from the photo series "Arthur Rimbaud in New York", by David Wojnarowicz. The location is Times Square, where the young DW was a hustler
I’m reading lots of texts by David Wojnarowicz now, preparing for a screening of his collaborative film and video works alongside the show opening in Madrid this spring.
As with most artists entering the canon of U.S. art, the work that David Wojnarowicz did in collaboration with others has been obscured. Since I know this work pretty well from the NYC East Village ‘80s time, and I live in Madrid, I thought it my duty to try to bring some of it to light. The show coming to the Reina Sofia museum, “History Keeps Me Awake at Night” (29 mayo – 30 septiembre, 2019; it was at the Whitney in NYC last year), is a major moment of remembrance of those fevered years in NYC I lived through.
Many didn’t. Wojnarowicz died at 38. I’m three decades past him now. While he was alive, I was running a video distribution project out of my apartment called MWF Video Club. It was a 1986 project of the artists’ group Colab. The poet Michael Carter worked with me on it.
By then Colab had flamed out as a video- and filmmaking group. At MWF we were pushing the group’s back catalogue of titles. The filmmaking action at that moment was the “Cinema of Transgression,” so named by would-be schlockmeister and pop avant-gardist Nick Zedd. Nick published a zine called the Underground Film Bulletin. His cronies were cranking out uniformly dark and troubled shorts reflecting their own dismal view of human relations, rough sex and poison love.
From the distributor’s point of view – and we were pushing VHS videotapes as hard as we could at (if not into) the commercial market – this amounted to a kind of full court press by parvenu no-budget independents on the slasher and horror film genres.
Nick Zedd was traipsing up and down the streets of NYC selling his videos directly to stores. That was exactly what MWF was supposed to be doing. (Although we were too lazy – “M-W-F”, you see?) So we started pushing Nick’s stuff, and soon his pals Richard Kern, Casandra Stark, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, and others. Michael Carter was more plugged into this gang than me, since he edited the art and literature magazine Redtape. He developed numerous titles from Cin of T artists for distribution by MWF, among them the trailer for Wojnarowicz’ most substantive film collaboration with Tommy Turner called “Where Evil Dwells”. This was intended as a feature film loosely based on the story of Ricky Kasso, the “Satan teen” murderer who vowed he’d chase his victim to hell, then killed himself in jail.
Wojnarowicz worked with Richard Kern, first as actor and then as actor and scenographer (meaning he built the climactic sets for “You Killed Me First”). These were spun out into art installations at a gallery called Ground Zero. James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cooke, who ran that project, later worked with David on the extraordinary graphic novel “7 Miles a Second.”
In the years since his death, much of Wojnarowicz’ full story has come out, through his powerful writing, a doorstop biography by C. Carr, a writer on performance art, and the oral history work undertaken by Sylvere Lotringer, DW: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side (2006). This latter book focusses on the artist’s collaborations, speaking with those who worked with him.
(As I wrote this blog post, I stumbled upon the “David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base” at NYU Fales Library, which holds his papers. So the mushrooms of scholarship continues apace – in English, natch.)
The literature on the Cinema of Transgression is more sparse. It’s a minoritarian moving image movement. In Jack Sargeant’s Deathtripping: The Cinema of Transgression (1995), an interview by Jeri Cain Rossi pins the artist in “the Reagan ‘80s,” a decade of shock for thoughful young people as the USA plunged into a revanchist period. Harsh puritanical voices demonized the weak and vulnerable. The AIDS virus devastated those very people, as heartless “Christians” cackled in glee.
More than his x-ray Rimbaudian vision as a writer, and his faux-naive surrealist painting and allusive photographic collages, it was the titanic and eloquent rage that Wojnarowicz summoned in his last years which made him famous. His art work sold like hotcakes, and he was recognized as a major figure of the East Village art years. But the sum of him was more. “Like an irate guardian angel,” Holland Cotter wrote in the NY Times, “...Wojnarowicz was there when we needed him politically 30-odd years ago. Now we need him again.”
LINKS
Wojnarowicz show coming to the Reina Sofia museum
https://www.museoreinasofia.es/en/exhibitions/david-wojnarowicz
MWF Video Club catalogue
http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore/
Colab, aka Collaborative Projects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colab
Nick Zedd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Zedd
Michael Carter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Carter_(poet)
Redtape at Fales Library, NYU
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/redtape/
climactic sets for “You Killed Me First” at Ground Zero gallery
https://cs.nyu.edu/ArtistArchives/KnowledgeBase/index.php/You_Killed_Me_First_Installation_8
7 Miles a Second
http://fantagraphics.com/flog/7-miles-a-second-by-david-wojnarowicz-james-romberger-marguerite-van-cook-previews-pre-order/
About the David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base
https://cs.nyu.edu/ArtistArchives/KnowledgeBase/index.php/About_the_David_Wojnarowicz_Knowledge_Base
Bibliography
https://cs.nyu.edu/ArtistArchives/KnowledgeBase/index.php/Bibliography--Articles_on_Wojnarowicz
NEXT
Colab, MWF Video and Types of Collaboration
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