David Wojnarowicz History Keeps Me Awake at Night Review

David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

A comprehensive survey of the impassioned American artist and writer proves his relevance then and at present, without stinting from the lows – likewise as the highs – of his prodigious output

David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz, 1983–84 (item). Collection of Brooke Garber Neidich and Daniel Neidich. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid
29 May – 30 September 2019

by JOE LLOYD

In 1985, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was selected to appear in the Whitney Biennial, then as at present the closest thing artists in America have to a golden ticket. "When I congratulated him," wrote his biographer Cynthia Carr, "he had such a await of distress on his face. He told me he hated the art globe. Then, I believe the exact sentence went: 'If I were straight, I'd motion to a pocket-size boondocks correct now and become a chore in a gas station.'"

Fifty-fifty if Wojnarowicz felt this avenue of escape possible, it seems unlikely he would take taken information technology. The grungy streets of 1980s New York seemed his natural habitat, and he thrived every bit part of an E Hamlet nexus of artists and musicians. Later on appearing at the Whitney, he continued to make and exhibit art at a frenzied stride, leaving behind a prodigious body of work that suggests an unquenchable itch to create. He painted, photographed, collaged, sculpted, assembled installations and dabbled in film; he fronted a band, 3 Teens Kill four; and he wrote incessantly. Until recently, however – the turning betoken may have been a mini-survey in 2011 at the PPOW Gallery in New York – he has often been remembered for two things: his death from Aids-related illness and his role as an anti-censorship activist in the 90s culture war.

David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Nighttime (For Rilo Chmielorz), 1986 Acrylic, spray paint and collaged paper on Masonite,182.9 × 213.four cm. Collection of John P. Axelrod. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

It goes without maxim that there was much more this to Wojnarowicz, as handsomely demonstrated by History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Reina Sofia – a full-bore retrospective exhibiting the bulk of his major work, which debuted last year at the Whitney Museum. Information technology likewise reveals him as an artist whose concerns remain resonant in the present moment. Wojnarowicz'due south art and writings scorch with righteous rage against homophobia, American imperialism, gun violence, child abuse, the patriarchy, advertizement, neo-liberal capitalism and organised faith. This acrimony stemmed in part from his own appalling experiences. Abandoned by his parents when he was two, he was a victim of child abuse and spent several years as a street hustler and sex worker.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet after Brassaï), 1979. Collage mounted on paper, 63.v × 92.1 cm. Private collection. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

Footling wonder that, from the outset, he defined himself every bit an outsider. He made collages featuring Jean Genet, William S Burroughs and Joseph Beuys, a trio of outsider heroes. Paramount to the young artist'due south mythology was Arthur Rimbaud, the symbolist prose-poet (and self-proclaimed other: "Je est un autre") who had blazed comet-similar over French poetry before choosing to disappear into colonial obscurity. Wojnarowicz'south 1979-80 periodical shows the poet masturbating, clothed and unclothed.

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in NewYork, 1978–79 (printed 1990). Gelatin silver impress, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., NewYork. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

His first major artwork, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-nine), involved Wojnarowicz and friends walking effectually the metropolis while wearing cardboard masks of the poet. At the Reina Sofia, a wall of photographic prints shows "Rimbaud" in a cake shop, an abattoir, pointing at graffiti and hanging effectually Coney Island. One sees the mask bandage down on the dirty footing, a speck of urban flotsam.

David Wojnarowicz, Wind (For Peter Hujar), 1987. Acrylic and collaged paper on Masonite, 182.nine × 243.8 cm. 2d Ward Foundation. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

Information technology didn't similar long for Wojnarowicz to emerge from backside the mask. In 1981, he had a brief romantic relationship with the photographer Peter Hujar, who subsequently became his mentor; an intimate portrait of Wojnarowicz past Hujar captures a wary sort of nerve and a confident seductiveness. A self-portrait from 1983-84, adapted from a photograph by Tom Warren, amplifies this front of self-possession further. The artist stands with folded artillery, staring into the photographic camera as if sizing it up. On his right, a map of America overlays his skin, while his left side is fringed with fire; whether he is called-for up or emanating flames is cryptic. A series of tiny clocks run downward his right arm, ticking reminders of mortality.

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in NewYork, 1978–79 (printed 1990). Gelatin silvery impress, 20.3 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy the Manor of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.West., NewYork. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

For all the apocalyptic fury of Wojnarowicz's vision, a compendious display of his studies and works on paper demonstrates a mischievous streak. In 1983, he painted and drew atop posters advertisement mass-market produce. The police invade Meat Franks, a gunman is shot in the hand over Sirloin Steaks, and a man sticks his caput in a horse's rectum in a higher place Jumbo Rolls. A collaboration with fellow scenester Kiki Smith has comic strip-esque figures bundled around a Rorschach splotch. There are disembodied heads redolent of Jean-Michel Basquiat, floating over text. Best of all are a set of minute images created with stencil, which Wojnarowicz adult to spray-paint on to buildings. One shows a business firm on burn down, another a man crisscrossed with a jet plane. A third shows a homo launched explosively out of the United states, rejected – or ejected – by his abode country.

Installation shot of David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Dark at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, May 2019. Photo: Jaoquin Cortés/Roman Lores. Photographical annal of the Museo Reina Sofia.

From these early works, Wojnarowicz developed a vocabulary of symbols that would recur throughout his career. The disembodied heads, for instance, were repurposed for Metamorphosis (1984), a series of collaged busts that were originally displayed equally if they were targets in a shooting range. One of them is gagged, as if awaiting execution. The painting Hujar Dreaming (1982) has the stencilled form of the older artist atop a world map. Above, Wojnarowicz sprayed-painted in black iv targets, a church building, a soldier, a needle, a bottle of booze, a television receiver, a falling man and, outlined in cerise, a demonic creature caput. The spread may represent Wojnarowicz's hinterland every bit much as it does its ostensible subjects. Hujar'due south grade itself was repeatedly morphed and reused, most strikingly in the acrylic on Masonite Green Head (1982), where it appears both entire and shattered into pieces, like a glass lamp striking past a bullet. Soldiers clamber around the space where Hujar's head was, camouflaged reminders of the militarism implicit in The states club.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Falling Man and Other Stencils), 1982. Spray paint on chipboard, 66 × 22.9 cm. Collection of John P. Axelrod. Photograph courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

These concerns were magnified in the mid-80s, when Wojnarowicz embarked on a serial of large-scale paintings that experience equally if conceived equally magnum opuses. They instead represent a nadir: glorifying in their own garishness and collapsing under the weight of their stacked symbolism. The work that lent the exhibition its title, History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz) (1986), is a case in betoken. The sleeping Hujar appears yet again, only here he lies below a wall of dollars, the outline of a cartoon gunman, a fallen Doric cavalcade, a wagon wheel and a comic book conflicting, amid other clutter. Arresting the momentum of an otherwise exhilarating exhibition, these busy paintings suggest Wojnarowicz as an artist at his best when operating inside constraints.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1988. Gelatin silver impress, 77.5 × 62.9 cm. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Photography Committee 2007. Photo courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

Hujar died in November 1987 from pneumonia, less than a year after beingness diagnosed with Aids. A trio of photographs of his caput, hands and feet, taken by Wojnarowicz on the day of the artist's death, remain nearly unbearably harrowing. Wojnarowicz was diagnosed with HIV a few months later. The art of his concluding years saw him pull back from painting and into photography and collage. Images that clashed in the paintings gain new vitality when transferred in medium. Spirituality (For Paul Thek) (1988-89), a set of vii stills from the unfinished film project Burn in the Belly, has the familiar dollar bills, clocks and reclining figures, but equally discrete snapshots rather than crudely bundled. Even in affliction, he still had a playfulness: the Sex series (1988-89) saw him montage pornographic images on to New York landscapes, as if zoom-in inserts showing the individual entanglements that prevarication backside the city's doors.

As the end drew closer, Wojnarowicz devoted more and more of his time to writing. The memoir-cum-essay collection Close to the Knives (1991) is his masterpiece, expressing in hallucinatory, incendiary prose much that his paintings had failed to practise. These writings in turn were excerpted and inserted into other works, such his 1990 quartet of Flower paintings, which demonstrate a far more than refined practice than the works of a few years earlier, every bit well equally a melancholy that intensifies his career-long rage.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (1 Day This Child . . .), 1990–91. Photostat mounted on board,
75.7 × 101.ix cm, Edition of 10. Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork; purchase, with funds from the Print Committee 2002. Photo courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

Two very unlike works close the exhibition. Both return to the paradigm of the artist himself. Untitled (1 Twenty-four hour period This Kid …) (1990-91), perhaps Wojnarowicz'due south most famed work in his lifetime, despite only appearing in a catalogue, sees a gawky childhood photo of the artist surrounded past a text that enumerates the numerous prejudices and calamities that will befall an developed by virtue of his sexuality; its power remains undiminished, today serving equally warning of how hands rights and freedoms can exist lost.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Confront in Dirt), 1991 (printed 1993). Gelatin silver print, 48.3 × 58.4 cm. Drove of Ted and Maryanne Ellison Simmons. Photo courtesy Museo Reina Sofia.

The photograph Untitled (Face in Dirt) (1991) shows the developed artist'due south visage part-emerging from the soil and stones of Death Valley, optics airtight, teeth defiantly flashed. He may be buried, merely he will remain slumbering below the soil, waiting to render. Thanks to this exhibition, Wojnarowicz has re-emerged, shaking away the dust, as an creative person for our times.

mcdonnellfromight.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/david-wojnarowicz-history-keeps-me-awake-at-night-review-museo-reina-sofia-madrid

Share this post