Arthur Rimbaud in New York
1978, printed 1990

Audio

• David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79 [group]

  In David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

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  David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79 [group]

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  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.

• David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79 [group]

  In David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

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  David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978–79 [group]

  0:00

  Play Transcript

  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.
  
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