David Wojnarowicz, Americans Can’t Deal with Death, 1990

David Wojnarowicz: All my life I had a hard time doing something simple like painting flowers. It always bugged me.

Narrator: David Wojnarowicz in 1991.

David Wojnarowicz: I always thought that was luxury to sit and paint flowers when there is so much around us going on. But I realized flowers aren’t fifty petals and a stalk but to paint landscape isn’t to just paint an object in a landscape but that object or flower is connected to so many things, so I started using text. I wanted to create something that when you first walk in it would be like a gorgeous flower, but as you got closer, the small photo insets would reveal certain insights, or displace the flower and go much more serious and not luxurious and the text, as you got very close, would speak of all the issues on the world or things I have experienced in my life, what the real world [is] for me, text about war, death, disease, dreams, fragments from notebooks.