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), Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987
David Wojnarowicz, Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987. Acrylic and collaged paper on board, 48 1/4 × 72 × 1 3/4 in. (122.6 × 182.9 × 4.4 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau P.2010.284. Image © The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, photograph by Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
A nightmarish allegory of violence and capitalism, Das Reingold: New York Schism makes reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (1854), in which the holder of a magical ring will gain the power to rule the world should he renounce love. This narrative assumed particular power at a moment when artists were joining the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies and government mismanagement of the AIDS crisis.