David Wojnarowicz

Untitled (One Day This Kid...)
1990

A black and white image featuring a young boy's face and upper torso with a checkered pattern shirt. The image is overlaid with a dense text in various font sizes discussing a narrative about the boy's future experiences and challenges related to societal reactions to his identity and actions. The text suggests a progression of events that will occur as the boy grows up, with a focus on themes of conflict, struggle, and societal judgment.

The subject pictured in this photo-text collage Untitled (One Day, This Kid) is David Wojnarowicz himself as child, his toothy grin and neat hair and dress evoking an all-American school snapshot from the 1950s. Surrounding this image of prepubescent innocence, however, are texts forecasting the artist’s future as a homosexual who is persecuted by his family, church, school, government, and the legal and medical communities. Among other abuses, he will “be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies” as well as “be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms”—all because, the text concludes, “he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.” With its imperative declarations and use of the future tense, Wojnarowicz’s text demands attention, transforming “this kid” from a specific figure to anyone subject to homophobia. Like many of the artist’s projects, this work insists on a presence and visibility for the gay community of which he was a part, proposing art as not only an instrument of protest but a vehicle for enlightenment.

Not on view

Date
1990

Classification
Prints

Medium
Photostat

Dimensions
Sheet: 29 13/16 × 40 1/8 × 3/16in. (75.7 × 101.9 × 0.5 cm) Image: 28 1/8 × 37 1/2in. (71.4 × 95.3 cm)

Accession number
2002.183

Edition
Ed. 10

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee

Rights and reproductions
© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

API
artworks/16431

Videos

I, YOU, WE: Cynthia Carr on David Wojnarowicz

Audio

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid…), 1990-91

In David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

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David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid…), 1990-91

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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.