Blunting the Knives: Disruption and Disintegration in the Life and Art of David Wojnarowicz

Broad Street Humanities Review, III Blunting the Knives: Disruption and Disintegration in the Life and Art of David Wojnarowicz Helena Aeberli Jesus College, Oxford 13th September 2020 1 Broad Street Humanities Review, III Blunting the Knives For David Wojnarowicz Perception’s broken mirror an umbrella of blacked out text against a newsprint of rain. New York at midnight. Windows gash mercury neon across broken boards the colour of premonitory ash. Your body moves under the shapeless garment of the moon. This darkroom mask — half-developed a luminary of silent touch, the dark-side stigma. Bodies find self-shaped craters. Your temple the shaved edge of a spoon the sirens of your skin wail. Manhattan washed with manmade moonlight. Sometimes you leave the city. Sometimes the city leaves you. In the photos your ears and forehead remain a boy’s the double exposure of chemical paint pooled on water. These things which brushes and touches and silver print cannot conceal. The hidden collarbone of moon. 2 Broad Street Humanities Review, III You stencil your own face into others; so this is posterity, the polyphonic self. 3 Broad Street Humanities Review, III Commentary In 1987 the multidisciplinary artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz stands beside the bed of a dying man. The man is Peter Hujar, a photographer and Wojnarowicz’s closest friend, a onetime lover he describes as ‘my brother my father my emotional link to the world.’1 Finally, after ten months of battling against the disease which has slowly reduced his body to little more than cancer and bones, Hujar slips away. Yet Wojnarowicz, who has already lost so many to AIDS, cannot cry. Instead, he takes out his camera and points it at Hujar — at his emaciated face, eyes and mouth cracked open, at his feet, at a hand curled like a bug on the hospital bedspread. The triptych of photos are monochrome, their edges gently softened, yet there is rage in them too, in the deep shadows and the isolation of the corpse. Eventually, Wojnarowicz breaks down. ‘I’m amazed,’ he will later write in his collection of autobiographical essays, ’that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this’ (117). David Wojnarowicz’s life is both disrupted and disruption. As an openly queer, radical artist, his very existence defied the American status quo. Abused as a child, Wojnarowicz found community and acceptance in the New York City of the 1970s and 1980s, a dangerous place which nonetheless provided a vibrant, inclusive community for artists and misfits, and a thriving gay social scene. Yet with the progress of the AIDS epidemic and increasing gentrification of New York, this vibrant acceptance was agonisingly disrupted. After Hujar’s death, Wojnarowicz’s work grew more political and his activism more vocal, his art standing as a testament to a world where love and community are forever hounded into the shadows by prejudice. The two silkscreens of 1990 ‘Untitled (Act Up Diptych)’ reveal the violence lurking under the veneer of American society (Fig. 1). The first is a map of America warped into a red and white shooting-range target, atop green and white numbers. Looking closer reveals stock market data running through the very fabric of the nation. The second is a blurred image of falling male bodies, underlaid with Wojnarowicz’s characteristic prose commentary on AIDS, America, and politics. ‘“If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says the ex-governor of texas’ reads one line. In these artworks, prejudice and capitalist exploitation are shown as endemic to an American society in which minorities are dehumanised, reduced to statistics or pinned to a target. What is most astounding about Wojnarowicz is his capacity for tenderness in the face of trauma such as this. In his essay ‘Being Queer in America’, the writer lays out a tableau of experiences, his own and others. The essay recounts his time as a rent boy fighting to stay alive on the streets, a violent assault ignored by the police, and a graphic account of his violent rape by a stranger. As with much of Wojnarowicz’s writing, it hinges on Hujar’s death from the invisible killer of AIDS — a kind of ‘connect- the-dots version of hell’ when any friend or lover could be next (75). Despite all this pain, at the moment of Hujar’s death ‘we’re sobbing and I’m totally amazed at how quietly he dies how beautiful everything is with us holding him down on the bed on the floor fourteens stories above the earth and the light and wind scattering outside the windows’ (91) Even in the midst of utmost agony and grief there is wonder at this brave world, which can hold so much beauty and so much pain simultaneously — a bit like the body, abstracted into little more than 1 Wojnarowicz, David. Close to The Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Edinburgh : Canongate, 2017), p. 112. Further references to this text will be cited in the body of the essay by page number. 4 Broad Street Humanities Review, III limbs on the bed, the same angle taken by the artist’s camera lens. Run-on-sentences and jagged scene-changes such as these are characteristic of Wojnarowicz’s writing, just as warped perspectives and striking, fluid lines characterise his visual art. Deeply authentic, it’s as if both an intimate internal monologue and the collective voice of a community have been captured on paper. In the essay mentioned above he writes ‘I always tend to mythologize the people, things, landscapes I love, always wanting them to somehow extend forever through time and motion’ (88). This is the impulse of both artist and activist; to create memory, to give voice. It’s an impulse that transcends history and context — consider the impassioned, strikingly beautiful murals and memorials that have appeared across the world in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement in recent months. Love and rage are the dual themes of Wojnarowicz’s writing and art, interwoven so tightly they are inseparable. To be queer in America renders that separation impossible. Each intimate encounter is laced with fear — the looming shadow of a cop car forcing ‘the momentary disengagement from the accelerations where the mind travels in sex…[until] they can resume their rituals and rhythms’ (64). Sex is something holy, rather than something sinful, dirty. In ‘Untitled, 1990-91’, a portrait of the artist as a smiling, all-American child is surrounded — one might say outnumbered — by a rainfall of newsprint-style text which conjures to mind the bars of a prison cell (Fig. 2). ‘One day this kid will get larger’ it explains, before detailing a slew of events that will ‘make existence intolerable for this kid’ simply because, it is revealed, he is about to discover ‘he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy’. The self-portrait flagrantly defies the demonisation of the gay community, showing the people — the grown-up-too-soon children — behind the shrouding veil of stigma. The final line depoliticises gay sex, asking the viewer if all this horror can possibly be justified or if they will act now against it. As Wojnarowicz puts it: “Some of us are born with the cross-hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs or skulls…[the powerful] consistently abstract human life and treat minorities as nothing more than clay pigeons at a skeet-shooting range” (66) Here again is the abstraction of humanity, this time by the violence society perpetuates in both its overt and its covert, dehumanising forms. Recalling the target of ‘Untitled (Act Up Diptych)’, Wojnarowicz’s writing is as visceral as his art. It hurts to read these lines — not just because of the historic pain, but the current pain it evokes, for those with targets still plastered on their backs. Wojnarowicz cared deeply for the plight of all minorities, not just the gay community, championing the value of diversity and inclusion against the oppression of what he called the ‘ONE TRIBE NATION’ (161). In my poem ‘Blunting the Knives’, I sought to memorialise Wojnarowicz. The poem is a modern elegy, not only for the man himself but for the disrupted community he symbolises, and the tender side of queer interactions in pre-gentrification New York, reframed by AIDS and the resurgent conservatism of Ronald Reagan and the Religious Right as purely dangerous and obscene. The poem has a fragmented structure which captures the painful, jarring experience of disruption and disintegration, and to mirror the extended imagery of light fracturing: moonlight streaming through the broken windows of the derelict New York piers, the neon of Times Square a ‘manmade moonlight’ and kind of toxic ‘mercury’, the subtle use of light in an artist’s darkroom. The dark side of the moon is 5 Broad Street Humanities Review, III a running image throughout: it is inaccessible yet undeniable, a constant yet invisible presence like both the ‘dark-side stigma’ of the gay community in 1980s America and the child who seeps through into the adult in ‘One day this kid…’, which I reference at the start of the poem. I play on the semantic connection of dark side / darkroom in the poem, because of Wojnarowicz’s use of photography and to hint at what is revealed — and what is not revealed — by a developed photograph, standing in for art as a whole. Elements can be lost and elements added through ‘the double exposure of chemical paint pooled on water’, revealing ghosts of the past beneath the present.

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