University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

Date:__June 5, 2007______

I, Jennifer Lynn Hardin______, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Masters of Arts in: Art History It is entitled: “ A Season in Hell”: David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York Series (1978-79)

This work and its defense approved by:

Chair: Dr.Kimberly Paice______Dr. Michael Carrasco______Dr. Mikiko Hirayama______

“A Season in Hell”: David Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud In New York Series (1978-79)

A thesis submitted to the Art History Faculty of the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning University of Cincinnati In candidacy for the degree of Masters of Arts in Art History

Jennifer Hardin June 2007

Advisor: Dr. Kimberly Paice

Abstract

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was an interdisciplinary artist who rejected traditional scholarship and was suspicious of institutions.

Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series (1978-79) is his earliest complete body of work. In the series a friend wears the visage of the French symbolist poet. My discussion of the photographs involves how they convey Wojnarowicz’s notion of the city. In chapter one I discuss Rimbaud’s conception of the modern city and how

Wojnarowicz evokes the figure of the flâneur in establishing a link with nineteenth century Paris. In the final chapters I address the issue of the control of the city and an individual’s right to the city. In chapter two I draw a connection between the renovations of

Paris by Baron George Eugène Haussman and the gentrification

Wojnarowicz witnessed of the Lower East side. Finally, in chapter three I analyze the role that graffiti plays in the series.

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the members of the Art

History faculty of the College of Design, Architecture, Art and

Planning at the University of Cincinnati whom I have had the pleasure of working with. I also must thank the Library staff that aided me in procuring research materials and taught me how to make better use of the Library.

I am indebted to my committee members, most importantly Dr.

Kimberly Paice my thesis advisor who always made herself available to me despite her heavy work load. She tirelessly edited my chapters and provided encouragement. I want to thank Dr. Michael Carrasco who rearranged his schedule to serve on my committee and Dr. Mikiko

Hirayama who filled in at the last minute despite an already busy schedule. I am eternally grateful for their insightful and constructive criticism.

Table of Contents

Introduction:...... 1

Chapter 1: Identity, Desire, and Decay in David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series 1978-79...... 9

Chapter 2: The Right to the City...... 19

Chapter 3: Commodification of Subcultural Production...... 45

Conclusion...... 50

Bibliography...... 55

Illustrations...... 59

List of Illustrations

1. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Cooney Island), ca. 1978-79. From a series of twenty-four gelatin-silver prints, 10x8” each. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York.

2. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Meat Packing District), ca.1978-79.

3. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Times Square), ca. 1978-79.

4. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Western Highway), ca. 1978-79

5. Rosa Von Praunheim in Collaboration with Phil Zwickler. Still from Silence= Death, 1990. Video Cassette, 60 min.

6. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Peep Show), ca. 1978-79

7. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Sex Pier), ca. 1978- 79.

8. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Photo Strip), ca. 1978-79.

9. Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon, ca. 1957-1974.

10. Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957.

11. Madeleine de Scudéry, La Carte de Tendre, ca. 1654. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

12. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [One day this kid…], ca.1990. Gelatin- silver print, 30x40”. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York, New York.

13. David Wojnarowicz, Flyer for 3 Teens Kill 4, ca. 1982.

14. David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar Dreaming/ Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, ca. 1982. Acrylic and spray paint on masonite, 48x48”.

15. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [Trash Can Lids], ca. 1982-83. Spray paint on trash can lids, 18” diameter each. Collections of Antonia Smith Robinson, New York: Nemo Labrizzi, New York; and Jean Foos and Dirk Rowntree, New York

16. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Hudson River Piers), ca. 1978-79

17. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Mural), ca. 1978- 79.

18. David Wojnarowicz with the Pterodactyl pier painting, ca. 1983. Photo: Marion Scemarna.

19. David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [Sirloin Steaks], ca. 1983. Acrylic on poster, 47”x32 ½”. Collection of Hal Bramm, New York.

20. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Subway Flatbush Ave), ca. 1978-79.

21. David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp), ca. 1978- 79.

22. David Wojnarowicz, Crash: The Birth of Language/ The Invention of Lies, ca. 1986. Acrylic on masonite, 72x96”. Collection of Adam Clayton, Dublin.

23. David Wojnarowicz, What is This Little Guy’s Job in the World, 1990. Gelatin-silver print, 13 1/2x19”

The Inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Introduction

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) could be considered the archetypal bohemian artist of the 1970s. He settled in New York’s East Village in the late 1970s when the area was predominately slums and vacant lots, before it emerged as a trendy “art scene.” He came to be closely associated with the underground, a community where the criminal world collided with the art world. Wojnarowicz questioned the function of social institutions and traditional historical narratives, and said,

“History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternative history.” 1

Wojnarowicz never claimed that he was a photographer. He said, “I don’t know how to operate a camera on anything other than automatic.”2

However, he became a photographer. My thesis concerns his earliest complete body of work, Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-79, a series of twenty-four black and white photographs in which a friend of the artist wears a mask with the visage of French Poet Arthur Rimbaud

(1854-1891). My study will be the first in-depth analysis of the

Rimbaud in New York series. It will also establish a connection between Wojnarowicz’s works, his life and writings, and his association with the city.

The image that Wojnarowicz used to make the mask was borrowed from a photograph by Parisian photographer Étienne Carjat (1828-1906)

1Lucy R. Lippard et al. David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape (New York, NY: Aperture Foundation Inc., 1994), 9. 2 Lucy R. Lippard et al.,1994, 16.

taken in December 1871. Wojnarowicz photographed the masked Rimbaud figure in various public and semi-private locations around New York

City. The individual images merge together to form a larger narrative about the nature of the city. The mask not only contributes to the layering aesthetic in the photographs but it also serves to flatten the space, thus evoking the idea of film stills depicting a solitary individual drifting through the city. The Rimbaud figure does not interact with the other individuals within the photographs, and he appears strikingly desolate within the urban setting.

The photographs serve as a metaphor for urban decay. There is a photograph of the masked Rimbaud figure that documents the disintegration of the Hudson River Piers and one of Rimbaud riding a graffiti- marked subway car bound for Flatbush Avenue. Photographs from the series show the Rimbaud figure engaging in illegal activities: Rimbaud as a hustler in Times Square, Rimbaud shooting-up in a dilapidated warehouse, or Rimbaud engaging in graffiti. The pictures reflect the feeling of alienation that one associates with living in the city.

Wojnarowicz felt an affinity with the French poet Rimbaud because he also lived on the street at one point in his life. Like

Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud has also been described as an outlaw. This is only one identity that informs the myth that surrounds Rimbaud. He is the criminal who reportedly stabbed Carjat and seduced a married Paul

Verlaine, he is a drug addict, a visionary tortured by illness, and an artist who abandoned writing at the age of twenty and spent his final days in Abyssenia; all of these identifications appealed to

Wojnarowicz’s sensibility. His photographs reflect how Wojnarowicz

conceptualized the city. They evoke the underground, the criminal, and the ruins of the city as seen through the eyes of the solitary figure.

Wojnarowicz received no formal art training beyond high school.

He dropped out of school at age sixteen. His Rimbaud in New York series is therefore, based mostly on his experience of living on the street in New York during his teen years. His knowledge of art, however, comes from his extensive self-study of the works of writers

Jean Gênet (1910-1986) and William S. Burroughs (1914-1997), and artists with whom he associated in the East Village. Wojnarowicz was strongly opposed to traditional scholarship and he was interested in what I consider “minor literature” as Gilles Deleuze and Pierre- Félix

Guattari defined it. “Major” literature repeats the methods of representation of the past and is concerned with depicting a national identity. “Minor” literature is defined by its difference from traditional methods of representation. It is rather an assemblage that breaks away from an image of a universal subject. It does not subjugate itself to fit neatly into a hypothetical identity. It is concerned with an individual conception of identity.3 I will explain in this study how the Rimbaud in New York series exemplifies a kind of

“minor literature.” It represents individuals that are outside of more generalized histories, such as the homeless, intravenous drug users, prostitutes, homosexuals, and teenage runaways.

Most of the discussion of Wojnarowicz’s work involves his association with AIDS activism. A well-known event in Wojnarowicz’s life was his court battle with Reverend Donald Wildmon and the

3 Constantin v. Boundas. The Deleuze Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), 145.

American Family Association, in the course of which Wojnarowicz claimed that his work had been copied and distorted. He argued successfully that Wildmon had misrepresented his Sex Series (1988-89) when Wildmon put it on the flyer “Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for

These Works of Art” in 1990, as an example of obscenity supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. An image from the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series also appeared on this flyer. The court ultimately ruled in Wojnarowicz’s favor, and he received a dollar in damages from the American Family Association.4

Wojnarowicz had his first success at the Civilian Warfare

Gallery, a gallery that opened in a storefront on East 11th street in

New York City. Besides having his work shown in several well-known

East Village galleries, Wojnarowicz’s work was also shown in the

Whitney Biennial in 1985, and there was a retrospective of his work at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1999, curated by Dan

Cameron.

Review of the Literature

A few of Wojnarowicz’s photographs from his Arthur Rimbaud in New

York series first appeared in an issue of Soho Weekly News on June 18,

1980 and were accompanied by text written by the artist himself. In much of the scholarship written about Wojnarowicz’s work, the Rimbaud in New York series receives scant or no attention. For example

4 Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books, 2002), 257.

although the exhibition catalogue Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz5 was put out by the New Museum of Contemporary Art to accompany his

1999 retrospective, it only briefly mentions the series. The book

Rimbaud in New York 1978-796 is the most comprehensive presentation of the photographs from the series; however, there is very little discussion of the series.

The Aperture Foundation published the book David Wojnarowicz:

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape in 19947; it includes an interview between Nan Goldin and Wojnarowicz, as well as essays by artists such as Karen Finley and Kiki Smith. The most notable essay in the book for my investigation is Lucy R. Lippard’s “Passenger on the Shadows.”

Lippard conducts an extensive study of Wojnarowicz’s work utilizing his own writing. She discusses elements of Wojnarowicz’s work that are often overlooked, for example, its similarities with the work of Dan

Graham and of Robert Smithson, in its concern with the industrial landscape and with architectural decay.

His photographs are directly connected to his writings, which tend to be more literary than critical. Some of his writings have been published such as Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration

(1991)8 and Memories that Smell Like Gasoline (1992)9 that provides

5 Dan Cameron, Mysoon Rizk, and John Carlin. Fever: The Art of DavidWojnarowicz (New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999). 6 Andrew Roth. Rimbaud in New York 1978-79 (New Haven, CT: PPP Editions, 2004). 7 David Wojnarowicz. David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the SocialLandscape (New York, NY: Aperture, 1994). 8 David Wojnarowicz. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Random House Inc., 1991). 9 David Wojnarowicz. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (Hong Kong: Artspace Books, 1992).

cartoon/ comic narrative of his memories. In the Shadow of the

American Dream (1999)10 is another collection of his diaries, and it was published posthumously, edited by Amy Scholder. His memoirs express sensational experiences of the city, his rejection of institutions, rage, and disillusionment with life in US-America.

East Village USA11 is an exhibition catalogue by Dan Cameron for the 2004 show. Therein, the performance artist Penny Arcade describes

Wojnarowicz’s association with the underground art community, and how it differed a great deal from the official “art scene.” Wojnarowicz was deeply involved in the punk scene and was in the noise band “3

Teens Kill 4.” It is important, therefore to consider the history of punk in the Lower East Side in order to understand his views of the city, because he was intimately involved with that music and art scene. Carrie Jaures Noland’s essay, “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance” (1995)12 is significant because she describes the influence of Rimbaud’s work on the development of Punk.

Organization of the Study

In the first chapter of the study I will discuss Arthur Rimbaud’s conception of the modern city and how Wojnarowicz used the figure of the flâneur as a means of establishing a link with nineteenth-century

Paris. I will examine Rimbaud’s ideas about the role of the poet and

10 David Wojnarowicz. In the Shadow of the American Dream. (New York: Grove Press,1999). 11 Dan Cameron. East Village USA (New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004). 12 Carrie Jaures Noland. “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995): 581-610.

how they apply to Wojnarowicz’s own concerns. I will also look at the role of the mask in Rimbaud in New York and how the series deals with the establishment of identity. The masked figure does not just represent Rimbaud or Wojnarowicz but also the anonymous city dweller; therefore, I will explore how the photographs are concerned with constructing histories.

In the second chapter of the study I address the issue of the control of the city as well as the individual’s right to the city. By drawing a connection between the renovation of Paris by Baron Georges-

Eugène Haussmann in the 1860s and the gentrification of the Lower East

Side from 1979 to 1984, one witnesses how working class citizens were forced out of the city due to Bourgeois imperialism in both histories.

I also address how Wojnarowicz relied on Rimbaud, a revolutionary figure, living during the Paris Commune of 1871, to express his desire for ordinary citizens to reclaim their place in the heart of city. By using Guy Debord’s concept of the “reversible connecting factor” as discussed by Greil Marcus, I establish a link between Rimbaud,

Wojnarowicz, Punk, and the Situationist understanding of the city.

In the third chapter I analyze the role that graffiti plays in

Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York and the influence that South

East Bronx hip-hop culture had on the series. I will also look at how

Wojnarowicz uses language to address the reclamation of public space.

In conclusion, I will claim that Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New

York series concerns the heterogeneity of discourses that are defined by Gilles Deleuze as “major” and “minor.” I also discuss how the series relates to the artist’s multi-layered understanding of New York

City- a city characterized by great wealth, but one that is also

marked by decay and the death of those claimed by AIDS, including

Wojnarowicz himself.

Chapter 1: Identity, Desire, and Decay In David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud In New York series 1978-79

You reach a moment in life when, among the people that you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms for each one it finds the most suitable mask.” -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities13

David Wojnarowicz wrote about his Arthur Rimbaud in New York series in an unpublished artist’s statement for the show, “David

Wojnarowicz: In the Garden” (1990) at the PPOW Gallery in New York

City:

I didn’t see myself as Rimbaud but rather used him as a device to confront my own desires, experiences, biography and to try and touch on those elusive “sites of attraction;” those places that suddenly and unexpectedly revive the smell and traces of former states of body and mind long ago left behind.14

The photographs that make up Arthur Rimbaud in New York explore personal desires; however, instead of depicting his own relationship with the city, Wojnarowicz relies on the phantasmic appearance of the nineteenth century French poet, Rimbaud. Photographs of the masked

Rimbaud figure offers a glimpse of what Wojnarowicz considered an unauthorized history of the city, told by the faceless city dweller.

The Rimbaud figure is shown wandering around Coney Island (fig.1). He is always alone and stands apart from the crowd. He passes through the

Meat Packing District (fig. 2), appears in Times Square (fig.3), and strolls underneath the western highway (fig.4).

13 Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities (New York, NY: A Harvest BookHarcourt, Inc., 1974), 95. 14 Deborah Bright ed., The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 179.

The Rimbaud figure provides a narrative for Wojnarowicz’s own experience of marginality and his connection to specific sites in the city. The Rimbaud figure examines what Wojnarowicz considers “sites of attraction,” but he also appears at sites of vandalism, sites depicting the failure of capitalism, sites documenting twentieth- century ruin and decay, and sites that have been abandoned only to be overrun by nature.15

The works in Arthur Rimbaud in New York deal with concepts of identity, history, death, and decay, all defined within the framework of the city. Rimbaud plays a decisive role in Wojnarowicz’s series. In order to forge together Wojnarowicz’s association with Rimbaud, one needs first to examine the poet’s own conception of the modern city as evinced in his poetry. I will look at what Rimbaud believed to be the role of the poet and how it applies to Wojnarowicz’s own understanding of his identity as an artist. I will examine the significance of the mask as a means of establishing identity in a society that has been inundated with images. I will also discuss Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz’s ideas concerning traditional representations of history.

Rimbaud’s Modern City and the Flâneur

Rimbaud wrote in his poem simply titled “City” from his work

Illuminations (1872-1874):

I am a transient, and not altogether unhappy, citizen of a metropolis considered modern, given every conceivable standard of taste has been avoided, in both interior decoration and exterior architecture, and even in the plan of the city itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find the barest trace of a monument to superstition here. Morality and Language have finally been refined to their purest forms! These millions of people who have

15 Bright, 193.

no need to know one another conduct their educations, professions, and retirements with such similarity as to suppose that the length of their lives must be several times shorter than statistics would indicate for continentals […]16

Rimbaud’s discussed the city portrays a glimpse of the modern city or the technological city of industry. Although the origin of modernity can be debated, one explanation is that it began with Charles

Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert, and the failure of the 1848

Revolution in Paris. Walter Benjamin regarded Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century.17 Paris plays a central role in Benjamin’s discussion of the city. Benjamin believed that through the examination of the wanderings of its crowd and the situation of its architecture one could come to understand modernity.18

In the continuation of the poem, “City,” Rimbaud presents a view of the modern city-dweller as an individual lost in the industrial landscape or ghosts in the fog as he writes, “[…] from my window, I see new ghosts rolling through unwaveringly thick coal-smoke-our dark woods, our summer night!”19 Rimbaud’s poetry addresses the citizens of the modern city and their feelings of alienation. An important figure that emerged from the Parisian streets during the nineteenth century that embodied this feeling of detachment was the flâneur.

Benjamin presents the flâneur as a figure that offers resistance to the modern condition yet is still born out of the modern condition.

16 Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete (New York, NY: Modern Library, 2003), 241. 17 The title of Benjamin’s book, Illuminations, comes from Rimbaud’s poem. 18 Neil Leach ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in cultural theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 24. 19 Rimbaud, 241.

The flâneur wonders with the crowd yet is set apart from the crowd.20

The flâneur is commonly associated with Baudelaire’s vision of the city and is not necessarily a subject whose literary invention is attributed to Rimbaud; however, it seems that Wojnarowicz has taken up the mantle of Baudelaire in Arthur Rimbaud in New York in order to present a view of how a solitary figure experiences the city.

For Wojnarowicz, the Rimbaud figure wonders with the other denizens of the city but is also isolated from his surrounding, and his gaze addresses the viewer directly. The individuals captured in the photographs are more likely to interact with the camera than with the masked figure. This creates a vision of Rimbaud as either a ghostly apparition haunting the city or simply another faceless resident of the city. The idea of aimless wondering and the invisible or anonymous city-dweller evoke illusions from Rimbaud’s poem “Bad

Blood” (1873):

On the roads, through winter nights, without a home, without habits, without bread, a voice strangled my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: Those are your options, so strength it is. You know neither where you’re going, nor why you’re going entering anywhere answering anyone. You’re no more likely to be killed than a corpse.” By morning, I had developed such a lost, dead expression that those I met may not have even seen me.21

Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud-figure is portrayed much like the flâneur and

Rimbaud himself: “A poetic observer having forgotten his place in the city, in the world, now looks at the city which escapes him and talks about the escape.”22 This notion of the urban dweller is similar to

Benjamin’s understanding of the flâneur as a marginal figure in

20 Leach, 26. 21 Rimbaud, 198. 22 Marc Eli Blachard, In Search of the City: Engels, Baudelaire, Rimbaud (Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri & Co., 1985), 135.

society who serves as a journalist or detective, through which the writer, or in this case, artist’s association with the city is compiled.23

The Role of the Poet, Masks and Identity

The flâneur is closely associated with the poet. Rimbaud wrote a letter to George Izambard on 13 May 1871, explaining his desire to be a poet and what he believed to be the role of the poet:

I want to be a poet, and I’m working to turn myself into a seer: You won’t understand at all, and it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to explain it to you. It has to do with making your way towards the unknown by a derangement of all the senses. The suffering is tremendous, but one must bear up against it, to be born a poet, and I know that’s what I am. It’s not my fault.24

The poet can also be perceived as a sovereign or creator of things.25

Rimbaud’s view concerning the role of the poet presents him a type of seer one that can throw off the “lying cultural mask.”26 The poet relies on the mask to maintain their anonymity through which they can make their assumptions about the current state of society. The mask involves the establishment of identity. The work of Rimbaud and

Wojnarowicz is also strongly informed by their status as an outsider.

The concept of identity is difficult to discuss in relation to Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz because they are artists who are shrouded in myth, and scholars have discussed these figures depending on their own personal agenda. Henry Miller has described the discourse on Rimbaud:

23 Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (California: University of California Press, 1994), 81. 24 Rimbaud 365. 25 Tester, 3. 26 Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corp.,1956),134.

When they want to castigate him as the adventurer they speak of what a great poet he was; when they want to subjugate him as a poet they speak of his chaos and rebelliousness. They are aghast when the poet imitates their plunderers and exploiters, and they are horrified when he shows no concern for money, or for the monotonous, irksome life of the ordinary citizen.27

The myth surrounding Rimbaud as well as his belief that one has to suffer in order to be a poet readily transfers to myths around

Wojnarowicz.

Wojnarowicz was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987. His work and identity is often defined by his status as a gay man living with AIDS and his individual identity is ignored or disappears. In Wojnarowicz’s work Untitled (1992) he writes,

“Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form. I am a Xerox of my former self…I am disappearing but not fast enough.”

This statement may refer to the deterioration of the physical body of a person living with AIDS but also presents the idea of the Xerox as it relates to Jean Baudrillard’s idea of the Simulacrum. According to

Baudrillard, “Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.”28 Rimbaud in New York attempts to copy the real, the mask is a copy of the portrait taken of

Rimbaud, the masked figure is animated and attempted to evoke the real

27 Henry Miller. The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (New York, NY: New Direction Publishing, 1956), 27. 28 Vincent B. Leitch, The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 1732.

historical figure in the photographs.29 The idea of a copy without original relates to the nature of the commodity. Walter Benjamin was concerned with the “historical nature” of commodity space and developed the idea of the “dialectical image.” The concept of the

“dialectical image” is described as:

[…] a prosthetic assemblage of mimesis, montage, and monad, aimed at extending our perception of the world of capitalism that is otherwise impossible to grasp in its expansive diffusion and mythic progress.30

The “dialectical image” corresponds to Wojnarowicz’s “cut-up” technique or collage aesthetic, which as Dianne Chisholm writes aims,

“[…] to subvert mass media’s dominated space.”31

Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz are enigmatic figures in the sense that

Rimbaud rejected art at a very young age choosing instead to travel and work while Wojnarowicz’s art became increasingly political with his involvement in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.) Most notable is the image of Wojnarowicz from the sixty-minute film

Silence=Death, 1990 (fig.5) in which he sewed his mouth shut as a means of representing how he is deprived a personal history. Both

Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz rejected generalized accounts of history.

Constructing Histories

Félix Guattari writes:

[…] creative work stems from his whole life and it is from there that it has acquired such an amazing power. It could even be said that it is through his plastic work and literary texts that he

29 Allison Young, Juding the Image: Art, Value, Law (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), 92. 30 Dianne Chisholm. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005), 34. 31 Chisholm, 59.

has turned himself into what he is today. The authenticity of his work on the imaginary plane is quite exceptional. His "method" consists in using his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he tape-records or writes down systematically in order to forge himself a language and a cartography enabling him at all times to reconstruct his own existence. It is from here that the extraordinary vigor of his work lies. David Wojnarowicz’s intention is explicitly ideological: his aim is to affect the world at large; he attempts to create imaginary weapons to resist established powers.32

Wojnarowicz’s creative work was suspect of traditional accounts of history. To him Rimbaud in New York was a way of actively constructing a personal history as a defense against a variety of methods of silencing. He created his own network of links between time and space similar to what Rimbaud did in his writing.33

Rimbaud rejected the formal limits of classical poetry. He strived to depart from the various social usages of language and attempted to develop a language that is “unmarked by historicity.”34

Rimbaud was interested in the formation of a universal language, and the exploration beyond words and concepts, Marc Eli Blachard writes:

Rimbaud’s poetry offers the challenge of a truly independent existence guaranteed by a perception beyond the limits of reference, analogy, and difference. The reader is invited to confront reality in its indistinction: as being at once the totality and the part, the image and the support giving reference.35

In Rimbaud in New York the transplant of the masked historical figure to another time, place, and milieu disrupts traditional notions of time, space, and historicity. The photographs exemplify Michel

32 Queer Cultural Center. 1993. David Wojnarowicz. Online. http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/DavidW/DW_index.html. accessed 16 April 2007. 33 Bright 180. 34 Carrie Jaures Noland.“Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995): 603. 35 Blachard 138.

Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias.” Foucault has described these

“different” or “other” spaces, which Foucault has described as “[…] a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live […]”36 The idea of “heterotopias” was later adopted by scholars in their discussion of “queer space” or rather the

“spatialization of (the history) of sexuality.”37

The photographs in Rimbaud in New York depict sites of attraction and address the desirous life of the city dweller, from the Rimbaud figure’s appearance at a peepshow in Times Square (fig. 6) to faceless sexual encounters on the West Side Piers (fig. 7). These sites are presented as counter sites that exist within the culture. Foucault discusses the significance of such places in his description of the role of the Bathhouse:

The Bath was a sort of Cathedral of pleasure at the heart of the city, where people could go as often as they want, where they walked about, picked each other up, met each together, took their pleasure, ate, drank, discussed.38

This discussion of ancient Rome also applies to the role of the gay

Bathhouse or other “queer spaces” that provide an alternative history that differs from the discourse concerning institutionalized space in modernity.

36 Michel Foucault. 1967. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. On-line. Available from internet, http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en. html, accessed 24 February 2007. 37 Chisholm, 26. The discussion of “queer spaces” draws heavily from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality. 38 Neil Leach ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in cultural theory (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 375.

In conclusion, Rimbaud in New York is concerned with issues such as identity, desire, and decay but it also depicts Wojnarowicz’s attempt to present an urban history. In the photographs he relies on previously established figures like the flâneur as a means of providing a narrative for the city dweller. At the same time he examines the role of the poet/artist who is not necessarily part of the culture they observe. The mask is a suitable implement for the artist. The artist is able more openly to express his or her own thoughts and desires when they use the visage of someone else with whom they have developed a kinship. Wojnarowicz relies on this idea in

Rimbaud in New York. Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz are both individuals whose identity is shrouded in myth and speculation, and they both serve as archetypes for the Bohemian artist. Both Rimbaud and

Wojnarowicz were interested in disrupting the idea of “major” discourse, preferring instead to draw on the individual experience of the outcast and unconventional city dweller. The two share a conception of the modern city and they both acknowledge the role that consumerism plays in the shaping of the city. The attempt at understanding how history is created, shall now lead me to analyze the production of space. The history of urban space is one of regimented space, corporate power, and ultimately dominated space. In the next chapter I will discuss the control of the city as well as an individual’s right to the city.

Chapter 2: The Right to the City

[…] one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities39

Tom Rauffenbart, the manager of David Wojnarowicz’s estate recalls how their mutual friend40 used to quote “[…] they lived lives without architecture.”41 Rauffenbart suggests that this statement describes Wojnarowicz. The artist lived in an apartment that did not have a real bed; he rejected domestication, and resisted the controlling social relations associated with architecture and institutions. His series Arthur Rimbaud In New York (1978-79) addresses these issues through the issue of control of the city, propriety, and accessibility.

The initial images in Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York are a strip of wallet-sized snapshots (fig. 8) similar to popular photographs taken in photo booths at an amusement park or various other public locales. What this style of photograph also evokes is the standard issued photo of a passport or an FBI mug shot. This raises questions about the Rimbaud figure’s status as an inhabitant of New

York City. He could be perceived as a traveler who exists legally, presenting Henri Lefebvre’s version of city as “[…] an object of cultural consumption for tourists, for estheticism, avid for

39 Calvino, 12. 40 Rauffenbart only states that her first name is Anita. 41 Andrew Roth, np.

spectacles and the picturesque.”42 In accordance with Lefebvre’s understanding of the city the photos maybe seen as marketable souvenirs. Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud figure could also represent a vagabond who lives outside of society and is neither subject to its laws nor a recipient of its protection. The rebellious character of an outlaw appealed to Wojnarowicz, he was interested in situations that exist in opposition to the controlling factors of the city. In the conclusion of his book, Close to the Knives: A memoir of

Disintegration, he writes, “Meat. Blood. War. We rise to greet the state to confront the state.”43

In this chapter I will build on Wojnarowicz’s critique of the state and discuss the control of the city and the individual’s right to the city. I will examine the gentrification that Wojnarowicz witnessed of the Lower East side in the 1980s and how it alienated residents from the city they inhabited. Again, it is important to mention Rimbaud and the Paris Commune of 1871 and how the communards reclaimed their right to the city after they were forced to relocate to outer regions. I will also analyze the Situationists’ conception of the city and examine the idea of abstract space both in Rimbaud in New

York and in examples from psychogeography, specifically the “Carte de

Tendre” (1654) and Guy Debord’s “Naked City” (1957).

42 NOT BORED! 14 September 2006. Henry Lefebvre’s Writings on Citiesand the Right to the Cities. Online. http://www.notbored.org/writings-on- cities.html,accessed 24 February 2007. n.p. 43 David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York, NY: Random House, Inc., 1991), 276.

La Commune de Paris 1871 and the Gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side

Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz both witnessed restructuring of their cities. Rimbaud was in Paris during the Commune of 1871, although both liberal and conservative scholars have embellished his involvement or lack of involvement in the Commune. Graham Robb describes Rimbaud as being part of a:

Nationwide epidemic, one of tens of thousands of boys who had run away from home and were now thought to constitute a separate class: a vast tribe of vagabonds who lived among respectable people like ‘wild animals’ and who for a cigar a glass of brandy, would set fire to all of Paris.44

The rebellious acts performed by the communards would have appealed to

Wojnarowicz, who wrote in his memoir Close to the Knives,

We’re suppose to quietly and politically make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our slow murder and I am amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets.45

Wojnarowicz discovered the creative radicalism that existed in Rimbaud in New York after he revaluated the work shortly before his death:

In the last few months in shifting through my heightening sense of mortality and calendars of my past, I went into some old cartons and looked at this series. I found many of the negatives damaged or missing indicating that at some point I felt the body of the work was unsuccessful or that it embarrassed me in its naiveté. But I was also attracted to the “youth” in the series; the rock n roll do or die abandon of that period.46

The photographs express his feelings of nostalgia for a Paris of the past and by using Rimbaud he aligns this revolutionary figure with

44 Graham Robb. Rimbaud: A Biography (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001),78. 45 David Wojnarowicz. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Random House Inc., 1991): 108. 46 Deborah Bright ed., The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998), 179.

what he considered the tribal eighties. In fact, Wojnarowicz coined the phrase “tribal eighties” and he wrote about the United States as a tribal nation, stating, “We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and in that illusion of a one tribe nation there are real tribes.”47 Yet, Wojnarowicz at the same time rejected the idea of a singular national identity. He emphasized the view throughout his career that there are many diverse tribes within this idea of “the one-tribe nation.” His phrase also corresponds to the formulation of his surrogate family or tribe in the Lower East

Side where Wojnarowicz lived before it was dubbed “the East Village,” when it was still just a place that the art community would visit, before retreating to their more bourgeois neighborhoods, and before it became a center for the art market.

The East Village was considered a center for traditional and emerging forms of cultural production and inhabited by a diverse group of individuals. Sarah Schulman states that Wojnarowicz’s community

“[…] was destroyed by AIDS, gentrification, and marketing. Now the

East Village is primarily a center of consumption for the wealthy.”48

The mismanagement of the AIDS epidemic and the marketing of Bohemian subculture that served to bolster local real estate markets contributed to the fall of the East Village. The gentrification of the

Lower East Side forced the working class individuals out of the city and transformed a place that was revered as a heterogeneous space into a homogenous site for bourgeois consumption.

47 Holert, Tom, “Blood of the Poets: the Tribal ‘80s,” ArtforumInternational, v.41, n.7 (2003): 235. 48 Dianne Chisholm. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005), 198.

This kind of reorganization is similar to the social reorganization of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann who built boulevards throughout the city to prevent the building of barricades and to promote the circulation of troops. The building of the boulevards also broke up old craft districts.49 Rimbaud wrote about the association between art and commerce in the emerging arcades:

The magic Columns of these places Show to the amateur on all sides, In the objects their porticos display, That industry is the rival of the arts. For sale the bodies, the voices, the tremendous unquestionable wealth, what will never be sold.50

Rimbaud wrote that “industry is the rival of the arts.” This is a statement that is also relevant to what Wojnarowicz witnessed in the

East Village.

Haussmann was responsible for removing the workers from the center of the city to its northeast peripheries. This was one of the actions taken in his attempt to “modernize” Paris and make it more accessible to the bourgeois consumer, at the same time alienating the proletariat from their city. During the Paris Commune workers moved back into the center of Paris representing their desire to reclaim the pubic space from which they had been expelled. Walter Benjamin wrote about the erection of the barricades in the streets, saying that for the “[…] flâneur, the city is metamorphosed into an interior, for the

49 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127. 50 Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 31.

communards the reverse is true, the interior becomes the street.”51 The commune broke the division between interior/ exterior spaces. The communards were more interested in transforming urban space and not with the appropriation of economic wealth. This is exemplified by their failure to attack the Bank of France.52

According to the Situationists:

The Commune represents the only realization of revolutionary urbanism to date- attacking on the spot the petrified signs of the dominant organizations or life, understanding social space in political terms, refusing to accept the innocence of any monument.53

The Paris Commune’s Federation of Artists chaired by painter Gustave

Courbet demolished the Vendôme Column; this radical artistic gesture is significant because the structure served as a monument to

Napoleonic imperialism.54

During the Commune, history was not something that was revealed to individuals after the fact; rather, ordinary citizens became self- governing and became involved in the process of history’s realization.55 The construction of their own history was not related to governmental politics but to their everyday life.56 The Communard

Elisée Reclus discussed his idea of “social geography,” which presented “history in space” and addressed the idea that space is a

51 Kristin Ross. “Rimbaud and the Transformation of Social Space.” Yale French Studies, no.73 (1987): 112. 52 Ross, 112. 53 Simon Sadler. The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 122. 54 Sadler, 99. 55 Ross, 116. 56 Sadler, 45.

social product57 and is fundamental in any exercise of power. Reclus was likewise important to the Situationists and to their notion that traditional urbanism regulated the body and the mind. The

Situationists were a small group of international artists and political agitators active in Europe in the 1960s who desired to mmake major social and political changes. They used such revolutionary methods as dérive58, detournnement, situations, and “unitary urbanism.”

Guy Debord promoted the concept of “Unitary Urbanism” which aimed to create a “unitary human milieu” that acknowledged no boundaries and dissolved such separations as public/private.59

Rimbaud’s Influence on Punk, Wojnarowicz’s “3 Teens Kill 4,” and the Situationists’ Conception of the City

Greil Marcus uses Guy Debord’s concept of the “reversible connecting factor” in his book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. Reviewers commented on his original method for establishing connections. Andrew Ross described it as “a situation constructed on the ruins of scholarship.”60 Marcus writes that the

“reversible connecting factor” is:

[…] the idea that the empty repetitions of modern life, or work and spectacle, could be detourned into the creation of

57 Thomas F. McDonough. “Situationist Space.” October, vol. 67 (1994): 65. 58 Dérive is an aimless walk through city streets. The idea was used by Guy Debord who encouraged people to explore their environment, step out of their daily routine, and resist the controlling aspect of the Cities’ basic design. 59 Sadler, 25. 60 Andrew Ross. “The Rock ‘n’ Roll Ghost.” October, v.50 (Autumn, 1989), 114.

situations, into abstract forms that could be infused with unlimited content.61

Using Marcus’s understanding of the “reversible connecting factor” one could establish link between a group of seemingly unrelated topics.

Rimbaud is connected to Wojnarowicz or Wojnarowicz is connected to the

Situationists, the Situationists with the Punk movement or Punk with

Rimbaud or Wojnarowicz. These connections can be made in the sense that they all relied on a revolutionary usage of language.

Wojnarowicz’s language is a language of disintegration, which does not necessarily refer to something that is falling apart but to a process of extricating something from an integrated system. Rimbaud relied on decontextualization and the rejection of the social function of language and the Situationists and the Lettrist International were interested in the notion of détournement, a technique of adaptation and plagiarism.

Punk musicians also relied on the idea of appropriation, in terms of their aesthetic influences. The Beat poets, Bob Dylan and Punk musicians, namely Patti Smith,62 assimilated Rimbaud into their work and his understanding, as Marcus expresses that, “the beautiful, the poetic, and the call to murder” are “all of a piece.”63 Punk music is often associated with the development of political movements that are linked to the working class. This is appropriate because there is a division between the high-culture discourse of poetry and a progressive rock style. Rimbaud, Punk, and Wojnarowicz are all linked

61 Marcus, 238. 62 Patti Smith’s 1978 album Easter is strongly influenced by Rimbaud. 63 Carrie Jaures Noland. “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance.” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995): 582.

by their anti-aesthetic practices and because they all were concerned with turning language into noise.64

Apart from being an artist, writer, and filmmaker, Wojnarowicz was also a member of the noise band “3 Teens Kill 4” who wanted their performance to include words, music, and visuals and relied on the appropriation of songs that are entrenched in popular culture. The title of the band was taken from a headline in the New York Post reading “3 Teens Kill 4-No Motive,” No Motive was the title of their first album. The band members included Julie Hair, Jesse Hutberg, Doug

Bressler, Brian Butterick (aka Hattie Hathaway,) along with

Wojnarowicz. Jesse Hutberg describes the band’s cover of “Tell Me

Something Good” in an interview stating:

There was a single at first, a cover version of "Tell Me Something Good," which was a Stevie Wonder song. Oh no, it was a Rufus song, Chaka Khan, but Stevie Wonder wrote it. And we did a version that was kind of experimental, with toys and recordings and people talking, and there was the newscast of the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan that we had floating in and out of the song.

He goes on to explain Wojnarowicz’s involvement in the creation of their album saying, “David was a poet and he just sort of rambled on sometimes, or he took stuff from his writings, and it was always interesting, sometimes dark, pretty dark, interesting.”65 Wojnarowicz and his band relied on Rimbaud’s idea of “disorientation” but also the

Situationist technique of détournement and the performative element of play. Situationists are often cited as being a primary influence on

Punk, although Greil Marcus also links the destructive element of Punk

64 Noland, 587. 65 Mary Gauthier. May 2005. 3 Teens Kill 4 and Jesse Hultberg Interview.Online.http://www.queermusicheritage.us/may2005s.html.access ed 16 April 2007.np.

with Dada and the Futurist movement. By using the “reversible connecting factor” it can be suggested that the Situationists informed

Wojnarowicz’s perception of the city.

Wojnarowicz never directly mentions the street art of

Situationist, Ernest Pignon-Ernest (b. 1942); however, Pignon-Ernest produced a life size poster of Arthur Rimbaud that he attached to buildings on the Boulevard Saint-Michel in Paris (1978-79) when

Wojnarowicz was visiting France. Shortly after Rimbaud in New York appeared in SoHo Weekly News in June of 1980. It is significant that

Pignon-Ernest is a Situationist because the Situationists acknowledge

Rimbaud as one of their predecessors, which aligns them with the punk movement. The Situationist concern with revolutionizing everyday life links them with Wojnarowicz. John Carlin wrote that Wojnarowicz “[…] was a visionary whose work was deeply rooted in our collective daily lives yet constantly linked the everyday to some greater unknowable force.”66 Rimbaud in New York also expresses Wojnarowicz’s desire “for an architecture of situation.”

Rimbaud demanded, “a rational disordering of the senses” 67 This notion can be applied to the Situationist desire to make strange the recognizable urban environment as a means of transforming space. They were also concerned with the discovery of the uncanny, an idea that

Wojnarowicz evoked with the use of the masked Rimbaud figure. Another

Situationist concept that I believe Wojnarowicz used in Rimbaud in New

York is Guy Debord’s notion of the “dérive” which is essentially a

66 Dan Cameron, Mysoon Rizk, and John Carlin, Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz(New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 93. 67 Sadler, 93.

walk but is different from the wanderings of the flâneur. The dérive takes place in a space that is “imposed by capitalism in the form of urban planning” because as Thomas F. McDonough states, “we are not interested in the charms of ruins.”68

Wojnarowicz however, is interested in documenting society’s ruins. In Rimbaud in New York the masked figure is photographed in decaying warehouses marked for destruction as well as walking through locations of ravenous consumerism such as Times Square. In this sense

I believe that Wojnarowicz used Rimbaud’s face for the mask because he was interested in expressing a feeling of nostalgia for a Paris, before steps were taken to modernize the city and the Paris Arcades.

Wojnarowicz is also interested in challenging the monumental nature of architecture.

The Situationists were interested in applying Rimbaud’s initial concern involving the disorientation of the senses to their architecture. The experimental design of Constant during the 1950s and

1960s disrupts conventional notions of architecture’s physicality as a permanent structure or landmark. New designs of “Other Architecture” allowed the inhabitants to define their own environment.69

The Situationists’ ultimate goal was to reconstruct the entire city. Architecture became the key to their revolutionary desires. Ivan

Chtcheglov, an International Lettrist, wrote in one of the manifestos concerning Situationism, titled “Formulaire pour un Urbanisme Nouveau”

(Formulary for a New Urbanism, 1953) that the “Situationists promised that their architecture would one day revolutionize everyday life and

68 McDonough, 73. 69 Sadler 37.

release the ordinary citizen into a world of experiment, anarchy, and play.”70 The Dutch artist Constant Nieuwenhuys (1920-2005) redesigned the city to create a Utopian City, exemplified by his drawing for the megastructure New Babylon: City for Another Life (fig.9). Babylon, which had once served as a symbol of excess, is now transformed into a modern, playful, and universal site that addresses the nomadic movement of the city dweller and plays a game with an imaginary environment.71

Abstract Space, “The Naked City” and the “Carte de Tendre”

Greil Marcus writes about the Lettriste Internationale, members of which were allied with the Situationiste Internationale, and its ideas of an imaginary city stating:

The members of the LI remained planners of an imaginary city, but now they were imaginary, complexes of desires turned into geography or suppressed by it, they saw that all cities could be explored.”72

The city that is created in Rimbaud in New York disrupts conventional notions of time and space by transplanting the Rimbaud figure from nineteenth-century France into the New York of the 1980s. This disruption prevents the discussion of concrete space. Abstract space instead becomes more important. This idea relates to the Situationist concept of psychogeography73 that Asger Jorn defines as “the science

70 Sadler, 69. 71 Sadler, 123. 72 Marcus, 390. 73 According to Guy Debord psychogeography is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organlized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Ken Knabb. Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Burreau of Public secrets, 1981).

fiction of Urban Planning74” and is exemplified by Guy Debord’s “Naked

City,” 1957 (fig. 10). It differed from Michel Foucault’s analysis of traditional cartography that is associated with power in the sense that each map “constitutes and it is constituted by a network of fluid relations.”75 Psychogeography instead maps human desire. “Naked City” was a map with nineteen cutout sections of Paris printed in black ink and linked with red directional arrows. This map shares similar concerns with the “Carte de Tendre” (fig. 11) or map of tenderness that was published in the first volume of Madeleine de Scudéry’s ten- volume heroic novel Clélie, Histoire Romaine in 1654. The map is concerned with time as well as space. Its placenames respond to activities, procedures, and states of mind rather than physical locations. The “Carte de Tendre” “[…] presented the world as a vast archive of meaning rather than merely a configuration of shapes and sizes, showing not only where places were located, but their significance as well.”76 Likewise, Wojnarowicz is not concerned with presenting a picturesque view of the city in Rimbaud in New York, instead he creates a visual map of the city that regulates the conflicts that produce capitalist space and leads to institutions of control.

Thus, Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York addresses the idea of an individual’s right to the city. In the discussion of how individuals can overcome the control of the city I have relied on the Situationist

74 Marcus, 391. 75 Peters,37. 76 Jeffrey N. Peters. Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 87.

idea of revolutionizing everyday life and the concept of play. I also discussed the Situationist desire for developing new architecture that is not a looming edifice that was designed to control the landscape but rather a structure that underscores the monumental nature of architecture and appeals to the nomadic habits of the city dweller. I have also mentioned the idea of the imaginary city such as Constant’s

“New Babylon,” the examination of abstract space in psychogeography and the discussion of a map that charts desire rather than represent a grid of actual physical space. Wojnarowicz took all of this a step further because his work expresses the concerns of modern biopolitics, such as “Untitled” (One Day this Kid), 1990 (fig. 12), in which there is a black and white reproduction of Wojnarowicz as a child, with text behind him reading:

One day this kid will get larger. […] One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. […] When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government's invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.77

The statement expresses Wojnarowicz’s concern about the invasion of an individual’s rights by the state. William F. Buckley, for instance wanted to tattoo individuals living with AIDS. He wanted the danger

77 Cameron, 53.

that he thought they possessed to be physically written on their body.78

Wojnarowicz was also concerned with the disruption of heterogeneous space. He directly witnessed how city dwellers were alienated from the part of the city they worked in because they could not afford the elevated price of real estate. The burgeoning art market that was being set up in storefronts in the East Village brought on this relocation. Wojnarowicz’s use of the Rimbaud mask evokes an image of Paris during the Commune of 1871, a moment in history that demonstrates how ordinary citizens took control of the center of the city. Wojnarowicz is concerned with how history is constructed. The idea that during the commune individual citizens were able to form their own history rather than being told what their history was after the fact was something that appealed to Wojnarowicz.

In the next chapter I will discuss the alternative art spaces in the

East Village, the marketing of subcultural production such as graffiti art, and how Wojnarowicz documents graffiti in Arthur Rimbaud in New

York as well as participated in its creation.

78 Meyer, 225.

Chapter Three: Arthur Rimbaud in New York Series and the Commodification of Subcultural Production

The city, however, does not tell its past but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. -Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

David Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series (1978-79) documents the history of individuals who have been marginalized by society. In Wojnarowicz’s own words the history that his photographs capture is “One that was never seen on the television sets behind the windows of electronic shops or the pages of newspapers floating around the 5:00 A.M. streets.”79 These photographs depict the world of city dwellers. Whether in photographs of the Hudson River Pier or the Times

Square Red light district, the images capture society’s outsiders, the homeless, intravenous drug users, homosexuals, teenage runaways, and prostitutes. They also detail the illegal writing of graffiti artists.

In this chapter of the study, I will analyze the role that graffiti plays in Arthur Rimbaud in New York and I will discuss its acceptance in the East Village art scene, and the eventual status as an art commodity that graffiti enjoyed. I will focus on art that Wojnarowicz made in public, as well as on the significance of alternative art spaces like Fashion Moda, and the crucial role of “The Times Square

Show” (1980) in bringing together graffiti writers and “professional”

79 Wojnarowicz, 142.

artists. Finally, I will examine how Wojnarowicz used graffiti in his critique of art institutions and the art market.

Wojnarowicz’s Public Art

No stranger to defacing public property, Wojnarowicz made some of his earliest art in the streets. For example, he used stencils to create graffiti advertisements for his band, “3 Teens Kill 4” (fig.

13.) 80 He incorporated stencils into his paintings such as Peter Hujar

Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian in 1982, (fig.14) 81 which also shows his penchant for a collage aesthetic, which was also an important characteristic of Arthur Rimbaud in New York. According to

Mysoon Rizk:

The shifting or scrambling of identity conveyed by the Rimbaud series emerged as a central strategy of Wojnarowicz’s collage aesthetic as well as the conceptual operation at the heart of the artist’s formulation of a spiritual genealogy and vision of history. 82

The collage aesthetic is a key element of Wojnarowicz’s work. He used his stencil technique in the installations that he created the same year. His stenciled aluminum trashcan lids with totemic imagery (fig.

15) depict his use of collage aesthetic. Although the work did not directly invade the street, it did evoke images of city life and its inhabitants.83

80 Dan Cameron, Mysoon Rizk, and John Carlin, Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz(New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 47. Yukio Mishima’s first novel Confessions of the Mask published in 1948. The novel semi-autobiographical and deals with issues of sexuality and façade. 81 Cameron et al., 7. 82 Cameron et al., 48. 83 Cameron et al., 11.

The French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud was significant to

Wojnarowicz partly because Rimbaud seemed to confer authenticity on

Wojnarowicz’s own status as an outlaw. Rimbaud was infamous for inscribing the blasphemous words “Death to God!” on church doors in chalk.84 In turn, the photographs in the series include Wojnarowicz’s own drawings on the walls and windows of abandoned warehouses on the

Hudson River Pier (fig.16), which he revisited in many works of art, documenting its social history, decay, and eventual demolition in

1984.85 He used this warehouse space to experiment with his own visual language. He wrote poetry on the walls, copied Chinese symbols, and painted guns, syringes, and outlines of nude male figures. In this location he produced some of his first paintings in the form of murals.

In one of the photographs from the series, the image is very dark with only the stark white visage of Rimbaud’s face, with its haunting vacant stare and the use of the illuminated word “trance.” The masked figure is standing in front of a public wall featuring a barely legible mural painted behind him (fig. 17.)86 In the photograph, one can make out the shape of a giant scorpion. The scorpion appealed to

Wojnarowicz who used prehistoric subject matter in his murals. Themes such as dinosaurs or fossils were also favorite subjects of artist

Robert Smithson (1938-1973). One of Wojnarowicz’s pier paintings of a life size pterodactyl (fig. 18) was based on a dream in which he

84 Henry Miller, The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud (New York, NY: New Directions Publishing Corp.,1956), 12. 85 Cameron et al., 48. 86 There are no writings that confirm whether Wojnarowicz painted this mural, but it does display a similar theme to the other murals he painted.

conceived himself as a type of prehistoric creature and considers the idea of extinction in connection to the dinosaur.87 Not only does extinction refer to the physical decay of the space where the mural was painted, but it also refers to bodily decay, namely, the deaths of gay men from AIDS. A photograph of the Rimbaud figure smoking a cigarette and walking past cow carcasses in the meatpacking district is closely connected to Wojnarowicz’s murals and Wojnarowicz himself, he often incorporated the image of a cow into his paintings (fig. 19), to signify a sacrificial animal. The large creatures depicted in

Wojnarowicz’s murals are surprising in the urban landscape.

In keeping with Wojnarowicz’s affinity for the prehistoric, the murals call to mind animals depicted in early cave wall paintings.

Wojnarowicz explained his desire to make street art, saying, “[…] I realized if I make something and leave it in public for any period of time I can create an environment where that object or writing acts as a magnet and draws others with a similar frame of reference out of silence or invisibility.” He spray painted on a variety of urban surfaces, ranging from abandoned cars to walls of decaying warehouses.

These works, he said, are equivalent to “[…] leaving historical records of [his] existence behind […]”88 The idea of using marks performatively to declare one’s existence was a primary aim of graffiti writers.

Graffiti writers CAINE, MAD 103, and FLAME, for example, broke into a subway storage lot in Queens on June 3, 1976 and spray painted eleven subway cars with a patriotic theme that celebrated the

87 Cameron et al., 49. 88 Wojnarowicz, 156.

bicentennial of the US.89 The graffiti on the “Freedom Train” was erased because the Transit Authority did not want the public to believe it had been officially commissioned. Many graffiti writers were arrested for their involvement in creating illegal artwork.90 In fact, the public generally considered graffiti writing an act of sheer vandalism that was void of artistic merit, and graffiti writers were often blamed for urban problems and considered criminals.91

The outlaw status of graffiti appealed to Wojnarowicz who considered theft an integral part of his art making and the claims he made on the city. In the essay, “Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch Politician” (1990), he wrote that his first thirty-five millimeter camera was stolen for him by a friend during the period in which Wojnarowicz was living on the streets of New York City. He continued:

I’d steal rolls of film from drugstores and take photographs of the gang of ex-con transvestites we hung around with on West Street. I never had any money so I couldn’t get photographs developed. I’d put all the rolls of film in whatever bus station locker we left our meager belongings in and the first day that we forgot to put in the daily- required quarter, all our belongings were confiscated and taken to a lost and found in the outer reaches of Brooklyn.92

Wojnarowicz, like graffiti writers, also engaged in illegally procuring materials to make his art.

Wojnarowicz was deeply influenced by graffiti, and this fact is brought out in many of his works. One photograph in Wojnarowicz’s

89 Unfortunately, no available visual documentation of the work exists. 90 Joe Austin, Taking the Train: How Graffiti Art Became an Urban Crisis in New York City (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001), 3. 91 Austin, 179. 92 Wojnarowicz, 142.

Arthur Rimbaud in New York series shows the figure with the Rimbaud mask riding on a train bound for Flatbush Avenue (fig. 20). The subway car in this image is entirely covered with graffiti writers’ tags.93

Fashion Moda and “The Times Square Art Show”: Commodity in Graffiti

The Arthur Rimbaud in New York series depicts the mark of the graffiti writers’ “wildstyle” on the urban environment and their acceptance into the East Village art scene.94 The first graffiti art exhibition was held at the nontraditional art space, Fashion Moda in

1979. The gallery, which Stefan Eins and Joe Lewis founded in 1978, was located in the South Bronx. Its mission was to bring together

“[…]conceptual art, street art, painting, and sculpture in a resolutely nonhierarchical context.”95 Thus, the art that Fashion Moda showed blurred the line between high and low culture. The graffiti show, “GAS: Graffiti Art Success for America,” for example, was organized by nineteen-year old graffiti writer CRASH and it embodied the aesthetic of the train writers. The show featured such writers as

PINK LADY who was one of the first female graffiti writers to make a name for her herself in the 1970s and 1980s.

93 Tagging is a reaction against the control of the city, but it is also done in response to other writers and serves to portray a kind of on-going narrative. They maintain their outlaw status by creating illegal artwork and sometimes even stealing the spray paint used to create it. 94 Irving Sandler, Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the early 1990s (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 470. 95 Dan Cameron. East Village USA (New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 49.

“The Times Square Show” (1980) was another major factor in subcultural productions like graffiti becomimg art commodities.96 It was a month-long exhibition organized by an artist group called

Collaborative Projects, Inc. and was held in an abandoned building near Times Square. The show included 100 artists who literally claimed their space of exhibition. They painted work directly on the walls and other unoccupied surfaces of buildings. At the end of the show the work was painted over. Anne Ominous states in her review of the show for Artforum as follows:

TTSS was ostensibly about Times Square-that is, about sex and money and violence and human degradation. It was also about artists banding together as pseudoterrorists and identifying with the denizens of this chosen locale- envying them and imitating them at the same time as colonizing them, thus rebelling against the cleanliness and godlessness of the art world institutions, “alternate” and otherwise.97

The art in the show evokes the decay of the inner city with the use of graffiti, broken bottles, and garbage.98 “The Times Square Show” was a rebellion against the conventional art world. When the work was installed it did not include labels and therefore none of the artists were identified. 99 Nonetheless, an invitation was issued to art dealers and collectors and, after this, artists sought to put their names on their work and even encroached on other artists’ space to make their work more visible.

96 Craig Owens. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 265. 97 Lucy R. Lippard, Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change. (New York, NY: E.P. Dutton , 1984), 186. 98 Sandler, 462. 99 Sandler ,464.

The work of graffiti writers was reviewed as a new style of painting or “folk art ” because there was a lack of qualified art critics to discuss this work, other than the writers themselves. There is a hierarchy that already existed among graffiti writers that is independent from the art world. However, collectors redefined and assigned value to the work of graffiti writers. Many graffiti writers associated the price tag that accompanies the graffiti art shown in galleries, with a loss of integrity within their own community. The graffiti writer DUSTER explains that the decisions of collectors to acquire works by specific graffiti artists were based almost entirely on word of mouth and were often uninformed because the buyers did not ride the train themselves to see who DUSTER and other writers considered to be the truly prolific graffiti writers. DUSTER claims

All of a sudden, everyone starts jumpin’ on the bandwagon claiming they’ve been writing for years and I had never even heard of ‘em! The Sidney Janis Gallery blows the whole art scene out of the water-he gets like twelve graffiti artists together and sells their work for $5000 each, ‘cause he’s got a reputation…Later, everyone’s thrown to the street ‘cause the gallery can’t sell shit, so they turn around and find a collector on the side who’ll give ‘em $1000 for a piece. Then the collector sells. So it’s like stocks and bonds. Whatever the galleries last sale was, that’s what your paintings are now worth…”100

Graffiti art disappeared from the art scene almost as quickly as it appeared; it became almost obsolete in New York art galleries by

1985.101 However, the skills of the graffiti writers continued to be utilized by commercial designers.102

100 Austin, 194. 101 Austin, 206. 102 Austin, 196.

Graffiti and Neo-Graffiti

Arthur Rimbaud in New York shows the markings of graffiti writers, as well as neo-graffiti done by East Village artists like

Wojnarowicz. Neo-graffiti artists are not necessarily apart of the graffiti writing culture because many of them are professionally trained, whereas graffiti writers claimed to work outside the realm of traditional art history. East Village artists Keith Haring (1958-1990) studied graphic design at the Ivy School of Professional Art in

Pittsburg and Kenny Scharf (b.1958) received his B.F.A at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. However, in spite of their fine art status, both create street art. The association between graffiti writers and neo-graffiti artists is a tentative one because of the general acknowledgement that graffiti writer’s so-called “wild style” is something that can be copied but not necessarily understood by fine artists.

Wojnarowicz’s Critique of Art Institutions

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) dismissed this idea and championed the work of graffiti writers both in the streets and in the galleries. In fact, as Craig Owens discussed,

Warhol left subsequent “avant-gardes” two alternatives: either they openly acknowledge their economic role-the alternative pursued by the East Village ‘avant-garde’ -or they actively work to dislodge an entrenched, institutionalized avant-garde production model.103

Wojnarowicz expressed his cynicism regarding institutions. For example, in one of the photographs the masked Rimbaud figure stands next to a wall where Wojnarowicz had drawn a male nude that

103 Owens, 266.

exemplifies such formal techniques as contrapposto (fig. 21).

Wojnarowicz disrupted the sanctity of this classical form when he took it out of its traditional place in the museum, then drawing it on a crumbling wall in an abandoned warehouse. Moreover, Wojnarowicz inscribed a statement by Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)104 “The silence of

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) is overrated.” This statement makes the association to Duchamp’s examination of the idea that it is the art object’s position in the museum or gallery that establishes itself as first and foremost a commodity. The warehouse that housed

Wojnarowicz’s graffiti-esque drawings was eventually demolished, thus leaving Arthur Rimbaud in New York as the only documentation that it ever existed.

In conclusion, Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York series depicts the mark of graffiti on the city. The series also captures

Wojnarowicz’s own experimentation with visual language on the walls of the warehouses on the Hudson River Pier. The discussion of graffiti also involves the merger of this subcultural production with the East

Village Art Scene. Although the alternative art spaces were interested in breaking away from the sterile feel of the traditional art institution, they still confirmed art’s commercial status.

Graffiti writers’ work that was typically executed on a larger scale was made smaller and became more accessible as an art commodity when it was painted on a canvas. With graffiti writers’ assimilation into the art world, they also lost part of their pre-existing status

104 Wojnarowicz saw Joseph Beuys’ Retrospective show at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979, the same year he created Rimbaud in New York.

amongst their own community because graffiti was not concerned with monetary success but rather with leaving their mark on the city.

Conclusion

David Wojnarowicz said, “All my life I’ve made things that are like fragmented mirrors of what I perceive to be the world.”105 It is interesting that Wojnarowicz uses the image of a mirror to describe his work because Michel Foucault discusses the mirror in his analysis of “heterotopias,” stating:

The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself where I am absent.106

Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-79) deals with identity and space.

For Wojnarowicz the apparition of the Rimbaud figure serves as a mirror though which he can express his own experience with the city and counteract what he perceived as his own vanishing. In this study I was interested in addressing how the series presents a history for societies’ outsiders, considering that the main objective of

Wojnarowicz’s work is communication. His art depicts his continuous struggle to be heard as well as his desire to provide a narrative for marginal members of society. Wojnarowicz explains his approach to history in his art stating:

History has been written and preserved by and for a particular class of people so in my work I want to rewrite or give new meaning to the histories that exist in textbooks using present day experience as a departure. For example, in a painting about

105 Dianne Chisholm. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2005),58 106 Foucault, Michel. 1967. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. On- line.http://foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroopia.en .html, accessed 24 February 2007, n.p.

the American West, I focus on the steam engine; the train that carried white culture through the land inhabited by the Indians. Obviously, judging by the current state of Indian affairs, there was intense exploitation and eradication by white people of anything or anyone that resisted their ‘cultural’ expansion. Given that I wasn’t born at that time, I can only speak of these elements in terms that exist today - I gather them by traveling, or from written works, images in popular culture, dreams and other symbols that will help me construct a discourse about this reality rejected or hidden by the white culture.107

Wojnarowicz paints a steam engine in his work Crash: The Birth of

Language/the Invention of Lies” in 1986 (fig. 22). The title of the work expresses Wojnarowicz’s skepticism concerning discourse.

Wojnarowicz was interested in creating a new language of images. This work draws heavily on his use of the collage aesthetic in his integration of coupons into the background confirming the continual existence of the commodity in society. In Crash the train demolished a pair of ancient Greek columns. The work also showcases a burning building, and vultures picking away the flesh of a corpse. This work shares similar themes with Rimbaud in New York in the sense that it disrupts the notion of the monumental nature of architecture and depicts an abandoned city or a city in ruins. The work literally represents modern society as a train wreck. It suggests that technological advancements, exemplified by the steam engine, do not necessarily denote progress.

The first chapter of the study revealed Rimbaud’s ideas concerning the modern city. Wojnarowicz evokes the figure of the flâneur as a means to examine how the individual navigates and responds to the city. The discussion of the wanderings of the flâneur

107 Queer Cultural Center. 1993. David Wojnarowicz. Online.http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/DavidW/DW_index.html. accessed 16 April 2007, n.p.

in this chapter helps to establish what Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz perceived of as the role of the poet/ artist in society. Rimbaud and

Wojnarowicz’s identity is strongly informed by variations of myth.

Rimbaud believed in the revelatory nature of art and that it was through suffering that the artist achieved the status of a seer.

Wojnarowicz saw his work as a way of witnessing and reacting to various methods of silencing enacted by dominant culture. In this chapter I addressed the construction of alternative histories and a history of “counter spaces.”

In Chapter two I explored how Wojnarowicz addressed the idea of the individual’s right to the city. Wojnarowicz was a prolific writer; his literary works are an integral resource in forming Wojnarowicz’s conception of the city. Rebecca Solnit remarks on how Wojnarowicz’s

Close to the Knives “reads like a summary of all the urban experience that came before him.”108 Rimbaud in New York comments on this past experience by evoking Rimbaud and nineteenth-century Paris. The reorganization of Paris by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann and the gentrification of the Lower East Side from 1979 to 1984 exemplify the control of the city and how ordinary citizens were driven from the center of the city by bourgeois imperialism. I examined the Paris

Commune of 1871 as a revolutionary example of ordinary citizens reclaiming their position in the heart of the city. In this chapter I use Debord’s idea of the “reversible connecting factor” in order to establish a link not only between Wojnarowicz and Rimbaud but also between Punk and the Situationist ideas concerning the city. The connection between these various groups lies in their radical use of

108 Chisholm, 59.

language and revolutionary ideas concerning the city. In this chapter

I looked at the revolutionary and the imaginary city. The imaginary city refers to the city presented in Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud in New York but also to Constant Nieuwenhuis’s drawings of New Babylon, 1957-1974 that illustrate his ideas concerning the total redesign of the city.

The idea of the imaginary city also applies to the examination of examples from psychogeography such as Guy Debord’s “Naked City” and the “Carte de Tendre” that charts desire rather than physical space.

Lastly, in chapter three I examined the commodification of subcultural production in the East Village. I looked at the emergence of alternative art spaces that went up in storefronts and rejected the traditional notion of the art gallery as a pristine white cube.

Although these sites are presented as alternative art spaces they still deal with art as a marketable commodity. In this chapter I discussed graffiti art and how it served as a method of reclaiming public space but also how it was moved from its location on inner city walls and subway cars and into the gallery. In Rimbaud in New York,

Wojnarowicz captures the mark of the graffiti writers on the city. In this chapter I also examined Wojnarowicz’s own contribution to the graffiti on the Hudson River Piers and how his drawings represent both the fine art tradition and illegal methods of art making.

David Wojnarowicz died of an AIDS on July 22, 1992. Many of the sites represented in Rimbaud in New York have since vanished primarily the locations marked by Wojnarowicz as sites of desire and associated with public sex.109 The series depicts urban decay and now documents a

109 Dan Cameron, Mysoon Rizk, and John Carlin. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz (New York, NY: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 69

space that no longer exists. The photographs address the concept of desire and life in the city.

Wojnarowicz’s art and writing was interested in presenting what

Gilles Deleuze describes as “minor” literature for individuals who have been excluded from more generalized accounts of history. His art reflects his sensitivity for societies’ outsiders and poetically captures the idea of innocence in the face of death. His work What is this Little Guy’s Job in the World, 1990 (fig. 23) shows a hand holding a small frog. The text in the background reads:

[…]if this little guy dies does the world know? Does the world feel this? Does something get displaced? If this little guy dies the world get a little lighter? […] Does the planet rotate a little faster? If this little guy dies, without his body to shift the currents of the air, does the air flow perceptibly faster? What shifts, if this little guy dies? Do people speak language a little bit differently? If this little guy does some little kid somewhere wake up with a bad dream? Does an almost imperceptible link in the chain snap? Will civilization stumble?110

Rimbaud in New York depicts the illegal and the underground. It presents sites of consumption, sites of desire, and decay. Ultimately, it presents a view of the faceless city dweller that would have ordinarily gone unnoticed and easily forgotten by history.

110 Dan Cameron, 39.

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(fig. 1) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Coney Island), ca. 1978-79. From a series of twenty-four gelatin-silver prints, 10x8” each. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York.

(fig. 2) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Meat Packing District), ca.1978-79.

(fig. 3) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Times Square), ca. 1978-79.

(fig. 4) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Western Highway), ca. 1978-79

(fig. 5) Rosa Von Praunheim in Collaboration with Phil Zwickler. Still from Silence= Death, 1990. Video Cassette, 60 min.

(fig.6) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Peep Show), ca. 1978-79

(fig. 7)David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Sex Pier), ca. 1978-79.

(fig. 8)David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Photo Strip), ca. 1978-79.

(fig. 9) Constant Nieuwenhuys, New Babylon, ca. 1957-1974.

(fig. 10) Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957.

(fig. 11) Madeleine de Scudéry, La Carte de Tendre, ca. 1654. Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Princeton University Library.

(fig. 12) David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [One day this kid…], ca.1990. Gelatin-silver print, 30x40”. Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York, New York.

(fig. 13)David Wojnarowicz, Flyer for 3 Teens Kill 4, ca. 1982.

(fig. 14)David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar Dreaming/ Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, ca. 1982. Acrylic and spray paint on masonite, 48x48”.

(fig.15) David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [Trash Can Lids], ca. 1982-83. Spray paint on trash can lids, 18” diameter each. Collections of Antonia Smith Robinson, New York: Nemo Labrizzi, New York; and Jean Foos and Dirk Rowntree, New York

(fig. 16) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Hudson River Piers), ca. 1978-79

(fig. 17) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Mural), ca. 1978-79.

(fig. 18) Wojnarowicz with the Pterodactyl pier painting, ca. 1983. Photo: Marion Scemarna.

(fig. 19) David Wojnarowicz, Untitled [Sirloin Steaks], ca. 1983. Acrylic on poster, 47”x32 ½”. Collection of Hal Bramm, New York.

(fig. 20) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Subway Flatbush Ave), ca. 1978-79.

(fig.21) David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp), ca. 1978-79.

(fig. 22) David Wojnarowicz, Crash: The Birth of Language/ The Invention of Lies, ca. 1986. Acrylic on masonite, 72x96”. Collection of Adam Clayton, Dublin.

(Fig. 23) David Wojnarowicz, What is This Little Guy’s Job in the World, 1990. Gelatin-silver print, 13 1/2x19”