Friday, December 31, 2010

A Comic Valentine for tweNtYEleven

The Independent, Number 77, January to March 1914, provides another example of art used for political leverage in a gender issue.

Happy New Years and may your own mythic Venus remain intact throughout.

Suffraget Outrages.  


The English suffragets in  pursuance of their policy of making as much disturbance as possible without imperiling life have turned their attention to historic monuments and works of art.   A militant known in the police records as "May Richardson" slashed the Rokeby Venus with a hatchet which she had concealed in her muff, inflicting irreparable damage to the canvas.  This painting is one of the most famous in the National Gallery of London, as it is the only work of the kind done by Velasquez and was saved a few years ago from falling into the hands of an American collector by its purchase with $225,000 raised by public subscription.  The painting could probably have been sold for much more than that, but the seven cuts in the back and shoulders of the Venus have materially reduced its value.  The National Gallery has been closed and also the Wallace collection, the Kensington Museum, Hampton Court and other public buildings which are the chief attraction of London to many American tourists.  Miss Richardson is an old offender.  When arraigned in the Bow street police court she defied the Government saying:  "Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary, has turned the criminal code into a comic valentine.  This is the tenth time I have been before a magistrate this year.  He cannot coerce me and cannot force me to serve a sentence.  He can only repeat the farce of releasing me."  She declared that her purpose was "to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythology as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history." 
Mrs. Pankhurst had been arrested the night before because she had threatened to force an audience with the King, but she went on a hunger strike as soon as she was taken to Holloway jail, and was released four days later.  Sylvia Pankhurst got out at the same time by the same method.  The "cat and mouse" policy of the Home Secretary is manifestly a failure and he is not able to protect public property or even his own house.  In spite of a police guard about Mr McKenna's home six suffragets arriving in a taxicab early in the morning smashed all the windows on the ground floor with leaded clubs. The pavilion of a tennis club at Birmingham was burnt by the "arson squad" and a bomb was exploded in St John's Church Westminster after the congregation had left and several stained glass windows were shattered. 


>>following picture at link above.
THE BACKHAND BLOW
It damages the suffrage cause more than Venus.

Appropriating Appropriately, Rendering Renditions

A fake National Portrait Gallery site (note the .us) has been created to show the censored David Wojnarowicz video "A Fire In My Belly"

Fake Site.
Censorer's Site.

Looking for the Aperture

Art has always threatened:

"Mental image, dream, fantasy, hallucination—all these are comprised in the psychoanalytic concept of the fantasm. Perhaps only such a multifarious concept is adequate to the range of visual elements involved in the experience of reading fiction, or of writing it. Soon after the birth of the novel, doctors expressed concern that readers might be possessed by what they were reading, haunted by textual fantasms."

Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning
This 1999 book by Peter Schwenger on Stanford University Press features a photo-collage by David Wojnarowicz on the cover and this illumination:

"Wonjarowicz's work plays modes of representation against one another to the point that "there is no more world," if by "world" we mean a stable and unanimous vision.  At the same time this dissolution opens a way into possibility: in the absence of preinvented world, "there is no world yet" and politics can literally visualize a new one.  It is for this reason, and not some facile nihilism, that Wojnarowicz writes "I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness."  In seeking to crawl into the dark room of the camera, Wojnarowicz is not necessarily turning away from his life and his world.  For turning, as he has said, is "the moment that disrupts the vision."  It is the moment both of disappearance and appearance, of losing the form in darkness and finding it.  To turn into the darkness of subdivision is to enter the place where vision has always been made and can always be made again."

Others featured in the book include Italo Calvino, Derek Jarman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Coleridge and Rimbaud.

Good Grief

American Suburb X pre- or re-prints an article by Emily Colucci called Peter Hujar & David Wojnarowicz: Some Sort of Grace, also available in pdf at Anamesa, an interdisciplinary journal from NYU.  The article contextualizes Wojnarowicz art in mourning at the death of Hujar.
"After Hujar’s death in 1987, Wojnarowicz aspired to make
an entire film about the death of Peter Hujar and his own process of grieving. While he would never complete this film, there remains an approximately four-minute silent black-and-white segment with the deathbed footage of Hujar combined with clips of beluga
whales swimming. The video ends with an actor, as Hujar, being passed among a line of men in a portrayal of Hujar moving on in death."

This Supportico Lopez Berlin page features a few details on a past exhibition from February 13 to March 21, 2009, and this quote from "DW." "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.”

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Avant Blog

In an article about  mediated identity shaped by outsider status and pigeonholing, Aymar Jean Christian asserts "Some of the greatest artists and thinkers of the 20th century took their less-than-popular identities and used them to create bold works about the broader culture, about society and civilization, from Toni Morrison and James Baldwin to David Wojnarowicz and Judith Butler."
On Embracing the Burden of Representation at Televisual.

Babylon Baroque documents a censoring from the 1890s because of perceived lewdity in Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the "indelicate" ephebe

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

For Maude Lang Syne

Ira Sachs and Adam Baran discuss artist picks and preferences for the 2010 Queer/Art/Film series, including David Wojnarowicz and Bea Arthur, in this Papermag article from January 25. 

This Daily Serving article from February 19, 2010, includes Wojnarowicz's "Untitled (Peter Hujar)," 1989, photo and places it within a death portrait canon including Hans Holbein, Albrecht Durer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and John Baldessari.  It includes this quote from Closer to the Knives. "I tend to dismantle and discard any and all kinds of spiritual and psychic and physical world or concepts designed to make sense of the external world..."

Here's some sense for ya, Maude doing Sex and the City.  Yes, I live in a cave.

David Wojnarowicz in the Media, 1995

On May 5, 1995, the New York Times detailed Zoe Leonard's studio show, annexed by the Paula Cooper Gallery, in an article by Holland Cotter:

"Scattered in corners and across shelves and window sills are dozens of dried fruit skins, each torn apart and painstakingly pieced together again with thread, zippers and buttons. Photographs hang here and there: a woman's scarred torso, a scarecrow hanging from a tree and phrases scrawled across bathroom walls and city buildings....The sewn fruit skins are dedicated to the memory of the artist David Wojnarowicz..."

July 21, 1995 saw the USA release of Postcards from America, a movie inspired by the work and writings of Wojnarowicz.

Leonard's 2008 show at Dia:Beacon featured over 4000 postcards of Niagara Falls.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Timidly Painterly





Manuel Ocampo
Untitled 1991
(via Phillips de Pury and Company)








Latest Shows:
(via Nosbaum & Reding)
  • An Exhibition of Collaborations with 7 Imaginary Friends Showing a Variety of Painterly Mishaps Flaunted as Majestic Embellishments
  • The Reincarnation of Modernism in Hellish Form
  • Monuments to the Institutional Critique of Myself
  • She has a Hot Ass: The Demystification of Art and its incorporation into the Practice of Everyday Life Could Only be Achieved Through the Deliberate Lowering of Standards
  • Monument to the Aesthetisization of Desublimated Fantasies Rendered Impotent by Unredeemable Gestures
  • Painting as an Attempt to Memorialize Reality’s Triumph over Art 
~~~~~~~~~~~~

According to Gordon Bell at depictionandpainting.net, an art survey, David Wojnarowicz's "timidly painterly or weakly print-sourced work" does not serve "'layout' and depiction", but he does share common attributes with the better realized work of Manuel Ocampo.  More headcramping writing and images at pdf including Wojnarowicz's Water and Ocampo's Once Again, First in the World.

Monday, December 27, 2010

David Wojnarowicz in the Media ~ January 2010

This New York Times art review of "Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991" at Grey Art Gallery includes a slideshow featuring Untitled (Rimbaud in New York) by David Wojnarowicz and a beautiful picture of Kathy Acker.

Sunday, December 26, 2010

The Hemispheric Institute's E-MISFÉRICA has an article by Debra Levine called How To Do Things With Dead Bodies which includes a description of the influence of David Wojnarowicz on The Marys, an Act Up affinity group.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Wojnarowicz read works from his writing, as a benefit for Needle Exchange, at the Drawing Center in New York City in 1992 shortly before his death.
RECENTLY PRODUCED
• Limited Edition of
100 .
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ READINGS
NEWLY REMASTERED 37-MINUTE VIDEO ON DVD   
This multi-menued 37-minute DVD may be purchased for $250

Not sure if this is still available, I'll check.

Friday, December 24, 2010

Out, Out...

Nicholas Terzoff describes a collaboration with Kiki Smith in Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure.  Blurry B&W Picture at link.
"In an earlier collaboration with the late David Wojnarowicz, Smith created a group of four photographer's light boxes overlaid with photographs of sections of the two artists' bodies, covered in blood.  The boxes are connected to each other with cables, and collectively to a plaster model of a human body in fetal position.  The cables suggest the umbilical cord, linking child to mother, and the internal lymphatic and circulatory systems.  The sculpted body and its means of vital support intersect across the light boxes, in the form of photographs.  It is the hands which make the strongest impression in these pictures, but it is unclear in what activity they are engaged.  On one level, hands suggest communication, touching and healing, but they are covered in blood, evoking surgery or even torture"


KIKI SMITH Untitled (For David Wojnarowicz), 2000, Etching and aquatint in colors, on wove paper, is a beautiful thing, here.


A Kiki Smith exhibition at the University of North Carolina sparked this description:
"How I Know I’m Here (1985 – 2000, linoleum blocks printed in four sheets Thai paper) showcases Kiki Smith's own body, both inside and out, over sixteen feet. The piece consisted of many photographs taken by fellow artist and friend David Wojnarowicz of Smith biting her toenails, eating a watermelon, picking nits out of a child’s hair or picking her nose along with various key internal organs to portray the senses."

This pdf with Michael Kimmelman at Harlan and Weaver describes Kiki Smith circa 2006, organ and ether.

David Wojnarowicz in the Media ~ 1991

from New York Times October 25, 1991

The Spoken Word

READING, the Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan. Kathy Acker, Hilton Als, Karen Finley, Richard Hell, Hapi Phace, Simon Watney and David Wojnarowicz will read from Mr. Wojnarowicz's new book, "Close to the Knives," to benefit Act Up's Needle Exchange Program. Tomorrow at 8 P.M; a cocktail reception is at 7 P.M. Admission to the reception and reading is $15.
James Romberger has an excellent personal history and analysis of David Wojnarowicz influence over at The Hooded Utilitarian with Wojnarowicz's Apostasy.  He includes a link to Wojnarowicz's last painting here.

I'm curious if Wojnarowicz had any contact with David Foster Wallace, and this speculation about originals and copies via Montevidayo from Joyelle McSweeney doesn't provide my answer, but defines interesting questions.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Curatorial Explanations

David Ward, the curator of Hide/Seek, responds to the Warhol Foundations threat to pull money in this Washington Blade article by David J. Hoffman.

"Ward also criticized the action announced last week by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which warned Clough that unless the Wojnarowicz video is returned to the exhibit it will withhold all future funds to any Smithsonian museum. The Warhol Foundation funded $100,000 of the costs to mount the exhibit.... Ward declared that, though “I find their reaction understandable,” it’s more important for such institutions to remain active in support for the arts at the Smithsonian galleries, which in the past has received a total of $375,000 in Warhol funding of various shows including “Hide/Seek.”

This might be restated: "While the ideals of freedom are important to you, your money is important to us."

David Wojnarowicz in Sound

available at UbuWeb

David Wojnarowicz and Doug Bressler - American Dreamtime

from Tellus: The Audio Cassette Magazine

Wojnarowicz and Bressler's other audio offerings are detailed at The End of Being in Viral Witnessing by Samantha Anne Scott.

"In the musical vein, Wojnarowicz comprised one-fifth of 3 Teens Kill 4, which was three-fifths gay. The other members of 3 Teens Kill 4 were Doug Bressler, Brian Butterick, Julie Hair and Jesse Hultberg. The band’s  name was snatched from a New York Post headline. While 3TK4′s No Motive is frequently compared to Brian Eno and David Byrne’s collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, their sound is as different from that album as it is similar. Whereas Byrne’s affinity for world music rose to the surface on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 3TK4′s sound is pure postmodern America. In a 1984 review of a 3TK4 show at The Pyramid, Christine Cassidy described the 3TK4 sound: “Sirens, rat-a-tat-tat, clashing cymbal, whistles, a robotic voice: ‘this is 3 Teens Kill Four.’ The noise is hypnotic, even frightening, like being in a Keystone Kops film during an air raid”."

Track 13, described as follows, includes some of the same players and the audio is also available on youtube.
 Bite Like A Kitty - Excerpt from Same Way
June, 1984. Mare Earley, Julie Hair, Kathy lnukai, Eileen Muir, Sandra Seymour. Produced by Doug Bressler and engineered by Mark Mandlebaum

David Wojnarowicz in the Media / 20 Years Ago This Month

From The New York Times /

Art View: An Artist Who Seeks Every Opportunity to Unnerve
By Michael Kimmerman / Published Dec 9, 1990

Same as it ever was.
"It took a misstep by the National Endowment for the Arts to put his name on lips across the country."
I'm not sure i'm fan enough to get THAT tattoo.

Quoting the quote of the text, I am.
"The notion of death is linked most poignantly by Mr. Wojnarowicz with the theme of escape, as in one of the texts he has stenciled onto a recent painting: "I wished for years and years that I could separate into 10 different people," he writes. "Ten versions of myself in order to give each person I loved a part of myself forever, and also have some left over to drift across the landscapes and maybe even to go into death or areas which were dangerous, and have enough of me to survive the deaths of one or two or three of me. This is what I thought was appropriate for all of my desires and I never figured out how to manage it all and now I'm in danger of losing the only one of me that is around."

Found via google news archive search

Words In Action

Hyperallergic.com has several photos of Sunday, December 19, 2010, action in NYC.  The protesters marched  to the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, operated by the Smithsonian.

Silence = Death
Smithsonian Stop the Censorship ART+

Consequences of Censorship

"The Andy Warhol Foundation, which part-funded the exhibition and other exhibitions at the Smithsonian, wrote a letter to Clough on December 13 stating that if the video was not replaced, the Foundation "will cease funding future exhibitions at all Smithsonian institutions."" from an Andy Warhol Foundation Pittsburg is ART press release
The pdf also includes screening schedules for A Fire In My Belly by supporting Pittsburgh arts institutions.


Mattress Factory Museum, 500 Sampsonia Way, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday 1 - 5 p.m., Screening continuous, through February 13.
Wood Street Galleries, 601 Wood Street, Wednesday and Thursday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. Screening continuous, through January 30.

Read more at warhol.org: http://www.warhol.org/webcalendar/event.aspx?id=2242#ixzz18xv27oZX

World Class Hero

Philippa P.B. Hughes at The Pinkline Project describes Patti Smith's performance and words of tribute to David Wojnarowicz at the National Portrait Gallery on Saturday in Patti Smith is still a hero
"Her best line of the day: "I imagine Jesus coming back and embracing the ants and being appalled by the crucifix." "

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

A Camera In Some Hands Can Preserve An Alternate History

This space is an attempt to gather information about David Wojnarowicz, as his art continues to influence "the social landscape".  I also plan to go off on completely unrelated tangents, personal, political and otherwise.  For my birthday in 1992 I was given Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives and have considered him an idol and influence ever since.
"A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history."  This quote is from CttK but I just read it in Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, the fabulous Aperture 137.  I'm pleased to see him (what shall I call him? how many times can i type David, Wojnarowicz, DW?, W?, Waje(no)) spreading.