-The Arts Fuse
The artist’s focus on brutality is present in the show, but the anger and homoeroticism that infused so much of his work are missing.
David Wojnarowicz at the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, through November 30.
New Englanders are being given a rare chance this summer to view the iconoclastic work of David Wojnarowicz (1954- 1992), a prolific artist/activist who produced photographs, graffiti, paintings, sculptures, performances, music, videos, and essays that ranted against governmental, medical, and societal stigmatization.
As an artist, he came of age in New York’s ’80s East Village gallery scene, alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat but he always remained very much an outsider. His art was highly political, angry and belligerent, an aggressive stance that reflected the harshness of his adolescence on the streets of Manhattan, which included drug-taking and prostitution. He also lived with AIDS. He was often in the crossfires of the Culture Wars before his untimely death in 1992.
The range of David Wojnarowicz’s raw and visceral output was astonishing in a decade of art-making: post-punk noise band, clandestine murals in abandoned piers, death-bed portraits of photographer Peter Hujar, staged tableaux of a masked Arthur Rimbaud, spray painted collages featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, AIDS activist group shows, and a solo exhibition at Illinois State University. Music groups as diverse as U2 and Kronos Quartet drew on his iconography for their record albums.
In November 1991, I presented David Wojnarowicz’s multimedia collaboration with composer Ben Neill, ITSOFOMO at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. We also exhibited his lithograph, Four Elements (1990), from the Walker’s permanent collection. Backstage, Wojnarowicz was feverish. I let him know it was okay to cancel, but he replied, “I came here to witness.” He died a few months later, at the age of 37.
This is the first time Vermont’s Hall Art Foundation is showcasing Wojnarowicz’s work, selected from its own collection, in one of its spaces. In 2018, the institution loaned some of its Wojnarowicz pieces to History Keeps Me Awake at Night, a retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum, which toured to Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg).
The current exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot square four-panel painting entitled Dad’s Ship (acrylic and enamel on Masonite, 1984). It depicts an ocean liner in flames: billowy clouds and churning seas, layered with frantic brush strokes that allude to the psychological and physical abuse inflicted by the artist’s merchant seaman father. In the upper quadrant, an image of a prone dog floats in relief.
On an adjoining wall sits a painting of a mugging (collaged paper, acrylic on Masonite, 1982), its violence cartoon-like, a wristwatch, ring, and wallet flying into the air. A fiberglass model of a shark collaged with map fragments (1984) serves as a peaceful counterbalance to the mayhem in the paintings. Wojnarowicz often drew on animal imagery as a reassuring talisman.
The second gallery contains eleven disembodied head sculptures (acrylic on plaster, 1984). Each is embellished with its own distinct mix of torn-up maps, money, paint, and differently colored eyes. The artist’s idea was to represent what he called “the evolution of consciousness.” Bruises, gags, and deteriorated bloodied bandages also distinguish each head from the other. Two painted globes and a repurposed supermarket poster stenciled with bestial imagery fill out the display.
These Wojnarowicz creations are powerful, but miss the firebrand I knew. The artist’s focus on brutality is here, but his anger and homoeroticism, which infused so much of his work, have been left out. The seventeen paintings and sculptures on view are political, but they contain little of the sexually charged content that was an essential part of Wojnarowicz’s dissident vision. His media works, published screeds, and performance footage would have added considerably to the gestalt.
The truth is, a pristine gallery with polished vitrines comes off as an antiseptic space to display the rage-filled, multidisciplinary art of an AIDS avatar. Even the informative contextual and historical information provided—either accessible online or in a binder, which includes images from early installations where the selected works originally appeared—feels inadequate.
The Hall Art Foundation’s collection of 5,000+ contemporary artworks is housed on three campuses. Also on view this summer: paintings by pop artists Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha, photographs by Joel Sternfeld, and colorful figurative canvases by Gladys Nilsson. There’s also a plethora of outdoor sculptures.
Visitors to MASS MoCA in the Berkshires can visit the Hall Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer pavilion. Internationally, a number of its holdings can be seen in a converted castle, Kunstmuseum Schloss in Derneburg Germany