Prolific, lyrical, and possessed of that entrepreneurial optimism which afflicts some who have seen the worst of what the world has to offer, David Wojnarowicz was a multivalent artist who survived a tormented childhood and decanted that bone-deep fury into his work. Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary “Wojnarowicz” doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS. It’s an effective method, similar to what Alex Winter recently drew on for his immersive but more standoffish “Zappa,” and likely the best way to view the life and career of an artist who drew so much on his own life and crossed genres with abandon.
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Wojnarowicz was battered by life early on. Raised in New Jersey by a drunk and abusive father, he spent time in an orphanage, and then after moving in with his mother in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s, became something of a street kid. The chaos of these early years, the hustling and narrow brushes with danger, provides a kind of fuel for the low flame that gutters through the movie and his art. His early work was scattered, agitated, and anarchic. He wrote, took pictures, made paintings and installations out of scavenged materials (the reason so many of his paintings have geographic backdrops? His brother Steve worked for AAA and always had surplus maps). Taking advantage of Manhattan’s crumbling and deserted fringes, he and some other artists opened up an abandoned warehouse on one of the rotting piers sticking into the Hudson River. They turned the grandly decaying space into an ad-hoc art gallery for graffiti works and other installations. Governments being as they are, once the activity was discovered the city tore the place down. A picture of the rubbled aftermath speaks volumes about the city’s openness to cultural expression in the 1970s.
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Wojnarowicz’s stencils of houses on fire and running soldiers began appearing around New York, presaging the combative tone of the punk-adjacent downtown art scene which was ignored by the uptown tastemakers for so long that they just started opening up their own galleries with names like Civilian Warfare. Wojnarowicz and his confederates occasionally staged what he called “action installations,” politically charged happenings often involving combat stencils and buckets of blood purloined from butcheries in the Meatpacking District. In an echt New York moment, Wojnarowicz and some other waiters from the club Danceteria (haunted by the likes of Keith Haring and Madonna) started a band whose name was taken from a “New York Post” headline. The clips Kim includes of 3 Teens Kill 4 shows a band collapsing plinky Casios and doom-laden found sound samples (radio reports of the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan) into a Suicide-esque audio assault.
Like many artists who built the scaffolding of the underground New York art world in the 1970s, Wojnarowicz was enamored of outlaw writers like Genet, Rimbaud, and Burroughs. (One of his earliest series involved self-portraits at various places in New York wearing a mask made from a portrait of Rimbaud.) When he started producing his own work—photography, painting, and writing—it drew on those writers’ outsider sensibility, mixing anger and dislocation with unapologetically aggressive sexuality. It was hardly surprising that Wojnarowicz would later become the target of homophobic conservative crusaders; Rimbaud never had to defend receiving NEA funding.
Unlike many documentaries of this sort which would need to draw on other sources for the subject’s thinking, Kim’s access to Wojnarowicz’s archives includes the dozens of taped journals he made throughout his life. His low, almost muffled, and rumbling voice plays out behind a scuffled tapestry of lo-fi footage showing the raw New York street life and vast highways of America beyond where Wojnarowicz occasionally ventured for idea-gathering road trips. Interestingly, while Wojnarowicz’s visual work was in-your-face—clips from his collaborations with fellow East Village provocateur Richard Kern resemble an art gallery slasher film—his audio musings give the movie greater emotional nuance. “I’m not going to be polite” he announces at one point. But while his rage, which starts escalating along with the AIDS crisis, is highly prevalent, so is his abiding humanity.
While “Wojnarowicz” could easily have been made a one-man show, Kim makes a point of highlighting his subject’s friendships and loves in the small world of artists and scenemakers who shared a kind of foxhole camaraderie (the ever-gabby Fran Lebowitz jokes that when she met Wojnarowicz the whole downtown art scene was maybe enough to fill a small restaurant). His relationships with one-time lover and long-time mentor Peter Hujar — a photographer with a knack for edgy portraiture and an allergy to compromise — as well as his partner Tom Rauffenbart, makes for a particularly warm counterbalance. There is also some humor to Wojnarowicz’s anger. This was often drawn from his contempt for the art world that suddenly warmed to him after the East Village scene exploded in the mid-late 1980s. Commissioned to create an installation for wealthy collector Robert Mnuchin (father of Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin), Wojnarowicz piled bug-infested garbage in Mnuchin’s basement.
Not surprisingly, given the breadth of Wojnarowicz’s work, Kim’s non-strictly linear approach necessarily leaves some gaps. The documentary is very attentive to his focus on the politics and discrimination around AIDS. However, given how wrenching the personal impact was, with his own diagnosis and the loss of friends (his deathbed photo series of Hujar has a carved-stone classicism). However, given how crucial Wojnarowicz’s art and activism around AIDS was to his legacy, Kim probably could have made a little more room for this section.
“Fuck these people that want me to be courageous,” Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992 from AIDS-related complications) says in one of his later taped entries as he struggled with the effects of his disease and political apathy. While his point is made—he’s not going to go stoically into the night but rage away until the last moment—there are few better descriptors for Wojnarowicz and his work than courageous. [A]