David Wojnarowicz is easy to recognize in photographs. He had long limbs, a saint’s thin face and a gawkiness that gave him the air of an adolescent. Sadly, he never grew old. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of 37, exemplifies the tradition of the artist-activist. He should be better-known, but discussions of his work have often treated him as an appendage to the fabled East Village scene of the ’80s rather than an artist whose work transcends its moment.
But his moment and his message remain unequivocally urgent, and the Whitney Museum is to be commended for bringing us this beautiful and much-needed show, “David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night.” The retrospective allows us to finally glimpse Wojnarowicz whole; it is a must-see event for anyone who believes in the necessity of love, empathy, and moral rightness. Wojnarowicz’s most consistent theme was the plight of the gay male in Reagan’s America, a notoriously unkind era in which our president responded to the AIDS epidemic with silence and arctic indifference.
Wojnarowicz, who grew up in suburban, N.J., found a hero in the figure of Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th century French symbolist poet and artist-outlaw. As we see at the Whitney, Wojnarowicz began his career with a series of witty black-and-white photographs, “Rimbaud in New York,” in which, from one work to the next, friends of his are shown wearing a Rimbaud paper mask and wandering the streets of Times Square or the abandoned piers on the Hudson River. The photographs are a little blurry, deliberately so, the better to conjure the sweet dream of Rimbaud’s reincarnation.
His later photographs have a magnificent directness. You might know his image of three buffalos tumbling off of a cliff, a metaphor for a generation of AIDS victims falling to their tragic deaths. He poached the image, brilliantly, from a natural-history diorama in Washington, D.C., and U2, to its credit, put it on an album cover
Wojnarowicz’s photographs, I think, are more memorable than his paintings, the latter of which are never contextualized in this show. We learn, for instance, that Wojnarowicz originally intended to be a writer, and took up painting after his dear friend Peter Hujar instructed him to do so. But nothing else about his influences is mentioned.
Wojnarowicz was no naïf, and it’s odd that the Whitney fails to acknowledge the historical artists who interested him. His painting style, with its heavy outlines and graphic immediacy, owes much to a generation of politically-inclined Mexican artists, especially Jose Clemente Orozco and Frida Kahlo. On the other hand, he borrowed liberally from Pop art, recycling posters for Kraft grape jelly and jumbo paper towels, among other staples of the American supermarket.
You could say that Wojnarowicz’s accomplishment, as a painter, was to infuse the upbeat and innocent forms of Pop art with a sense of political menace and impending death. In retrospect, his vision was prophetic. He saw that America had a mean streak and, had he lived, he might not be surprised to see that today, the meanies rule.