David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night
July 13–Sept 30, 2018
Gallery 5
5
In the mid-1980s Wojnarowicz began to incorporate his disparate signs and symbols into complex paintings. A fierce critic of a society he saw degrading the environment and ostracizing the outsider, Wojnarowicz made compositions that were dense with markers of industrial and colonized life. These include railroad tracks and highways, sprawling cities and factory buildings, maps and currency, nuclear power diagrams and crumbling monuments. Interspersed among them are symbols that he connected to fragility, such as blood cells, animals and insects, and the natural world. Wojnarowicz used these depictions as metaphors for a culture that devalues the lives of those on the periphery of mainstream culture. He made these paintings at a time when AIDS was ravaging New York, particularly the gay community. Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, President Ronald Reagan did not mention it publicly until 1985. By the end of that year, in New York alone there already had been 3,766 AIDS-related deaths.
Installation view of Gallery 5
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