#david wojnarowicz (silence = death)

[peachblossomboi]

David Wojnarowicz

"Silence = Death" (1990) by Rosa Von Praunheim

[arte-e-homoerotismo]

David Wojnarowicz

David Michael Wojnarowicz; (14 de setembro de 1954 - 22 de julho de 1992) foi um pintor, fotógrafo, escritor, cineasta, artista performático, compositor/artista de gravação e ativista da AIDS americano proeminente na cena artística do East Village . Ele incorporou narrativas pessoais influenciadas por sua luta contra a AIDS, bem como seu ativismo político em sua arte até sua morte pela doença em 1992.

Biografia

Wojnarowicz nasceu em Red Bank, Nova Jersey , onde ele e seus dois irmãos e às vezes sua mãe foram abusados ​​fisicamente por seu pai, Ed Wojnarowicz. Ed, um marinheiro mercante polonês-americano de Detroit, conheceu e se casou com Dolores McGuinness em Sydney, Austrália, em 1948, quando ele tinha 26 anos e ela 16. Após o amargo divórcio de seus pais, Wojnarowicz e seus irmãos foram sequestrados por seu pai e criados em Michigan e Long Island. Depois de encontrar sua jovem mãe australiana em uma lista telefônica de Nova York, eles se mudaram para a casa dela. Durante sua adolescência em Manhattan, Wojnarowicz trabalhou como um prostituto na Times Square. Ele se formou na High School of Music & Art em Manhattan. Em 1971, aos 17 anos, Wojnarowicz estava vivendo nas ruas em tempo integral, dormindo em casas de recuperação e ocupações. 

Após um período fora de Nova York, Wojnarowicz retornou no final dos anos 1970 e emergiu como um dos membros mais proeminentes e prolíficos de uma ala de vanguarda que usava mídia mista, bem como grafite e arte de rua. Seu primeiro reconhecimento veio de estênceis de casas em chamas que apareciam nas laterais expostas dos edifícios do East Village.

Wojnarowicz completou uma série fotográfica de 1977–1979 sobre Arthur Rimbaud , fez trabalho de estêncil e colaborou com a banda 3 Teens Kill 4 , que lançou o EP independente No Motive em 1982. Ele fez filmes autônomos em super-8 , como Heroin e Beautiful People com o colega de banda Jesse Hultberg, e colaborou com os cineastas Richard Kern e Tommy Turner do Cinema of Transgression . Ele expôs seu trabalho em galerias conhecidas do East Village e marcos da cidade de Nova York, notavelmente Civilian Warfare Gallery , Ground Zero Gallery NY , Public Illumination Picture Gallery, Gracie Mansion Gallery e Hal Bromm Gallery.

Wojnarowicz também esteve ligado a outros artistas prolíficos da época, aparecendo ou colaborando em obras com Nan Goldin , Peter Hujar , Luis Frangella , Karen Finley , Kiki Smith , Richard Kern , James Romberger , Marguerite Van Cook , Ben Neill , Marion Scemama, e Phil Zwickler.

No início de 1981, Wojnarowicz conheceu o fotógrafo Peter Hujar e, após um breve período como amantes, passou a ver Hujar como seu grande amigo e mentor. Semanas após a morte de Hujar de AIDS em 26 de novembro de 1987, Wojnarowicz mudou-se para seu loft na 189 2nd Avenue. Ele logo foi diagnosticado com AIDS e, após lutar com sucesso contra o proprietário para manter o contrato de locação, viveu os últimos cinco anos de sua vida no loft de Hujar. Herdar o quarto escuro de Hujar — e suprimentos como o raro papel Portriga Rapid — foi uma bênção para o processo artístico de Wojnarowicz. Foi neste loft que ele imprimiu elementos de sua 'Sex Series' e uma edição de “Untitled (Buffalos)”.

A morte de Hujar levou Wojnarowicz a criar um ativismo e conteúdo político muito mais explícito, principalmente sobre as injustiças sociais e legais relacionadas à resposta do governo à epidemia de AIDS. Ele colaborou com o videoartista Tom Rubnitz no curta-metragem Listen to This (1992), uma crítica às respostas homofóbicas dos governos Reagan e Bush e à falha em lidar com a crise. O filme foi exibido na exposição Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village, 1978–1983, do MoMA em 2017-18 . 

Em 1985, Wojnarowicz foi incluído no chamado Graffiti Show da Bienal do Whitney . Na década de 1990, ele processou e obteve uma liminar contra Donald Wildmon e a American Family Association, alegando que o trabalho de Wojnarowicz havia sido copiado e distorcido em violação ao New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act . 

As obras de Wojnarowicz incluem Sem título (One Day This Kid...) , Sem título (Buffalo) , Água , Nascimento da linguagem II , Sem título (Shark) , Sem título (Peter Hujar) , Atum , Peter Hujar Sonhando/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian , Delta Towels , Mito verdadeiro (Domino Sugar) , Algo do sono II , Sem título (Rosto na terra) e Sinto uma vaga náusea .

Wojnarowicz também escreveu duas memórias em sua vida, incluindo Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration , discutindo tópicos como sua infância conturbada, tornando-se um artista renomado na cidade de Nova York e seu diagnóstico de AIDS e Memories that Smell like Gasoline. Knives abre com um ensaio sobre seus anos de sem-teto: um garoto de óculos vendendo seu corpo magro para os pedófilos e pervertidos que andavam pela Times Square. O coração de Knives é o ensaio do título, que trata da doença e morte de Hujar, amante, melhor amigo e mentor de Wojnarowicz, "meu irmão, meu pai, meu elo emocional com o mundo". No ensaio final, "The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine Over a Mouse Hole", Wojnarowicz investiga o suicídio de um amigo, misturando suas próprias reflexões com entrevistas com membros de seu círculo compartilhado. Em 1989, Wojnarowicz apareceu no filme amplamente aclamado de Rosa von Praunheim , Silence = Death, sobre artistas gays na cidade de Nova York lutando pelos direitos dos portadores de AIDS.

Wojnarowicz morreu em casa, em Manhattan, em 22 de julho de 1992, aos 37 anos, devido ao que seu namorado Tom Rauffenbart confirmou ser AIDS. 

Após sua morte, a fotógrafa e artista Zoe Leonard , amiga de Wojnarowicz, expôs uma obra inspirada nele, Strange Fruit (para David) .

David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), Photo by Andreas Sterzing, 1989

[tomafome]

David Wojnarowicz, A FIRE IN MY BELLY (1986-1989, Super 8mm) from Rosa von Praunheim’s Silence=Death (00:04:10m excerpt, beginning at 00:49:21m). Image: Film Still: Ants on Crucifix (Color print from Kodachrome slide, 20 × 25,1 cm). This edit, done by Wojnarowicz with help from his frequent collaborator Marion Scemama, includes scenes from Mexico, etc... presented in their original order, but edited down and intercut with other footage. The first three minutes of the segment are accompanied by audio from an interview between Wojnarowicz and von Praunheim, before Diamanda Galás’s This is the Law of the Plague comes on (beginning at 00:52:18), over footage of ants crawling on a crucifix, filmed in Mexico. In The David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base

[femmedesyeuxnoirs]

Andreas Sterzing, David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), New York 1989

[iphigeniacomplex]

[Transcript of Untitled (One Day This Kid...) by David Wojnarowicz:

One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn't mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compell him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government's invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.

]

I cried the first time I read this at the MoMA.

[itslegribou]

Affiche dessinée par David Wojnarowicz pour Silence = Death et Positive, deux documentaires de Rosa Von Praunheim et Phil Zwickler, 1990.

[iamfullofdiseases]

Andreas Sterzing, David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), 1989, New York

“I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice. I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.” 

[tobydammit68]

Silence = Death (1990) Dir. Rosa von Praunheim

[notsuchasecret]

On March 12, 1990, some thousand protestors and advocates dropped their mobility aids and crawled up the steps of the US capitol building to fight for their rights.

[id: A photograph of the steps of the US capitol building. Several people are standing and crawling on the steps. The focus of the photograph is an eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, a young blonde girl with a white and red bandana on her head, a blue tee-shirt, and bluejeans, who had left her wheelchair behind to crawl up the steps. She looks toward the counter with a tired, but determined expression.]

This demonstration was instrumental in passing the Americans With Disabilities Act.

In 1988, at the height of the AIDS epidemic here in the US, David Wojnarowicz was photographed wearing a jacket with a rather brutal saying on it.

[id: David Wojnarowicz wearing his famous denim jacket, photographed from behind. The jacket features a pink triangle, a symbol for the gay community reclaimed from Nazi markers for gay men, over which the words “IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.” are painted in white.]

Wojnarowicz felt it was his personal duty and obligation to not allow himself to be silenced, to speak up for his rights, especially following the death of his lover Peter Hujar.

Most of us know the story of the Stonewall riot, of the shotglass heard ‘round the world. Stonewall wasn’t the only gay bar at which there were riots: several in New York City, San Fransisco, and a few other cities also helped spark the queer rights movement as we know it.

But look at the faces.

[id: Three black-and-white images from gay-rights protests in the 1960s. The first features a group of people, mostly men, standing with their fists in the air, shouting. In the foreground stands a man in uniform, likely a police officer, with his hands behind his back, viewed from behind. The second image is a group of people on the stairs of a building, running from a cluster of police officers in riot gear, holding guns and batons. A sign hanging from the building reads “STOP ATTACKS ON LESBIANS & GAYS”. The third image is of a parade, several people walking down a sidewalk in an urban neighborhood. The man in the foreground holds an American flag. The visible banner reads  “STONEWALL MEANS FIGHT BACK! SMASH GAY OPPRESSION! Gay caucus [illegible] against war & fascism”. There are two other banners visible with their wording out of frame.]

My point here is that none of these protests were pretty. None of them were calm, quiet words and polite conversations. The time for that came after.

But each of these protests needed to happen. Many of these people were beaten. Many were imprisoned. History books like to gloss over this, but the fact was that even the so-called poster child for peaceful protest, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, was imprisoned multiple times for his activism, and was assassinated for a reason.

They will not listen if you do not give them a reason to listen.

Ultimately the debate over changing the minds of our oppressors with angry words versus kind words is meaningless because it rests on the assumption that people in power will be swayed by words at all. In reality, people who have power over you have limitless ways of tuning you out or reinterpreting your words to death. It's often the case that they won't actually hear you unless there are material consequences for not doing so.

[fiercerthanyou]

Andreas Sterzing, David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death), New York 1989,

In one of the most striking images of David Wojnarowicz, taken just a few years before he died of AIDS-related illness, the artist, writer and activist is depicted with his mouth sewn shut. The work’s title, Silence = Death, references the slogan from a famous ad campaign started in the mid-1980s which ACT UP, the AIDS activist group Wojnarowicz belonged to, would later adopt as their rallying cry.

Courtesy der Künstler / the artist, the Estate of David Wojnarowicz und / and P·P·O·W Gallery, New York

[seaoflove]

olivia laing: not long before he (david wojnarowicz) died, he made a photograph in the desert of his own face, eyes closed, teeth bared, almost buried beneath the dirt, an image of defiance in the face of extinction. if silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.

[sashakurmaz]

David Wojnarowicz, 1989 

(silence=death)

[thingstol00kat]

Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing

on David Hockney: “Years later, he confided to a friend that he did sometimes consider suicide, adding ‘we all have a desire to survive, because we like the experience of loving.’”

on David Wojnarowicz and his art: “if silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.”

on the work of Derek Jarman: “When he and the designer Christopher Hobbs needed a set in Caravaggio to look like Vatican marble, they painted a concrete floor black and flooded it with water, an illusion of plentitude that was somehow plentitude in its own right, because of its imaginative richness: a richness comprised not of hard cash, but of resourcefulness and effort.”

on women engaging with conceptual art in the 1970s: “As Susan Hiller remarked, ‘you have no subject matter other than what’s already in language, for my generation of women, was not what we wanted to say.’”

on the body: “There are two bodies, aren’t there? The one you see in magazines, the one that is available to strangers’ eyes, and the one you inhabit, the leaky vessel, permeable and expulsive, prone to vents and fractures; a factory, slippery and bilious, its secret compartments stained rose madder and Chinese red.”

[bettedavissmoking]

“David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death),” Andreas Sterzing, 1989. This portrait of the artist David Wojnarowicz was made by Andreas Sterzing in 1989, a year in which AIDS was estimated by the Centers for Disease Control to be the second leading cause of death among men 25 to 44 years of age. Wojnarowicz started out as an avant-garde painter and filmmaker in Lower Manhattan, but his work became far more politically charged after he discovered, around 1987, that he was H.I.V. positive. His sewn-up mouth became a recurring image in his art and activism, a gesture that took the slogan “Silence = Death,” which had been adopted as a rallying cry by AIDS activists and serves as the picture’s subtitle, to its logical, literal extreme. The task of educating the public about the crisis was largely left to activists and artists like Wojnarowicz. “I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice,” he once said. “I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.” #WorldAIDSDay #DavidWojnarowicz #Wojnarowicz #AndreasSterzing #SilenceEqualsDeath #KnowYourStatus https://www.instagram.com/p/CW-BftRMIui/?utm_medium=tumblr

[manicartconsumer]

David Wojnarowicz (Silence = Death)

“This portrait of the artist David Wojnarowicz was made by Andreas Sterzing in 1989, a year in which AIDS was estimated by the Centers for Disease Control to be the second leading cause of death among men 25 to 44 years of age. [...]His sewn-up mouth became a recurring image in his art and activism, a gesture that took the slogan “Silence = Death,” which had been adopted as a rallying cry by AIDS activists and serves as the picture’s subtitle, to its logical, literal extreme.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/t-magazine/most-influential-protest-art.html

[spectacletheater]

Spectacle Radio ep.56 :: 06.01.20 :: Throw Away Your Laptops, Rally in the Streets

(Born in Flames) // Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Jerusalem (Handsworth Songs) // Sam Waymon - Seduction (Ganja and Hess) // Diamanda Galas - This is the Law of the Plague (Silence = Death) // David Wojnarowicz - (Silence = Death) // Trevor Mathison (Handsworth Songs) // Society Waits for You (Society) // Red Krayola - End Titles from Born in Flames // Can - Gomorrha (The Last Days of Gomorrah) // (Song of the Shirt) // (The People's Account) // - // Brian Mcomber - Afronauts // Tony Rémy - protest montage (A Passion of Remembrance) // Carl Vine - An Island (Bedevil) // (A Different Image) // (Drylongso) // Mukul - ALGO-RHYTHM // Smarty - Le chapeau du chef (Le President) // 911 Is a Joke (Welcome II the Terrordome) // Joseph Charles - The Neighborhood Bobby (A Passion of Remembrance) // Tony Rémy - Main Titles from A Passion of Remembrance // Mark Stewart and the Maffia - Jerusalem (Handsworth Songs) (reprise) // Kimyan  Law - Run Ames (Naked Reality) // (Drylongso) // J. J. Johnson - Top of the Heap // Wasis Diop - Ramatu (Hyenas) // End Titles from Welcome II the Terrordome