David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night

PHOTO: David Wojnarowicz photographed by Peter Hujar

Девід Wojnarowicz: історія тримає мене вночі вночі

Where: The Whitney Museum of Modern Art, New York City through Sept 30, 2018.

What’s cool about this?
Reminds you of the art and mad artists who that were the reason you wanted to move to New York city in the first place. Reminds us that we shouldn’t let history repeat itself.

Rant
Went to see David Wojnarowicz’s epic show at the Whitney the other day. I knew him to be a queer outsider artist from New York in the 80’s and a subject of some of photographer Peter Hujar’s best pictures, but had never seen the stunning breadth of this work. The show is brilliantly curated but for an artist as unrepentantly diverse in media, form and format; raw, pure, intense and punk in his approach, one doesn’t have to be a genius to pick out compelling pieces. It should be mandatory for recently arrived New Yorkers to experience this show. We don’t live in the dangerous city full of possibilities where someone young, brilliant but troubled and abused like David Wojnarowicz could make incendiary, jagged, provocative DIY art from scraps he collected from garbage and dollar stores.

We might be living in the dark comedy of Trump as President, but others have seen worse. AIDs ravaged America in the 80s while Republicans looked the other way and let thousands of people die from neglect, willful ignorance and cruelty. Most of us haven’t suffered the shattering sorrow of losing an entire generation of friends to a deadly disease as we watched helplessly. Nor have we fought back with rage and sorrow with everything/anything we had at our disposal, infected with the same virus that killed our lovers as an apathetic government ignored us. And most of us don’t possess the talent, courage or radical empathy that David Wojnarowicz, Larry Kramer, Peter Hujar, Yolanda Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe and hundreds of other New Yorkers found in themselves to live and die with the disease, or be the fiery activists fighting an apathetic system on behalf of our loved ones.

The show was like a mild electric shock to me. A wake-up call. We now live in a safe and sanitized city, but David Wojnarowicz’ brilliant and disturbing art SHOULD keep us awake at night. Because if we don’t fight the scourge of our times, history might repeat itself.