David Wojnarowicz – Close to the Knives

“There are things which are and should not be There are things which are not and should be” – 3 Teens Kill 4, Crime Drama, from No Motive (1982)

“What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world towards my eyes? What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras; what do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring?"¹ Almost two decades after David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS, his film A Fire in my Belly (1987) aroused controversy. The shot of a crucifix lying on the floor, covered in a frenetically moving swarm of ants, ultimately led to the work’s removal from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington. Few events can serve as better testaments to the current need for a struggle against conservative moralistic hypocrisy, which Wonjaro-wicz waged in his works again and again. His experiences with domestic violence, prostitution, homelessness, the stigmatization of homosexuals and life with HIV led him to an uncompromising critique of superficial normativity in whose name we pretend everything is alright in our neigh-borhood whilst avoiding the sight of structural oppression crushing those whom ‘respectable’ society does not take into account.

Like many other artists from the East Village scene, he questioned the values of Western civilization and turned to life at its edges. In his work, however, through an imagina-tive feverishness, individual themes grow into a sticky and dismal inferno of illness, death and decay, at the center of which there is the occasional flash of an unexpected faith in the force of vulnerability and beauty. Even the ants disturb-ingly crawling across photographs of naked bodies, weap-ons, money, clocks or eyes serve Wojnarowicz as a parallel of human organization: “They have queens, they create wars, they keep pets, they keep slaves”.² What’s more, the uncertainty elicited by the presence of ants, snakes, frogs or other non-human species is often highlighted by their inad-equate size (Ant Series), which seems – similarly to cut-outs from maps often standing in for human skin in his collages and sculptures – to force us to doubt the obvious nature of our rational dominion over reality.

Even though his life was cut short, Wojnarowicz left behind numerous paintings, drawings, objects, photographs, texts and film and sound recordings, all remarkable in their collage-like and yet consistent nature. The dream logic of unexpected connections between new and found materials obscures the seemingly recognizable idealized world (of the American suburb) with the thick fog of nightmares we cannot wake up from. These ‘gore’ scenes of burning figures and houses, skeletons, bodies and blood, however, are con-trasted with a feeling for fragility accompanied by a strange openness to fantasy regimes. In the spirit of a famous quote of his – “Hell is a place on Earth. Heaven is a place in your head” – a childish naivety meets the cruelty of social prejudice (One Day This Kid…) and hallucinatory lines about technologization and war naturally enclose even the fragile petals of blooming flowers (Americans Can’t Deal with Death).

This hope of creating a radical break through physi-cally manipulating collage material seems to resonate with Burroughs’s ‘cut-up’ campaign against the dictate of linearity, which the theoretical unit known as ccru³ later rechristened as a gesture of ‘sorcery’ making use of the magical power of ‘scissors and switchblades’ for a liberating cutting-up of the strangling system.⁴ In this sense, with its illegibility and intense fantasy, the divided and mixed-up world of Wojnaro-wicz’s collages demonstrates that artistic fiction need not be a mere reflective commentary, but can instead act as a live cutting weapon to transform reality by the hand of oppositional imagination.

For Wojnarowicz, the personal is always social and the aesthetic is inescapably political. Resistance against the damaging power cannot distinguish between the media specificity of painting, graphic art, text, or music – each means of expression grows into a lived poetic practice. Such an active approach, however, cannot be flattened to be ‘merely’ activism, the term most often related to the art-ist’s work. It would be more precise to say that it represents a daily resisting existence in the deep chasm of societal crisis in which art is born of an indignation that cannot be silenced by a few stitches (A Fire in My Belly). And perhaps those who are “Close to the Knives”^⁵ today can awaken inside them those magical gestures to open up the fissure. Because only “with enough gestures we can deafen the sat-ellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room”.⁶

Text: Noemi Purkrábková

IMAGE CAPTIONS

1 | David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, gelatin silver print, 50.4 × 60.6cm, 1993, Christie‘s Images, London/Scala, Florence, 2021
2 | David Wojnarowicz, Fire, synthetic polymer paint and pasted paper on plywood, two panels, 182.9 × 243.8 cm, 1987, gift of Agnes Gund and Barbara Jakobson Fund, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence, 2021
3 | David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid...), sheet 75.7 × 101.9 x 0.5 cm, image 71.4 × 95.3 cm, 1990, Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala, 2021