Sunday Morning! “In the Shadow of Forward Motion” by David Wojnarowicz

Adding to my reading pile, last week I picked up a recent reprint of David Wojnarowicz’s fairly remarkable zine/collage/artist’s book In the Shadow of Forward Motion, which I found at the Karma gallery bookstore in the East Village.  I will get to that briefly.

First, let me mention that this was my first trip to NYC in over five years and it was a genuinely magical visit. New Yorkers always tell you that the city was a lot better ten years ago, which maybe it was, but with about 8.8 million people (many of them deeply weird) living in a single place, there’s still plenty of opportunities for the miraculous to enter into the mundane. We saw bad 60s horror movies at the great Anthology Film Archives, punk cabaret music in Tompkins Square Park, the very fun band Pinc Louds playing for a crowd of children and a few adults in an outdoor park, saw thousands of Halloween costumes, and gorged ourselves on dollar pizza slices, coffee, art, music, and culture. It felt like it was perpetually twilight and, six days later, I want to go back.

In a somewhat similar way, when I think of the art of David Wojnarowicz, I’m most struck by its intensity and its compression, as if he was more a bombmaker than an artist and sought to make himself into an explosive devise with the little time he had. Honestly, he’s one of those artists I find daunting because he just accomplished so much in such a short time; he died, of AIDS, when he was just 37. By that time, he’d written one of the best books I’ve read (which I covered here), made numerous stunning short films, was an accomplished photographer, recorded with 3 Teens Kill 4, and was perhaps best known in his time as a brilliant painter. The recent documentary on him covers much and adds a lot to our knowledge of him. It will be no doubt celebrated by the sort of people he’d have spit on.

The doc also struck me, once again, with the feeling that Wojnarowicz was an artist who did what many of us imagine doing and haven’t the nerve for: turning himself fully inside-out and externalizing all of the things rushing through his heart and mind. There’s a manic intensity to much of the “downtown” art from this era anyway; I can’t imagine how Kathy Acker wrote so much either, or how Jean-Michel Basquiat had time to dabble in music and film, while making such great paintings. Art scenes might be shaped more than we like to admit by what drugs are consumed; in spite of the harder things going around, the downtown 80s NYC art feels most inspired by speed and TV. People were throwing a lot of things at the walls to see what might stick.

There’s also a feeling (when we talk about the “Downtown Pop Underground“) that the bouncers fell asleep and the outsiders rushed the doors. Especially today, when artists are becoming a sort of cultural functionary, creating self-flattering consumer items, or properties for portfolios, it’s rather striking how much art from 40-30 years ago actually became more shocking with time. Lydia Lunch recently told my dear friend Emily that she simply can’t be “cancelled” at this point, and it’s undoubtedly true: whatever you might deign to find offensive in her recent work, she’s already done way worse four decades ago. But, sadly, you look at the work of someone like Wojnarowicz and still think “this could never happen again” in the sense that it would never get past the gatekeepers long enough to be canceled. We don’t have to cancel upsetting and fearless artists; we just treat them like they’re already dead.

And the more unsettling truth is David Wojnarowicz was also obviously spurred by his society’s indifference towards his impending death. He made art like time was running out because it obviously was. This booklet was made between February 8 and March 4, 1989. He would die on July 22, 1992. Already, he was dealing with his diagnosis and rages here against the toxicity of AZT, government drug trials that excluded the poor, women, or people of color, politicians who joked openly about curing AIDS by “shooting queers,” healthcare officials who criticized the notion of spending tax money to treat people with HIV, and everpresent homophobia. I think we forget how homophobic the 80s were. We see images of ACT-UP protesting at cathedrals in documentaries and very rarely the “Catholic” protesters screaming at Pride marches: “You won’t be here next year. You’ll get AIDS and die. Ha ha.”

The second joke I can remember hearing, when I was in second grade: “What do you call a gay in a wheelchair? ‘Rollaids’.”

So, we criticize “edgy” artists who rebel against a society that we imagine has given them a comfortable life; but this never remotely the case for David Wojnarowicz. His father was a violent man who beat him up and killed the family pet in rage; he was living on the streets as a hustler before he was out of his teen years; he likely would have died a lot earlier if it wasn’t for Peter Hujar; and then Hujar died of AIDS and later Wojnarowicz was diagnosed. As he famously put it, he’d already “contracted” a diseased society.

And a recurring theme in all of his work, as well as this booklet, is the idea that we are born into a society that was made before us without our imput, and to which we must now adapt ourselves. History has a weight that we struggle under. America is a “contractualist” society, but very few of us reach voting age and fully consider the contract to which we’ve implicitly consented since birth. And, if you want to get out, where do you go?

I think the artist goes inward; they are internal exiles. As Felix Guattari argues in the introductory essay, David Wojnarowicz’s ‘method’ “consists in using his phantasies 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.” The artist himself had a different image:

…I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone…

Of course, he had to explode. You can’t imagine an artist like David Wojnarowicz standing around today at the Gugenheim making pleasant chit-chat about how much more enlightened we are in 2021. They wouldn’t let hin through the front door. It feels like a miracle they ever did. Also a travesty.

And so, what are YOU reading, watching, pondering, playing, or blowing up this weekend?