David Wojnarowicz

Das Reingold: New York Schism

1987

Two vibrant red-orange abstract faces float over a blue seascape with small sperm-like shapes.

Not on view

Date
1987

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Acrylic and collaged paper on board

Dimensions
Overall: 48 1/4 × 72 × 1 3/4 in. (122.6 × 182.9 × 4.4 cm)

Accession number
2024.250

Credit line
Gift from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection

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

API
artworks/37980

Audio

David Wojnarowicz, Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987

In David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

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David Wojnarowicz, Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987

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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?

Exhibitions

Installation photography

Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: The Birth of Language II, 1986; Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

From the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987; Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, 1986; Dung Beetles II: Camouflage Leads Us Into Destruction, 1986; Peter Hujar, David Lighting Up, 1985; Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II), 1981; Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, 1981; Mexican Crucifix, 1987; Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: Saint Sebastian, 1982; I Use Maps Because I Don’t Know How to Paint, 1984; The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A., 1986. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

From the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: The Newspaper as National Voodoo: A Brief History of the U.S.A., 1986; History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz), 1986; The Death of American Spirituality, 1987; Queer Basher/Icarus Falling, 1986; Unfinished Film (A Fire in My Belly), 1986-87; Unfinished Film (Mexico, etc… Peter, etc…), 1987; Unfinished Film (with sequence in memory of Peter Hujar), c. 1987; Unfinished Film (Mexico Film Footage II), c. 1988; A Worker, 1986; The Birth of Language II, 1986; Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987; Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water, 1986. Photograph by Ron Amstutz

From the exhibition David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night