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.”

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

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.

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 

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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.

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.

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.
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from Act Up NY

David Wojnarowicz Readings

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.