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.
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz), 1986
David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz), 1986. Acrylic, spray paint, and collaged paper on composition board, 72 x 84 in. (170.2 x 200 cm). Collection of John P. Axelrod. Photograph by Ron Cowie
In History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz) Wojnarowicz presents a dystopic vision of American life. Presenting simulated American currency and bureaucratic emblems alongside symbols of crime, monstrosity, and chaos, the painting’s threatening imagery runs counter to the apparently placid sleep of the man below. If the painting is about fear, perhaps the fear of staring down AIDS, Wojnarowicz presents it as an endemic condition in which new fears are built upon historical ones.