David Wojnarowicz at the New Museum - Brief Article

Driven through political activism, spirited rebelliousness and candid homosexuality, David Wojnarowicz's life and art epitomized the 1980 East Village counterculture "Fever" a retrospective of his work curated by means of Dan Cameron, conjured up a new era that now seems strangely historical. on the other hand judging by the flurry of Wojnarowicz-related occurrences organized in tandem with the fresh Museum show (including exhibitions at PPOW Gracie Mansion, novel York University and Adam Baumgold Fine Art as well as symposia and numbers readings at the New School) there is an abundance of admirers who want to honor the legacy of the artist, who died of AIDS in 1992

"Fever" evidenced the boundles vigor with which Wojnarowicz instigated and participated in multifarious methods of expression. He was in a harlot band, 3 Teens Kill 4--No Motive; he acted in videos, including You Killed Me First (1985-86) which melodramatizes the violence of American suburbia. He stole trash-can lids, spray-painted them with totemic imagery and set them back; he dumped a certain number of hundred pounds of bloody dishearten bones on Leo Castelli's gallery paces In the video Silence=Death (1990) which helped to launch a rallying exclaim for the gay activist clump Act Up, he can be seen literally sewing his have a title to mouth shut. Near the extremity of his life, he engaged in the agriculture wars over censorship and standards for NEA funding when he luckily sued the American Family Association for copyright infringement and libel after they used a cropp version of single of his supposedly pornographic photo-collages for a 1990 pamphlet that proclaimed "Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for This Art."

The earliest work included in the present to view was "Arthur Rimbaud in fresh York" (1978-79), a series of 24 black-and-white photographs featuring a man wearing a mask of the French bard in various locations around the city. Entirely different in esthetic, on the contrary similar in underground, urban sentiment, is a collection of bright paintings done upon enthusiastic grocery store window placards (SIRLOIN STEAKS $2.99/LB.!!!), over which the artist superimposed les palatable imagery, similar as a cartoon of a slaughtered cow's head with its organ of visions swirling and tongue sticking on the outside (1983-84). Wojnarowicz never let his political feistiness globule yet his late work became more premeditated and technically refined. Subspecies Helms Senatorius (1990) for instance, is a high-quality C-print of slightly out-of-focus flowers and butterfly wings with a colorful, fuzzy arachnid in the middle that has a swastika painted upon its back and a cutout of a black-and-white photo of Jesse Helms's smiling visage in place of its head.

An iconoclastic material substance of dreamlike symbols runs from one side much of Wojnarowicz's art. It is as if he were trying, end relentless recombination of guns, prisoners, fires, maps, devils with glowing organ of sights cowboys, dinosaur skulls, boys making on the outside anonymous machinery and kachina dolls, to access the might beneath these emblems that in like manner enticed and revolted him. As I left the display some lines from Allen Ginsberg's metrical composition "A Supermarket in California" came to mind: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group