David Wojnarowicz: Rimbaud In New York
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David Wojnarowicz (September 14, 1954 - July 22, 1992) was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.[1]
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City and worked as a farmer on the Canadian border. Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries. In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and was issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act. See Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, 745 F.Supp 130 (1990). Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992. His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.
(Αναδημοσίευση από τη Wikipedia)
David Wojnarowicz
Arthur Rimbaud in New York
Nowhere in David Wojnarowicz's oeuvre are his literary and visual passions so beautifully and inextricably intertwined as in the photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1979 - 80). The Whitney Museum of American Art has recently acquired a print of a single image from the project, and it is a striking example of the series as a whole. At first glance, it appears that Wojnarowicz has captured a "decisive moment," as the street photographers of the 1940s and 1950s did, but when the details of the picture come into focus, a world of unexpected connections opens up.
In this photograph a man stands calmly in front of a light-filled window and points a pistol into the darkness. The searing brightness behind him barely penetrates the interior shadows. The portrait on the window over the man's right shoulder resembles him, and both the drawn and standing figure gaze eerily at the viewer. What appears to be a man's face is actually a mask of someone from another era. It is a portrait of the nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Wojnarowicz carefully conceived the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series. In a manuscript for the project, he typed out the locations, times of day, and situations for his photographs under headings such as "Rimbaud in Brooklyn day and night," "Rimbaud in Chinatown," "Rimbaud in Bowery," "Rimbaud in Daytime Dawn Meat Packin (sic) District," etc. Under the heading "Rimaud (sic) on Lower West Side River,” Wojnarowicz described the setting for the photograph in the Whitney's permanent collection as:
…[R]imbaud in pier with spraypaint portrait of himself…
Although the manuscript reads like an outline for a film, the title "Rimbaud in New York (35mm photo script)" indicates that the artist intended to create a series of still photographs. In 1989, Wojnarowicz described his work on the project as "…playing with ideas of compression of 'historical time and activity' and fusing the French poet's identity with modern [N]ew [Y]ork urban activities mostly illegal in nature."
In order to establish the poet's persona in the series, Wojnarowicz used a mask of Rimbaud's head that he made from a life-size reproduction of the poet. The portrait appears to have been commercially printed on a semigloss paper, much like the surface of a poster or magazine. The artist glued this picture of Rimbaud to a piece of mat board and cut the two bonded sheets around the perimeter of the head. He then attached a rubber band to the back of the mask with black tape that he adhered to either side of the eyes around the temples. Although the rubber band is broken now, it was clearly meant to hold the mask in place on someone's head. Wojnarowicz also cut two small openings in the eyes, and scored the mouth with a knife on both sides of the mask. The reproduction he used is based on a portrait of 17-year-old Rimbaud taken by Etienne Carjat in Paris in 1871. The artist used this well-known image to convey Rimbaud's identity throughout the series.
Drawing on Carjat's portrayal of Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz spray-painted his own portrait on one of the windows. What appears at first to be graffiti is actually another reference to the poet. Wojnarowicz also signed his drawing with a mark that further alludes to Rimbaud. The artist’s journals indicate that in May 1978, before he left for France, he made an artist’s postcard, which he signed with what looks like a caricature of a lightning bolt. In referring to this postcard he said, “…I cut out my bright red trademark – the A. RIMBAUD LIGHTNING STREAK [illustration]…”. The symbol reappears in various places throughout his journals, and in wall text and paintings in the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series.
It remains unclear exactly who posed as Rimbaud for the artist; the individual photographs give no indication of the subject's identity. There is, however, a visual consistency throughout the series, and it appears from the artist's contact sheets that Wojnarowicz and two or three other men wore the Rimbaud mask on different occasions. Any masked figure raises the question of who is concealed, but the Arthur Rimbaud in New York photographs also suggest the more intriguing question of who was behind the legend of Rimbaud.
Wojnarowicz used the Rimbaud mask to conjure the identity or spirit of the deceased poet, but the overt nature of his masquerade is consistent with a journalistic approach he took with the series. Like William Klein, who photographed New York in the mid-1950s after returning from Europe, Wojnarowicz portrayed his own view of New York in the late 1970s with striking intimacy and the insight of a man who has left the city and returned with a keen eye and a fresh perspective. The photograph in the Whitney's collection records a particular time and place--an abandoned pier in New York in 1979-80--with all the potential for darkness and light, pleasure and pain, and art and violence that existed there, poised between the perpetual flow of the Hudson River and the West Side Highway.
The truthfulness of the Whitney’s photograph is also indebted to the psychological or symbolic elements of the work. Wojnarowicz once said:
I've always treated the camera as a journalistic device but at the same time, for years and years I've taken pictures of things because they were psychologically loaded--whether it's a clock, or a hand with some tadpoles in it--no matter what it was it was always extremely loaded. In the course of looking at all those negatives, I realized that the photographs were like words in a sentence and that what I try to do is to construct paragraphs out of the multiple images.
The man, the mask, the spray-painted portrait of Rimbaud, the characteristic lightning streak signature, the gun, the bright light that blurs any view beyond the window, the darkness in the foreground, and the crumbling wall are all key elements in the language of this picture. What appear as details that record the essence of a moment are also illusions that create a visual poetry. Each element of each image, and each image in the series, build upon one another to construct a story or myth. And like a myth, the unexpected and unexplainable resonate with truth. As Wojnarowicz wrote, "…[A]ll of my life I've made things that are like fragmented mirrors of what I perceive to be the world."
David Wojnarowicz was as committed and talented a writer as he was a visual artist. He was clearly fascinated with Rimbaud, and both the poet's writing and life likely were a source of inspiration and identification. Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) lived almost exactly one hundred years after Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), and there are many parallels between the lives of the two men. The most obvious similarities are: the violence they experienced in their youth; the sense of confinement they both felt as young men--Wojnarowicz with a violent father, and Rimbaud with a domineering mother; their desire to experience life fully outside of the bourgeois or middle-class environment of their birth; an understanding of homosexuality, although Rimbaud did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality, but alluded to it in Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) (1873); the confessional nature of much of their art; and their desire to expose the truth. The strongest parallel, however, may lie in their sense of alienation. Both Rimbaud and Wojnarowicz struggled to come to terms with their position in a larger society that neither shared nor condoned their reality.
In 1946, Henry Miller wrote in The Time of the Assassins: A Study of Rimbaud that he also felt an affinity for the poet:
I do not think I am unique in this respect; I think there are many Rimbauds in this world and that their number will increase in time. I think the Rimbaud type will displace, in the world to come, the Hamlet type and the Faustian type. The trend is toward a deeper split. Until the old world dies out utterly, the "abnormal" individual will tend more and more to become the norm.
It is the sense of alienation that is perhaps the most powerful element in the Whitney's photograph and in the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series as a whole. The poet appears in the photographs as if in a dream. He is out of place in the twentieth century, just as he was strangely out of place in his own lifetime. Wojnarowicz photographed the Rimbaud-masked figure in a contemporary world that the poet might have lived in had he been 17 years old in New York in the late 1970s. This was also Wojnarowicz’s world, and the two are so closely interwoven in the series that it is difficult to tell one from the other. Even the illegal nature of some of the activities in the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series is in keeping with Wojnarowicz's own milieu, as well as Rimbaud's description of the poet as convict in Une Saison en enfer (A Season in Hell). The June 18, 1980 issue of the Soho News included several photographs from the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series with text by Wojnarowicz that further evokes this sense of the artist as outsider:
When I was younger and living among the city streets I assumed the smoking exterior of the convict. I entered the shadows of mythologies and thieves and passion: the bedroom of waterfront nights where nameless men lay blooming along the floorboards; where meals and cots and train tickets could be found in a stranger's hip pocket, and nothing was lost but slender minutes.
By 1979 Rimbaud's influence had already inspired a wide range of artists, writers and musicians, including André Breton, Hart Crane, Henry Miller, Patti Smith, the Beat poets, Jim Morrison, and Dennis Cooper, among others. It is not clear exactly when Wojnarowicz's fascination with Rimbaud began, but it was well before the artist's first visit to France in 1978. Wojnarowicz's contact sheets reveal that he had the mask while he was in Paris, but the trip there and his subsequent return to New York may have influenced his work on this series. His journals indicate that the artist felt an intense sense of connection to himself and to the world at large during his travels. A journal entry made between September 7 and September 10, 1978, when the artist was en route to France, alludes to this feeling:
…[S]o really now I don't want to rail on and on about the sense of walking on the ground of foreign countries but the sense is terrific. – At times I feel as if I’ve found myself and that this really isn’t [E]ngland at all – that the sense of it being [E]ngland isn’t really what I’m feeling but rather that it’s all in the mind…
His time in France also highlighted a disconnection from the people and places in New York that he had left behind. Wojnarowicz corresponded with friends while he was away, and he was acutely aware that while they continued their lives in New York, he was living his own in a very different environment. When he returned to the city, he was initially depressed:
Arrived at Kennedy Airport around 11:30 P.M….the unsettling subtle violence of New York/America and yet that realization not easing the sense of almost horror at being once again part of the place….Almost passed out, felt hot and dizzy and weary and sick of all these huge looming flashbacks into states of past mind, things in the past, attitudes here in America, working for livelihood, the flash lighting of Pizza stand clattering character, dark night over grainy red buildings' rooftops, the glimmer of the chrome in windows, the Yemen Club sign…
It is easy to imagine the disconnection Wojnarowicz may have felt upon returning to New York. The photograph in the Whitney's collection and the Arthur Rimbaud in New York series as a whole are imbued with a sense of alienation. Most often, Rimbaud is alone, and when other people are in the picture, they are distinctly separate. The most notable exceptions are the photographs of the Rimbaud-masked man being embraced by another man. Yet despite the resonance of isolation, there is also a sense of connection between the images within the series as a whole. Wojnarowicz pieced together the words and the sentences of his pictures into cohesive paragraphs that describe a time in New York in another dimension. By adding Rimbaud's identity to the places and subjects he photographed, the artist was able to connect all that Rimbaud stood for to Wojnarowicz's own time, place, and milieu.
The Arthur Rimbaud in New York series is a highly sophisticated and wildly authentic work of art. A wide range of references to other artists as diverse as Walker Evans and Joseph Beuys are visible, and yet they are filtered so finely through Wojnarowicz's perspective that it is impossible to know if some of the references were accidental or not. Wojnarowicz was a high school dropout. His teachers were the writers, artists, and people whose work and lives he read about, saw, and observed. He was, however, highly self-educated, and his awareness of the work of other artists and writers was extensive. His own art included prose, poetry, film, drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, printmaking, photography, and performance. At the end of his life he was known also for his AIDS activism.
The Arthur Rimbaud in New York series is a glimpse into the vast and complex art of David Wojnarowicz and a window into a time, place, and psychological climate that reflects the past--and informs the present.
(www.whitney.org)
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