Untitled (face in dirt), c. 1990
David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance
artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art
world of the 1980s. The product of an
extremely difficult childhood brought on by an abusive family life and an
emerging sense of his own homosexuality, Wojnarowicz dropped out of high school
and was hustling and living on the streets by the age of sixteen.
Many of Wojnarowicz'
works incorporate outsider experiences drawn from his personal history and from
stories he heard from the people he met. By the late 1970s he had, in his own words, "started
developing ideas of making and preserving an authentic version of history in
the form of images/writings/objects that would contest state-supported forms of
'history.'" He continually returned to the personal voices of
individuals stigmatized by society. Often overlapping text, paint, collaged elements,
and photography, and sometimes organizing them in quadrants or comic strip-like
frames, Wojnarowicz created provocative narratives and historical allegories
dealing with dialectical themes of order and disorder, birth and death.
Untitled, 1988
Untitled (Falling Buffalo).
1988-89
One of his most well
known photographic works is the series "Rimbaud," which is made up of twenty-four
black-and-white photographs of himself and friends holding up a mask of the
poet Arthur Rimbaud in a variety of underground settings in New York City. According
to Wojnarowicz, he was “playing with ideas of compression of ‘historical time
and activity’ and fusing the French poet’s identity with modern New York urban
activities, mostly illegal in nature.” The similarities between Rimbaud's
life and Wojnarowicz's are striking: They lived exactly a century apart and
both died in their late 30s; each came from a broken home with abusive parents;
both fled to the big city--Rimbaud to Paris, Wojnarowicz to New York; both were
gay, and each found a surrogate father in the form of an older lover--Paul
Verlaine for Rimbaud, Peter Hujar for Wojnarowicz. In addition to his work as
an artist--which has become more widely recognized over the years--Wojnarowicz
was a political activist in the midst of the AIDS crisis, the disease that
would eventually take his life.
“Arthur Rimbaud in New York” (Duchamp, Pier), 1978-79
Untitled, from the series
Rimbaud in New York, 1977-79
Untitled (Peter Hujar), 1989
In the late 1980s, after
he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz' art took on a sharply political edge,
and soon he was entangled in highly public debates about medical research and
funding, morality and censorship in the arts, and the legal rights of artists. In another series of
photographs, Wojnarowicz photographed the artist Peter Hujar moments after he
died of complications from AIDS. These works contain multiple layers of
meaning--stark witness to the death of a lover, elegiac homage to a significant
artist, unflinching rage in the face of another AIDS death.
Wojnarowicz died of
AIDS-related illness in New York City in 1992, at the age of 37. He is the
author of five books. His artwork is in numerous private and public collections
including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of
American Art.
"Bottom Line, if people don't say what they believe, those ideas and feelings get lost. If they are lost often enough, those ideas and feelings never return."
Untitled from Ant Series (Spirituality), 1988-89
Untitled (One day this kid…), 1990
No comments:
Post a Comment