A personal view of David Wojnarowicz on his would-be 60thth birthday (September 14thth ) ) by Joseph Nechvatal Published at at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/his-would-be-60th-birthday/3048 David Wojnarowicz, Untitled from the Ant Series (spirituality) 1988-89, gelatin silver print_40 _ x 47 inches, Courtesy of the Estate of f David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York The artist and writer David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) lived a wild life and died a harrowing death of AIDS at the early age of 37 after an impressive stretch in AIDS activism and in the defense of freedom of expression. I met him as part of the now mythic East Village art scene that was active between the late 1970s and late 1980s, then a sanctuary for diehard artists and galleries. A period that soon was followed by the neighborhood’s gentrification, along with its art community’s devastation by HIV/AIDS and the national culture wars of the 1990s. I encountered David’s long face and deep voice for the first time in May 1983 at the Speed Trials noise rock concert series organized by Live Skull members at White Columns. This was just after the famous Noise Fest series there. David and I did the art on the walls for the Speed Trials as an anonymous space share. It was not collaborative. Within it, various performance artists, such as Ilona Granet, intermixed with the live music of The Fall, Beastie Boys, Live Skull, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch, Elliott Sharp, Swans and Arto Lindsay. It had been a pleasant experience working next to him and I remember him from that day as being gentle and pleasant. I had seen David in an exhilarating performance with the noise band 3 Teens Kill 4 at the Pyramid Club, but David had recently left 3 Teens Kill 4.. As we walked back from far west Spring Street to the Lower East Side together after completing the installation, we talked about our favorite bookstores and books, about our passion for Arthur Rimbaud and French Symbolist poetry, about the growing nuclear war threat in relation to his stencil street work of the burning building and my nuclear war street posters. Also we spoke about his dumping of a pile of cow bones on the stairs outside of the Leo Castelli Gallery (of that I did not approve). He did not impress me as someone particularly angry - or for that matter as someone into anonymous sex (he exhibited no gay clone cliches, no gay cruising come-ons) - and I was surprised to learn otherwise much later. However, we did not become close friends and I did not know him in any profound way. He did not participate in the conceptually bent Gallery Nature Morte scene, as I did, nor the more political Colab / ABC No Rio circles that I was active in at the time. But I would see him now and again and say hello at East Village openings or nightclubs. We next appeared together in the Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine #5-6 - Special Audio Visual Issue (that I co-edited). His admirable noise piece for that issue was a collaboration with Doug Bressler called “American Dreamtime” - that is now archived on the web at Ubuweb. Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, "The New Irascibles” (1985) David standing left in stripped shirt, the author is seated central in blue jeans and black shirt The next time we spoke was in 1985 at the studio of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders when Timothy photographed us, together with other East Village artists, for "The New Irascibles," cover of Arts Magazine. David was not very cordial that day, as I recall. Yet he seemed still tender, if distant, to me. David Wojnarowicz, Subspecies Helms Senatorius 1990, color photograph, 19 x 24 _ inches, _Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York Perhaps some aspects of David’s life and work need not to be romanticized. Years later in 1989 he would rage against me for not including his collaborative work on sex and AIDS with Marion Scemama in my show Erotic America at Galerie Antoine Candau in Paris (catalogue essay by Eleanor Heartney), comparing me to Hitler. Such is the insufficiency of crowning him with the militant hero persona. My intention for the show was to address the AIDS epidemic with a counter-attack of ecstatic Eros. But perhaps something positive came from David and Marion’s disproval of my choice of not including their work in the show (it was attacked via Marion for ignoring HIV/AIDS in Liberatiotionn, the leftist Parisian newspaper, while at the same time being censured by the local police). I learned later that this event inspired David to speak out on HIV/AIDS even more explicitly in his work and activism. This is important to me, as Wojnarowicz’s gay activism is the most important thing I think to cherish about him, as preserved in his many writings and art works dealing with AIDS (certainly not the lousy and nasty death trip stuff he fooled around with as part of the Cinema of Transgression). It is quite possible that this event nudged me closer to my HIV/AIDS themed computer virus project that began in 1991 (ongoing). I usually attribute the birth of the computer virus project however to my direct experience with, and exposure to, the deadly virus through my relationship to the tormenting AIDS death of Bebe Smith. That and the AIDS death I witnessed of my friend and neighbor the performer Tron Von Hollywood. That period cracked open an emotional range in me between dread for one’s life and happy memories of a fading wild sexual freedom. Regardless, I had little idea of David’s terrible AIDS background at the time. Not until I read Cynthia Carr book “Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz” did I fully understand. Nor did I know that he had had a harrowing childhood of emotional and physical abusive at the hands of an alcoholic father and distant - soon divorced - mother, or that he was at one time a young gay hustler. On this last point however, Carr points out that even as she was exhaustive about verifying facts about his childhood and his years as a hustler, Wojnarowicz sometimes exaggerated his hustling, for effect. Equally, I knew nothing of the years Wojnarowicz spent working on poetry before he became an artist. Carr did a remarkable job cataloging David’s early poetic publications and readings. I was well aware of his key relationship to the photographer Peter Hujar, his mentor, but not at all with his longer, if punctuated, relationships with Jean-Pierre Delage and then Tom Rauffenbart - or his hard drug use. Indeed it seems to me that David took the wrong drugs while reading the right books (Jean Genet). Nor did I know of his times spent in Paris. *** David Woinarowicz, North/South: The New Legionaires 1986, acrylic and printed paper collage on masonite_72 x 48 inches, Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York My aesthetic and political problems with David’s work David’s surrealistic imagery is way too blunt for me. His work offers little in stylistic innovation, as it depends on a pretty standard, sub-surreal, technique of collage. Worse, this collage language of deliriousness poetic free association seemed to have opened up too many superficial associations for him and to have closed down his emotional capacity to connect. So his work exudes a mood of sullen dissatisfaction that does not appear helpful in today’s world. He discovered through French symbolist poetry the freedom of re-aligning thoughts and images, but he never went further in questioning the adequacy of standard representations. He never found the magical capacity of establishing new visual logics through the consolation of patterns. Indeed the pattern of his life was stuttered with violent ruptures and anonymous intimacy. His work rarely winked or smiled, and I think it was that heavy earnestness about it that repelled me then and now. His compositions are stogy, almost Pre-Columbian in arrangement, and that restricts the heart from joyful leaps. Indeed, his is a mood of one who has embraced ugliness as a state of spiritual disgust. Some of the work is revolting, in the positive sense of the term. But he is too Romantic in the idealized sense. Worse, David standardizes and stereotypes in his work. Wojnarowicz’s most famous work is his short silent film "Fire in the Belly" which elicited controversy because of an 11-second sequence that featured ants crawling over a crucifix. This is actually pretty tame stuff when compared to some mesmerizing films of Luis Buñuel, such as “L'âge d'Or” (1930). David’s stated goal was to penetrate life so as to recover what he called the “pre-invented world” - the invented world being what most of us would recognize to be Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum. It seems he was struggling for a de-simulation art that attempts to re-establish a private critical distance achieved through the challenge of (and disparity between) pleasure and frustration. But for me, David never achieved de-simulation in his work - nor a state of free flowing virtuosity, as did Jean Genet in his writing or as did Rhys Chatham in his post-punk guitar music. I think that perhaps David tried to do too many things: after all, he was a writer, painter, photographer, noise musician, filmmaker, and a performance artist.