David Wojnarowicz, Wind (For Peter Hujar), 1987

Narrator: Like Earth, which is also on view in this gallery, Wind (For Peter Hujar) is one of the Four Elements paintings that Wojnarowicz painted in 1987.

David Wojnarowicz: This is Wind, this is painted for my friend Peter Hujar who died later that year. Again, I was thinking of all the associations of wind. At the time that I did these four paintings, I just would exhaustively list hundreds of associations with each element, and then pair those associations down into a small set of them and then create the painting from that.  This is more about an evolution; the bird wing is painted on a large photograph of an airline, an airplane control panel. If you were to get close to it you’d see the dials and the gauges underneath that wing. It’s also, it’s copy of a Dürer etching or watercolor of a bird wing and it was [the] wing that my friend who was dying had always wanted tattooed on his shoulder, but never got around to doing it. I was also thinking about birth and death, and that window came from a dream I had had about an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in a year in the late 70s. It involved a nightmare that was very beautiful but it actually became nightmarish towards the end of the dream. I wrote him a letter and I asked him how he was, and it turned out his baby had been stillborn the same day that I had a dream. So, the baby has an umbilical cord that goes through the window, seeing the window is a symbol of death. Then it goes to these two army men jumping out of an airplane. I was thinking of what birth is: moving through portals interior to exterior. There are associations of birth and death.