David Wojnarowicz, Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987

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?