and death.

David Breslin: In this exhibition, we decided to show Wojnarowicz's work in film as a series of his unfinished films that he made from 1986 through 1987. Wojnarowicz used film as a sketchbook. 

Narrator: David Breslin.

David Breslin: A Fire in My Belly is an unfinished work, called a work in progress, that he made between 1986 and 1987. This is footage that he shot while in Mexico City. He went there to document activities around Day of the Dead, and it was also right after a major earthquake that had happened in Mexico. 

Narrator: In one scene, Wojnarowicz films fire ants walking over a sculpted image of Christ. In 2010, this scene became controversial when it appeared in an exhibition called Hide/Seek: Difference in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery. The Catholic League, along with Representatives John Boehner and Eric Cantor, protested the imagery. 

Marvin Taylor: David was actually deeply religious, but people think that he hated the church—which is true. But he was raised Catholic and I see a lot of Catholicism in his work. 

Marvin Taylor: Ants are pretty cruel, pretty awful to one another. And they have a very rigid hierarchical structure. And I think that what he's motioning toward, is almost a military approach to the world. And the ants crawling over the Christ are not taking care of the body. It's the juxtaposition of suffering and humanity with a militarized culture. I think that's what that particular use of the ants is about.

Narrator: Fire in My Belly was never finished, and the remaining footage is silent. At the National Portrait Gallery, it was given a soundtrack drawn from a later recording of Wojnarowicz at an ACT UP rally, protesting the government’s reaction to AIDS. The video on view in Hide/Seek was thus quite different from what Wojnarowicz might have intended. In the face of protests, the museum removed this video from the exhibition a few weeks after its opening. 

Emily Roysdon: I was thinking a lot about how there has not been, for many years, an established queer cannon.

I was very interested in this question of identification and this kind of being able to cite and reference, and call to your idols, mentor, hero—any word that you wanna call that.

So I made David’s face and I kind of occupied that spot for a while. And similarly asked my friends. 

There were other people in my community who were willing to think about genderqueer politics. To think about what was our contemporary feminism. How we were aligning with AIDS activist artists and the intersectional movements around that. Those were my interests with the project. I was really thinking about what it means that an infamously diseased gay man is actually one of my primary identifications.

I've never imagined that, that David is my friend or would even wanna be my friend (laughs), in that way. I've never meant to speak for him, just to show respect and to align myself with him and to pull forward his legacy—to enliven his legacy.

Narrator: Welcome to David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night. The exhibition begins with a self-portrait by the artist.

David Breslin: Half his face is made up of maps, there is this tattoo of a globe on his arm, clocks streaming up his forearm, this running man that he used in some of his early stencils. 

Narrator: David Breslin is the DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection, and one of the curators of this exhibition. 

David Breslin: We thought this would be a great way to begin the show because this is both an exhibition that explores how he made art, but also how he performed himself through the art.

Narrator: When you’re ready, take a look around the first gallery of the exhibition. 

David Wojnarowicz: I never really see myself as a photographer, I don't see myself as a filmmaker, I don't see myself as an artist, yet I know I'm an artist. 

Narrator: The artist, speaking in 1988. 

David Wojnarowicz: I know that I'm compelled to make things. It's a compulsion to make things and make sense of my life. It makes me feel relieved about the experience of living, of the experience of the world, of the experience of all this pre-invented shit. 

Narrator: Wojnarowicz was born in 1954. His early home life was unstable. He escaped to New York, living on the streets and supporting himself briefly as a sex worker. A short stint in an arts high school made a big impact on him. But his art flowed from many sources. He was influenced by books and travel, and by intense friendships with East Village artists. He had a radical queer outlook on the world, and a powerful sense of right and wrong. By the end of the 1980s, like many others in New York’s gay community, Wojnarowicz was living with HIV. He became a vocal AIDS activist, channeling his furious mix of ethics and aesthetics into one of the most difficult crises of our time. 

Peter Hujar: It's like, photography is still a baby.

Narrator: Peter Hujar.

Peter Hujar: It's a new thing, and it's something that anyone can do and anyone can do fairly well; especially, with all the automatic cameras. Anyone can take a picture and any picture is interesting. Say, I've never seen an uninteresting photograph.

David Wojnarowicz: But yet, there's ... for me, there's a sense of ... For me, your work is photography to me, it's not─it doesn't have to hide under a claim of being art or being all these other things. It's not like Postmodern stuff where it looks like commercials without the texts in front of it─in terms of what product it’s advertising. Your images don't seem to try to persuade people or lead them into an area outside of whatever it is that you're photographing. It's like, it just deals with things ... generally, you deal with things in your life, and these are what you photograph. And it's not like trying to distort something through a photographic medium. It's more like trying to arrive at some kind of personal truth in that thing. And that's how I see your photographs, and I don't see that many people doing that.

Narrator: To make this painting, Wojnarowicz took his photographs of Peter Hujar on his deathbed, and overlaid them with screen-printed text. The text calls out systemic homophobia, as well as government complicity in the AIDS epidemic.

Emily Roysdon: This was, for me, from my life experience, a crucial image to see.

Narrator: Artist Emily Roysdon describes the impact of this painting.

Emily Roysdon: It was this profound intimacy mixed with rage. It was an emotional bond and a political moment.

The thing with David's work to me was always that—I think people like to talk about the rage that is in his work and, and that he expressed himself in those very terms, but for me there, there was always this kind of hope that was also coupled with that. Just because of the depth of his articulation. Because he was so analytic, so forceful about another vision that he had for what life could be, what America could be, and what he kind of would demand of a loving, tolerant, reasonable, radical society. Because he could be so explicit about that, there was this kind of hopefulness also that was important to me.

Narrator: In 1991, Wojnarowicz made a recording of the text screened over this painting. To hear him read it, please tap to continue.

David Breslin: Toward the end of Wojnarowicz's life, he made a number of works that combined image and text.

Narrator: David Breslin.

David Breslin: And this work, One Day This Kid..., from 1990 to 1991, is a work that combines a text that really talks about this kid, and this kid, in particular here, being David Wojnarowicz as a child.

And the text that's surrounding him is really about the phases he or any other queer kid might face growing up. The really tough things that he's going to go through. The reason why we feel like this is such an important work, and also such a key work to end the exhibition with, is, I find it to be really a work about both survival, and also a kind of triumph.

Narrator: David Wojnarowicz died of an AIDS-related illness on July 22, 1992. He was thirty-seven years old.

David Breslin: One of the most kind of important things when putting this exhibition together was a friend who was reading an initial text and was talking─I wrote something about David Wojnarowicz's quote-unquote untimely death, and this friend said, "Why do you have to say untimely? He did so much during his life that, yes, we wish that things had happened differently, that drugs had been made and been distributed at a quicker pace, but in some ways, a lot of those what-ifs and wishes can really take away from everything that certain people, including Wojnarowicz, were able to do in the time that they were alive and were making work."

And to end this exhibition with this note of the power of making artwork, the power of having a voice, the power to make a change, was something that was really crucial to us.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today.

More work by David Wojnarowicz will be on view at New York University’s Fales Archive in an exhibition organized in conjunction with this one called The Unflinching Eye: The Symbols of David Wojnarowicz.

Narrator: Here, Wojnarowicz has photographed his own hand, holding a tiny frog. David Kiehl speaks about the image.

David Kiehl: And he's looking at this little frog and he's going, "What's this little guy's job in the world?" I think that's David, talking to us, and talking about himself, saying, "What is our real job in this world? What are we doing? What are you doing as a human being? What are you giving back to the whole, all of humanity? To the world? To the natural world? To your social world? What is your job in this world?"

And I think that is, to me, the parting shot of David. He's asking us to sit there, to think about what are we really doing here? What have we done for the guy sitting next to you on the subway, the old man or old woman crossing the street? What have you done? What have you done about the fox in the woods? What have you done?

And I think this is David─to me, it's the most profound statement of David. It sums him up for me.

David Wojnarowicz: All my life I had a hard time doing something simple like painting flowers. It always bugged me.

Narrator: David Wojnarowicz in 1991.

David Wojnarowicz: I always thought that was luxury to sit and paint flowers when there is so much around us going on. But I realized flowers aren’t fifty petals and a stalk but to paint landscape isn’t to just paint an object in a landscape but that object or flower is connected to so many things, so I started using text. I wanted to create something that when you first walk in it would be like a gorgeous flower, but as you got closer, the small photo insets would reveal certain insights, or displace the flower and go much more serious and not luxurious and the text, as you got very close, would speak of all the issues on the world or things I have experienced in my life, what the real world [is] for me, text about war, death, disease, dreams, fragments from notebooks.

Terry Gross: Now you're saying that he took one component of a larger mixed media collage work.

David Wojnarowicz: Right.

Terry Gross: And blew that up and presented that as being representative of your work. You've been working with mixed media images for a long time. Tell us a little bit about why you work in that form.

David Wojnarowicz: I guess emotionally and intellectually, it's the only way that I can represent what my experience in the world is. I do a lot of things. I write. I make videos, films, performances, paintings, photographs, et cetera. But the mixed media is, in terms of the paintings and some of the photographs, is just about the only way that I can approximate what it feels like to live in America at this point and time, given that when we walk out in the street, we're so heavily bombarded with visual information, whether it's store signs, newspaper covers, magazine covers, advertising, et cetera, that I like to use a variety of media that somehow approximates what it's like to walk down a street or to move through a space in contemporary America.

Terry Gross: Artist David Wojnarowicz. We contacted the office of Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association. He declined to comment or be interviewed. This is Fresh Air.

Narrator: A federal judge ruled in Wojnarowicz’s favor and ordered Wildmon’s organization to send a corrective mailing to everyone who received the original, explaining the misrepresentation.

The interview you’ve been listening to was broadcast on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, which is produced at WHYY, Philadelphia, and distributed by National Public Radio.

Terry Gross: David Wojnarowicz is an artist at the center of the controversy over government funding of the arts.

Narrator: Terry Gross interviewed Wojnarowicz in this interview on June 26, 1990. They discussed his fight against religious conservatives who targeted his work.

Terry Gross: He was represented in last year's group show, Witnesses Against Our Vanishing, Art About AIDS. The exhibition was at Artists Space in New York. The National Endowment for the Arts withdrew its funding from the show, then reinstated it, but with the stipulation that no endowment money be used to fund the catalogue. The reason was the catalogue essay, written by Wojnarowicz, which attacked prominent political and religious figures. Earlier this year, Wojnarowicz had a retrospective exhibition at the Illinois State University galleries in Normal, funded in part by the NEA.

Reverend Donald Wildmon in spearheading the attack against the reauthorization of the NEA. One of his recent mass mailings was headlined: Your tax dollars helped pay for these, quote, works of art. Below are sexually explicit images taken from Wojnarowicz's multimedia works. This week, Wojnarowicz took Wildmon to court for violating his copyright and distorting his work by taking it out of context. The judge issued a temporary injunction against the pamphlet. A full decision is expected in a month. Wojnarowicz described how Wildmon used his art.

David Wojnarowicz: What he did was, he excised from the images, small fragments that dealt with sexual activity or depicted sexual activity that were in a political and artistic context, stripped the context from around the image and then presented that image as the full work, put my name on it. And he did this to fourteen images, three of which were not sexual in nature, and sent them around the country.

What he did was essentially reduce my work by stripping out all the artistic and political context that I place images in, and he basically left the very strong impression that my work consists of solely nothing more than a banal pornography.

Narrator: If you’d like to hear more of the conversation between Gross and Wojnarowicz, please tap to continue.

David Wojnarowicz: This is called Bad Moon Rising and it was in response to being diagnosed. There’s a little house in the upper left-hand corner that blows up in the lower right-hand corner, it’s a house on an atomic testing range. There’s also two images of sexuality: one that’s being put into negative like there’s things like radioactivity, disease, stuff like that. There’s a clock that slowly rises, becoming a blood cell.

David Breslin: In the background are fake dollar bills that he made, like the maps that he includes in a lot of his paintings.

Narrator: David Breslin.

David Breslin: Currency was something Wojnarowicz used because it was something that everyone knows, but it was also something that really is a symbol and a shorthand for many complex, both economic and human, relations. On top of these dollar bills, he's painted a nude figure with no feet, no head, with hands bound behind him.

And this is the way that Saint Sebastian has been traditionally configured. Sebastian who was a Christian martyr, very early Christian martyr, is typically rendered as one who's been pierced by arrows and left to die. This was a very important image for Wojnarowicz.

This was a symbol not only of desire, but also the idea of this figure who would care so much about his ideal and mission that he would die for it.

Narrator: Printed in negative, images such as a tornado, cityscape, and train, are punctuated with circular insets containing cropped details, including pornographic imagery. This material was taken from Hujar’s porn collection, which he had discarded after his diagnosis, and Wojnarowicz saved. Reframed in this network of symbols, it becomes an affirmation of eroticism and intimacy as a vital form of human connection.
 
David Breslin: Wojnarowicz showed a selection of these works in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, an exhibition that the artist Nan Goldin curated at Artists Space in Lower Manhattan.
 
Nan Goldin: I had just gotten out of the hospital. I was living near the hospital outside Boston.
 
I thought that I had been kind of isolated from my community and I thought I was going back to my community. And then I realized most of the people were dead or dying. So, when they asked me to curate a show, they didn't tell me what it should be about or any kind of frame for it. But, there were a lot of shows about AIDS. And that maybe mine would not be so important because there had already been a lot. And there hadn't been any! It still shocks me to think that.
 
So I asked all my friends to contribute something because I wanted it to be a community.
 
David Breslin: Goldin asked Wojnarowicz to write one of the catalog essays, which became the center of a controversy about NEA funding. If you’d like to hear about it, please tap to continue.

David Wojnarowicz: “If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare, I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS,” says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can’t even afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what this official looked like because I reached in through the TV screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country. “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says the governor of Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for re-elections anyways. And I wake up every morning, and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America. And I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside, a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping Amazonian blow darks in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs. There’s a thin line, a very thin line between the inside and outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on people’s lips; the religious types outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral shouting to men and women in the gay parade “You won’t be here next year─you’ll get AIDS and die. Ha ha.” And the areas of the USA where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free. And the difficulties that a bunch of Republican Senators have in Albany with supporting an anti-violence bill that includes ‘sexual orientation’ as a category of crime victims. There’s a thin line, a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure, ten pounds of rage, and I focus that rage into non-violent resistance, but the focus is starting to slip, the focus is starting to slip. My hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack. America. America. America seems to understand and accept murder as a self-defense against those who would murder other people and its been murder on a daily basis for eight, nine, ten count them eight long years and we’re only expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder, but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and healthcare officials that had better get bigger dogs and higher fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment, at the moment I’m a thirty-seven foot tall, one thousand and one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot body and all I can feel is the pressure, all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

David Kiehl: In November of 1987, David Wojnarowicz was at the hospital with Peter. He was there a lot.

Narrator: David Kiehl.

David Kiehl: Seeing that it was almost the end, they were in the room, and when Peter died, David had a camera with him. He asked everyone to leave the room so he could spend time with this person who was like the most important person to him, because of being a teacher, a mentor, a model.

Narrator: Wojnarowicz focused on Hujar’s face, hands, and feet.

David Kiehl: So these are the three parts of the body that are the most, really about─the head, where the eyes are, the memory is, the brain. The hands, which are the things that touch you and feel you. And the feet, that anchor you to the world. These are very important things in remembering the dead who have meant a lot to you. How do you keep that memory alive?

Narrator: In the paintings you see in this room, Wojnarowicz responded to a classical art-historical theme, the Four Elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. He began them after Peter Hujar tested positive for HIV in early 1987. He described the series in a talk he gave at the Whitney in 1991.

David Wojnarowicz: I wanted to do a series about the Four Elements. I was also dealing with the loss of a very close friend who was dying of AIDS at the time, and I was feeling a lot of pressure because I felt very sure I was going to receive a diagnosis at some near future point. So I basically wanted to put all the pressure in my head, everything I knew about the world into a series of four paintings, basically do them, in effect, before I died, or at least that’s what I was afraid of having happen to me.

Anyway, this is Earth─there’s references to the kachinas, the early Hopi spiritualities. There’s the little grey image towards the top of a cowboy riding a bull. It’s very difficult to see. I was thinking of things that move the earth around, so there’s an ant in the upper left-hand area and then there’s a bulldozer in the lower right-hand area. I was thinking of things like architecture and ideas of architecture, intuitive ideas of architecture, so there a rib cage and then there’s a bridge, I’m thinking of the similarities between the two.

Narrator: In late 1988, Wojnarowicz was—as he had anticipated—diagnosed as having HIV.

Narrator: A monkey in a threadbare red suit strides across the canvas. Based on a similar monkey that Wojnarowicz filmed collecting coins at a circus in Mexico, he seems entirely too human in his purposeful but downtrodden stance. If this monkey has evolved from a natural to a civilized state, it has not been to his benefit.

David Breslin: He was really trying to think hard about what are the relationships between the natural world and the made world.

Narrator: David Breslin.

David Breslin: And this was very interesting to him because he didn't necessarily want to forget about the mark that humankind had made on the planet, but he wanted us not to forget that a lot of those marks were marks that were damaging.

Narrator: Two giant heads—similar to the sculptures on view earlier in this exhibition—loom over a cityscape. Looking through them to the background, you’ll see the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges over the East River.

David Breslin: And then you start looking closer at the work, you see on the upper right hand corner, a train moving through.

Narrator: David Breslin.

David Breslin: Trains were something that figured a lot in Wojnarowicz's work, this idea of travel. How ideas and civilizations and disease are kind of spread and brought into different places.

And then you see in the back right corner these sleeping figures composed of maps and this almost peaceful sleep that one could see as a moment of quiet repose, but, it's almost like Goya's sleeping monsters. That all these things that one thinks and hopes about, optimistically, also could be the things that come back as a nightmare to haunt you.

This painting was done when the AIDS crisis was really hitting New York City, and one idea that we think is motivating this work is this idea of the two worlds, the schism, between what happens in everyday life. You get up, you take that train or car over one of those bridges, you go to work. But then what are all the things underneath the surface that are happening in our bodies? Between each of us, in our relationships?

Narrator: The reclining figure in this painting is the photographer Peter Hujar. Wojnarowicz took a picture of him lying on the floor, and turned it into a stencil that he used over and over again in his paintings.

Marvin Taylor: David met Peter I believe in 1981 at a gay bar on Second Avenue. And he was influenced by the work.

Narrator: Marvin Taylor is Head of Special Collections and Fales Library at New York University, which houses the David Wojnarowicz papers.  

Marvin Taylor: Their relationship, their sexual relationship didn't last very long actually, but Peter became David's mentor, and encouraged David to really work on visual work as opposed to writing. And gave him the courage to do that.

Narrator: Wojnarowicz’s image is a kind of tribute to Hujar, who often took pictures of people in repose. One of those photographs, picturing Wojnarowicz himself, hangs in this room. Frequently, Wojnarowicz would make audio recordings as a form of journal. One of them includes a conversation with Hujar. Even in a brief excerpt, you can hear how much he respected the older artist’s work. To hear them talk about photography, please tap to continue.

Narrator: Wojnarowicz made these heads in 1984.  

David Kiehl: Are they robotic? Possibly. Are they Frankenstein—someone suggested Frankenstein? If you look at their eyes, they have those little plug-in eyes. Like, they are not real humans.

Narrator: David Kiehl is Curator Emeritus at the Whitney, and one of the curators of this exhibition.

David Kiehl: You'll notice all the torn up maps. The bits of litter, or things that he used, and tearing up maps was important for him because─he's starting to think of a world without boundaries, how boundaries limit ourselves as human beings.

They're painted weirdly. Some of them are gagged. They are colorful and, at the same point, they're scary. And I think how we have displayed them in the gallery, it's sort of like they're coming at you.

As you go through the galleries, you'll see this head appearing over and over again.

They are all about the way civilization has impersonalized the natural world, the natural person─It's why we have city-states and national states and war and all of that. It's these heads. They're part of it.

Is that the whole meaning behind them? That's just one of the many meanings.

Narrator: In this room, you can hear music by Wojnarowicz’s band, 3 Teens Kill 4. In a 1991 talk at the Whitney, he described the connection between his music and his visual art.

David Wojnarowicz: In the early 80s I started making a series of stencils, with spray paint. I was working with a rock and roll band called 3 Teens Kill 4. And we were playing in small clubs around the Lower East Side and I would do posters for the band. I cut stencils [and] spray painted through the stencils dates for the band, and where we were playing, and [I would] stick them on walls around the Lower East Side. And rival bands would rip them down. [There was] a lot of fighting in the music scene. So, I started spraying them directly on walls of abandoned buildings.

Narrator: For each of these photographs, Wojnarowicz took a picture of one of his friends wearing a photocopied mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. The face on the mask is flat, and printed with very high contrast. In the photographs, it looks almost like a stencil—a tool Wojnarowicz would later use in graffiti, and then in his paintings. Cool and crude at the same time, the face seems both to stand out from the gritty New York City locations where the men pose, and to fit into them. This sense of simultaneous belonging and not belonging is appropriate for Wojnarowicz’s subject. The most famous line of Rimbaud’s poetry translates as “I is another.” Using deliberately ambiguous grammar, it is a statement of ownership over one’s feeling of displacement, a form of resistance to the ordinary. The nineteenth-century poet’s attitude of absolute rebellion appealed to Wojnarowicz enormously, as did his open homosexuality.

In the years leading up to these photographs, Wojnarowicz focused largely on poetry. In some sense, Rimbaud’s image gave him a point of entry into the visual arts. Wojnarowicz—who has been extremely important to a younger generation—played a similar role for artist Emily Roysdon.

Emily Roysdon: In no uncertain terms, David Wojnarowicz was the first artist that made me think that I could also be an artist.

Narrator: Roysdon made David Wojnarowicz in New York in an act of homage. Just like Wojnarowicz had photographed friends wearing a mask of Rimbaud, she took pictures of friends wearing a mask of Wojnarowicz.

Please tap to continue.

Narrator: A human hand roughly grasps a monkey, whose limbs flail and eyes bulge in alarm. Sperm swims about, their forms cut from maps and collaged onto the composition’s surface. There’s a clock without hands, and a solitary gear with no mechanism to lock into. The manufactured, or, as the artist called it, “the pre-invented world,” is not to be trusted. 

David Wojnarowicz called this work Fear of Monkeys/Evolution. When he made it, the AIDS crisis had already ravaged New York’s art community. He received his own diagnosis that same year. This composition responds to the crisis both with its furious intensity and with its symbolic imagery. The monkey points both to  the possible origin of the HIV virus. The motionless clock hints at mortality. The sperm shapes suggest both desire and contagion. 

The year after making this composition, Wojnarowicz explained the impulse behind his work: “My paintings are my own written versions of history, which I don’t look at as being linear. I don’t obey the time elements of history or space and distance or whatever; I fuse them all together. For me, it gives me strength to make things, it gives me strength to offer proof of my existence in this form. I think anybody who is impoverished in any way, whether physically or psychically, tends to want to build rather than destroy.”

Cynthia Carr: My name is Cynthia Carr. I wrote a biography of David Wojnarowicz called Fire in the Belly.

David did not really identify as a visual artist. He was a writer. And then when he met Peter Hujar, it was Hujar who said, “you have to become a visual artist.” Peter truly was a great photographer, specializing in portraits. He and David were lovers for maybe a month, but they began to form a different kind of relationship, where they were like family to each other. They were like kindred souls. By, I’d say, ’87, the AIDS crisis was starting to get worse and worse. Peter died on Thanksgiving of that year. And David was with him. Moments after Peter died, he took pictures of his face, and his hands, his feet. You see his love for Peter. That’s Peter’s foot. It’s important. And he’s going to record it, because Peter’s going to disappear now. 

Julie Ault: My name is Julie Ault, and we’re here during installation. 

My contribution to the Biennial is a kind of a hybrid artistic/curatorial/editorial/archiving project. I don’t produce the objects that you see here. I bring them together and select and combine things that will articulate a set of issues and themes and relationships. So David Wojnarowicz and Martin Wong are the starting points of the installation.

Narrator: Ault has installed two works by these artists, both of whom died in the AIDS crisis. There’s a large painting by Wong showing a locked storefront on the Lower East Side. A Wojnarowicz photograph shows ants crawling on clocks and Mexican coins. Both works come from the Whitney’s collection. 

Julie Ault: There’s a sense in both of these of closure and decay. 

I wanted to bring together with those works some of the artifacts and traces of everyday life from these artists. Both of these artists are no longer living. So in the case of David Wojnarowicz there’s this wonderful object called Magic Box, which is a box of lots of different items that David saved, and is a private endeavor. He didn’t share it with people, it was something that we understand that he kept under his bed, and within that box there are over eighty items and probably a lot more. But there’s charms, there’s amulets, there’s figures, cartoon figures, small jewels, beads, photographs, notes, all kinds of material, and a lot of it relates to the iconography that Wojnarowicz used in his work. 

And of course I am in some way―particularly with making a point of borrowing something like David’s magic box, which was a very personal object, and then putting it in a very public space of the Whitney Biennial―I’m making a point about the effectiveness, say, of highlighting the personal, and the personal process in relation to broadcasting an artist’s work. 

Narrator: As you look around, you’ll see other threads running through Ault’s installation, which is intuitively rather than didactically organized. She explores diaries, archives, and other material histories, both public and private.