‘Any kind of outcast whatsoever’: the art and politics of David Wojnarowicz

Abstract

This doctoral thesis examines the sexual, gender, and bodily politics of the multimedia artist, David Wojnarowicz (14 September 1954 – 22 July 1992). Wojnarowicz coined the term ‘ONE-TRIBE NATION’ to describe the illusion of a heteronormative and monocultural America that demanded compliance of its citizens through the violent suppression of non-normative ontologies. Wojnarowicz’s art and literature sought to destroy the symbolic and literal stranglehold of the ONE-TRIBE NATION over the potentialities of the American population by bringing into public visibility the myriad sexualities, genders, and corporealities that were perceived as compromising the stability of the body politic. By repeatedly pressing at the boundaries of what was visually and imaginatively permitted by the ONE-TRIBE NATION and challenging the highly circumscribed depiction of the ideal American citizen as heterosexual, male, white, able-bodied, and upper-middle class, Wojnarowicz aimed to improve the circumstances of the most dispossessed and marginal individuals of his society. For Wojnarowicz, the apparatus of the ONE-TRIBE NATION reached its apotheosis with the intersection of Reaganite politics, right-wing religious rhetoric, and biomedical orthodoxy during the first decade of the AIDS crisis, granting that his dedication to issues concerning social justice and reform extended beyond his immediate biographical context. Wojnarowicz’s value as an artist is and must be associated with his political identity as a person with AIDS (PWA). However, the importance of Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre extends beyond its singular categorisation as a form of AIDS activism by resituating his politics and motifs as amenable to a variety of contexts. Consequently, this thesis also emphasises the politics of expression at work in Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre, arguing that his literary and artistic strategies generate multiple networks of association and intersection among discrete aesthetic and historical moments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapter one revisits the posthumous removal of Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly, a Work in Progress, from the National Portrait Gallery exhibition, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. The chapter clarifies misperceptions about the offending crucifix sequence, arguing that the text, existing as it does in various extant versions, defies any attempt to singularise its meaning. I therefore undertake a filmographic analysis of these versions to consider their aesthetic resemblances to the Surrealist procedures of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. Identifying significant differences between the versions in their imagery, structure, and duration, confirms the semantic complexity of A Fire in My Belly. This filmographic analysis also elucidates some of Wojnarowicz’s preeminent thematic concerns, such as spirituality, death, and sexuality. Chapter two examines how Wojnarowicz responded to the intersection of biomedical knowledge, symbolic representation, and public policy in 1980s America, which created a pernicious social environment where (gay) PWAs were vilified for engaging in practices deemed dangerous in compromising the illusion of a monolithic ONE-TRIBE NATION. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline represent through Wojnarowicz’s narratives of individual and communal loss the interpersonal and ideological struggles arising from the pathologisation of PWAs and HIV/AIDS. This chapter argues that Wojnarowicz’s texts were always and already engaged in a discourse of (auto)thanatography, since gay PWAs in particular were perceived as a dispensable group by religious and governmental structures operating under the ideologies of the ONE-TRIBE NATION at the onset of the AIDS crisis. The central argument of chapter three is that Wojnarowicz’s narratives about the open road and the automobile are key instruments in his dismantling of the ONE-TRIBE NATION by unveiling the ‘millions of tribes’ that populate America. At the same time, such narratives in The Waterfront Journals form part of an extensive tradition within American literature avowing the transformative and epiphanic possibilities of travel and migration. Of particular interest is how Wojnarowicz’s representations of the emotional, psychic, and physical excursions converging in highway narratives resemble Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Gregg Araki’s The Living End. Equally, the utopian sentiment underlining Wojnarowicz’s catalogue of the myriad social voices he heard during his automotive journeys suggest the democratic humanism of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of the Open Road.’ Wojnarowicz rigorously opposed the policing of imaginative and artistic expression, particularly in its disproportionately negative effects on gay PWAs. Chapter four identifies how Wojnarowicz utilised a repository of non-human figures to critique the main axes of civilisation responsible for preventing alternative relations and subjectivities from reaching the wider public. Wojnarowicz employed a politics of vision in which he distorted perspective, size, and scale in his visual artworks to focus his audience’s attention upon what the ONE-TRIBE NATION aimed to conceal from the public sphere, namely homosexuality and homosexual desire. With his inversion of the hierarchy between human and animal and public and private, Wojnarowicz provides his audience with a momentary glimpse into the positive changes effected through the destruction of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. Chapter five examines Wojnarowicz’s representation of counterpublics such as the subculture of cruising, which involve sexual practices that generate alternative forms of collectivity by resisting the normative logic of sex as dyadic, monogamous, and heterosexual. Such non-normative relations reinforce Wojnarowicz’s dismantling of the ONE-TRIBE NATION through consistently representing behaviour regarded as ‘taboo’ or ‘deviant’ by the status quo. Additionally, Wojnarowicz’s relationship with Peter Hujar challenges pre-existing assumptions about the roles of the carer and cared-for within a feminist ethical framework. Wojnarowicz construes an ethics of intimacy wherein the relationship between the carer and cared-for is reciprocal and interdependent in nature. In chapter six, I contend that Wojnarowicz utilised the conventions of Victorian mortuary portraiture in his postmortem photographs of Peter Hujar. The genre of mortuary portraiture reinforced the political motives underlying his aesthetics, since through these photographs Wojnarowicz commemorated his departed friend whilst situating his death within the political context of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz’s determination to cultivate new methods to express the discursive entanglements of mourning, witnessing, and testimony was closely related to the cultural activism that proliferated within the gay community as a result of the HIV/AIDS crisis. For this thesis, I consulted the David Wojnarowicz Papers in Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, including Wojnarowicz’s personal correspondence and the many audio recordings and unfinished films he made whilst embarking on his cross-country and transcontinental road trips during the 1980s. These materials shed light on Wojnarowicz’s struggle to represent his sexuality and desires in a world he perceived as increasingly hostile to difference in its many forms.