David Wojnarwicz, Untitled, from the Metamorphosis series, 1984

Narrator: Wojnarowicz made these heads in 1984.  

David Kiehl: Are they robotic? Possibly. Are they Frankenstein—someone suggested Frankenstein? If you look at their eyes, they have those little plug-in eyes. Like, they are not real humans.

Narrator: David Kiehl is Curator Emeritus at the Whitney, and one of the curators of this exhibition.

David Kiehl: You'll notice all the torn up maps. The bits of litter, or things that he used, and tearing up maps was important for him because─he's starting to think of a world without boundaries, how boundaries limit ourselves as human beings.

They're painted weirdly. Some of them are gagged. They are colorful and, at the same point, they're scary. And I think how we have displayed them in the gallery, it's sort of like they're coming at you.

As you go through the galleries, you'll see this head appearing over and over again.

They are all about the way civilization has impersonalized the natural world, the natural person─It's why we have city-states and national states and war and all of that. It's these heads. They're part of it.

Is that the whole meaning behind them? That's just one of the many meanings.