David Wojnarowicz at New Galerie, Paris, and Mudam, Luxembourg
After a childhood marred by family and societal violence, the American artist David Wojnarowicz went on to develop a unique vision across many media. A victim of the AIDS epidemic, he died in New York City in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Wojnarowicz left an incredible body of photographic work, including previously un-seen photographs, to his friend and collaborator Marion Scemama, which are on show this fall at the New Galerie in Paris. Scemama is also presenting her own works, photographs and videos from the 1980s, taking inspiration from and documenting Wojnarowicz’s art and life, as well as the Lower East Side scene. Mathieu Cénac, co-founder of the publishing house Jean Boîte Éditions and co-curator of the exhibition, speaks to us about the artist.
L’OFFICIEL ART: David Wojnarowicz was the subject of a traveling exhibition, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” presented first at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2018, then at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid earlier in 2019, and at Mudam Luxembourg from this October. Why did the New Galerie want to exhibit Wojnarowicz’s photography specifically? What impact can it make on art in Paris? MATHIEU CÉNAC: There were never any plans to show “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” in Paris. But Wojnarowicz’s intellectual friendships, romantic relationships, and the other friendships that he developed in France defined his short career. He came to Paris in 1978 and became the lover of
Jean-Pierre Delage, a hairdresser who later modeled for the artist’s first series of photographs – which became symbolic – featuring a scenario of Arthur Rimbaud in New York. In this same period, he used the figure of Jean Genet in many of his works. Wojnarowicz identified with these two poets/ artists/homosexuals/marginalized figures/ vagabonds outside the law. The exhibition at the New Galerie is formed around the personal collection of the photographer and cinematographer Marion Scemama, and around the photographs that she developed with and for Wojnarowicz. Without having any desire to be retrospective, the exhibition allows visitors to explore more than ten years [1978-1989] of the artist’s photographic production, and to follow the course of an artistic friendship that led Wojnarowicz to take his last long trip with Scemama in 1991.
Born in 1954 in New Jersey, Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992. It was a short life in which he produced drawings, paintings, music, written texts, and in which he was an activist, especially against the inaction of the government in the face of the AIDS epidemic. Keith Haring, Zoe Leonard, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, and others were part of his inner circle, or came into contact with him. Who are Wojnarowicz’s artistic heirs? Artists killed by AIDS are united by the fact that they died too young and they were often imprisoned in a single-minded combat against the illness and the inaction of the governments of the time. But the rage that Wojnarowicz developed very early in his expression of the coming and going of his desires was due just as much to the total absence of homosexual role models in his childhood. Today, the fight for the emergence of non-caricatured, nonstigmatized LGBTQI+ public figures is far from over, and the HIV crisis of the 1980s and 1990s certainly curbed the breakthrough in gaining recognition for marginalized people. But beyond the social status of LGBTQI+ peoples,
Wojnarowicz is a figure for the marginalized and for free spirits reacting against the “preinvented world” – a phrase that he coined and that remains at the very center of his work. To him, this concept combines all social rules that humans have put in place: money, religion, guns, red lights, road signs – all the things that separate us from our free will. The untitled photographs from the “Ant Series” that the New Galerie exhibits illustrate clearly this concept: ants are the only insects that “keep pets, use tools, make war and capture slaves.”
Who are the points of reference for Wojnarowicz in terms of art, and how did this self-taught artist develop his language? Wojnarowicz produced written texts, paintings, photographs, drawings, graffiti, music, installations, videos – a great variety of media and visual languages. But if we pay attention to the repetitions in his work, it’s easy to identify not only animals, but also friends, landscapes, lovers, and recurrent motifs that first he photographed. Photography, then, is a central practice and the point of departure for his language. “To me,” says Wojnarowicz, “photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a freefloating sentence that speaks about the world I witness. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.”
He embodies in his life and work the figure of the outsider in 1980s New York, a city that was at once full of a hyperactive creativity and only a handful of years past being on the brink of bankruptcy. How does the city feature in his work?
In his writing, Wojnarowicz proves to be one of the most important and revealing chroniclers of his generation. His style transports the reader into the streets and bars of New York City, evoking a life of wandering between squats, bars, and piers, but also speaking of
the expansive deserts of the American West. He writes just as movingly in his narratives about his encounters with men as about fleeting moments in which his anguish is on full display. Formally, his photographs present places, bodies, and feelings from a New York that gentrification has entirely destroyed. The New York of the 1980s can be symbolized in the terms of the agreement that Wojnarowicz brokered with the owners of the building where he squatted in the former loft of his mentor and lover Peter Hujar: he could stay on for as long as he had the disease, but as soon as a treatment were found, he would have to leave. He died three years later.
Sex, spirituality, love, and notions of absence and loss define his work. Borders between the personal and the collective are effectively abrogated. “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications in the pre-invented world,” Wojnarowicz wrote.
He also wrote, “Everything was sexualized. Any turn that I made on a street corner was a possibility of eroticism. Everything was fused with, infused with eroticism. And it was wonderful because everything felt free in that movement.” Sexuality is central to his life; it was at the heart of his writing. Making clear the beauty of his sexuality was for him a way of making visible and public an entire community that America preferred to keep hidden – or, worse, to deny entirely. His strongest images and rage-filled slogans immediately became a part of history, and it is time to also honor the eroticism, the poetry, and the beauty present in his work.
“This Killing Machine Called America,” the title of the exhibition at the New Galerie, resonates with contemporary history, if we think about anti-black violence or the dispossession of Native Americans from their land.
In 1985, Louie Welch, a former mayor of Houston who was still active in politics, suggested solving the HIV problem by “shooting the queers.” This allows us to put into perspective the violent title of the show, a phrase taken from one of Wojnarowicz’s texts. “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America” was a daily feeling for communities decimated by AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, but it resonates more broadly with all those who have been and will be excluded, killed, or sacrificed by the American “system” – African-Americans, Native Americans, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics, the poor, the marginal, those addicted to drugs, prostitutes, and former and current slaves. Wojnarowicz questions America’s arrogant proclamations of being a land of the free – one that is built upon the oppression and the sacrificing of entire categories of people.
“This Killing Machine Called America,” New Galerie, Paris, October 11-December 14.
“David Wojnarowicz”, MUDAM, Luxembourg, October 26, 2019-February 9, 2020.