Exhibition dates: 13th July – 30th September 2018
Curators: This exhibition is co-curated by David Kiehl, Curator Emeritus, and David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Collection.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992) with Tom Warren
Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz
1983-1984
Acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print
60 × 40 in. (152.4 × 101.6cm)
Collection of Brooke Garber Neidich and Daniel Neidich
Photo: Ron Amstutz
Man on fire
… and two important ones I forgot: earth and spirit!
What an unforgettable, socially aware artist.
His work, and the concepts it investigates, have lost none of their relevance. With the rise of the right, Trump, fake news, discrimination and the ongoing bigotry of religion his thoughts and ideas, his writing, and his imagination are as critical as ever to understanding the dynamics of power and oppression. As Olivia Laing observes, ” …the forces he spoke out against are as lively and malevolent as ever.”
Remember: silence is the voice of complicity.
Although in his lifetime he never achieved the grace he desired, through his art the grace of his spirit lives on. Love and respect.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
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Many thankx to the Whitney Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
This exhibition will be the first major, monographic presentation of the work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) in over a decade. Wojnarowicz came to prominence in the East Village art world of the 1980s, actively embracing all media and forging an expansive range of work both fiercely political and highly personal. Although largely self-taught, he worked as an artist and writer to meld a sophisticated combination of found and discarded materials with an uncanny understanding of literary influences. First displayed in raw storefront galleries, his work achieved national prominence at the same moment that the AIDS epidemic was cutting down a generation of artists, himself included. This presentation will draw upon recently-available scholarly resources and the Whitney’s extensive holdings of Wojnarowicz’s work.
“I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder, and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.”
“It is exhausting, living in a population where people don’t speak up if what they witness doesn’t directly threaten them…”
“When I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realise that I’d contracted a diseased society, as well.”
“I’ve always painted what I see, and what I experience, and what I perceive, so it naturally has a place in the work. I think not all the work I do is about AIDS or deals with AIDS, but I think the threads of it are in the other work as well.”
“I think what I really fear about death is the silencing of my voice… I feel this incredible pressure to leave something of myself behind.”
“To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.”
“I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers for radical gesture is the imagination…”
“Smell the flowers while you can.”
“All I want is some kind of grace.”
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David Wojnarowicz
The image of Rimbaud as a loner bad boy – shooting up, masturbating, prowling Times Square – embodied Wojnarowicz’s early view of what an artist should be: a guerrilla infiltrator, disrupter of what he called the “pre-invented world” that we’re all told is normal, a world of fake borders, gated hierarchies and controlling insider laws. …
A salon-like central gallery is lined with large-scale pictures from the mid-1980s that are basically the equivalent of the history paintings produced by Nicolas Poussin and Thomas Cole, big-thinking panoramas that addressed contemporary politics in a classical language of mythology and landscape. …
Wojnarowicz unabashedly turned, as he said, “the private into something public.” He collapsed political, cultural and personal history in a way that he hadn’t before. He took his outsider citizenship as a subject and weaponized it. The move was strategically effective: It got a lot of attention, including a barrage of right-wing attacks that have persisted into the near-present.”
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Holland Cotter. “He Spoke Out During the AIDS Crisis. See Why His Art Still Matters,” on the New York Times website, July 12, 2018 [Online] Cited 22/02/2022
“Wojnarowicz, the writer, painter, photographer, poet, printmaker and activist, was gay himself, and in his work addressed same-sex desire, the Aids crisis, the persecution of sexual minorities and the Reagan administration’s refusal to acknowledge their existence. But his work is really about America, a place he had described in his 1991 essay collection ‘Close to the Knives’ as an “illusion”, a “killing machine”, a “tribal nation of zombies … slowly dying beyond our grasp”.
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Jake Nevins. “David Wojnarowicz: remembering the work of a trailblazing artist,” on The Guardian website 13 July 2018 [Online] Cited 22/02/2022
“Long before the word intersectionality was in common currency, Wojnarowicz was alert to people whose experience was erased by what he called “the pre‑invented world” or “the one-tribe nation”. Politicised by his own sexuality, by the violence and deprivation he had been subjected to, he developed a deep empathy with others, a passionate investment in diversity.”
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Olivia Laing. “David Wojnarowicz: still fighting prejudice 24 years after his death,” on The Guardian website 13 May 2016 [Online] Cited 22/02/2022
“AIDS is not history. The AIDS crisis did not die with David Wojnarowicz,” reads a mission statement displayed by protesters at the museum. “We are here tonight to honor David’s art and activism by explicitly connecting them to the present day. When we talk about HIV/AIDS without acknowledging that there’s still an epidemic – including in the United States – the crisis goes quietly on and people continue to die… The danger is when you look right now at young people, they think AIDS is over with. They don’t think anyone is living with HIV. They go to the museum and they see it as art – they don’t see AIDS as an urgent problem…”
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Sarah Cascone. “‘AIDS Is Not History’: ACT UP Members Protest the Whitney Museum’s David Wojnarowicz Show, Claiming It Ignores an Ongoing Crisis,” on Art News website 30 July 2018 [Online] Cited 22/02/2022
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Buffalo)
1988-1989
Marion Scemama collection
Courtesy of Estate of David Wojnarowicz and Gracie Mansion Fine Art
© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Buffalo) is one of the artist’s best-known works and perhaps one of the most haunting artistic responses to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The work depicts a herd of buffalo falling off a cliff to their deaths. The artist provides very little context for why and how the creatures got there. The work is in reality, a photograph of a diorama from a museum in Washington, DC depicting an early Native American hunting technique. Through appropriation of this graphic image, the artist evokes feelings of doom and hopelessness, making the work extremely powerful and provocative. Made in the wake of the artist’s HIV-positive diagnosis, Wojnarowicz’s image draws a parallel between the AIDS crisis and the mass slaughter of buffalo in America in the nineteenth century, reminding viewers of the neglect and marginalisation that characterised the politics of HIV/AIDS at the time.
Anonymous text from the Paddle 8 website Nd [Online] Cited 26/09/2022. No longer available online
Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movements – graffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist painting – made New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structures – a feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politics – he varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the prevailing culture.
Wojnarowicz saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction. Wojnarowicz’s work documents and illuminates a desperate period of American history: that of the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But his rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss. Wojnarowicz, who was thirty-seven when he died from AIDS-related complications, wrote: “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.”
Text from the Whitney Museum of American Art
David Wojnarowicz in 1988
David Wojnarowicz (History Keeps Me Awake at Night) Whitney Museum of American Art
Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movements – graffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist painting – made New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. He saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction.
Whitney Museum of American Art
This summer, the most complete presentation to date of the work of artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz will be on view in a full-scale retrospective organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night is the first major re-evaluation since 1999 of one of the most fervent and essential voices of his generation.
Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, performance, and activism. Joining a lineage of iconoclasts, Wojnarowicz (pronounced Voyna-ROW-vich) saw the outsider as his true subject. His mature period began with a series of photographs and collages that honoured – and placed himself among – consummate countercultural figures like Arthur Rimbaud, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet. Even as he became well-known in the East Village art scene for his mythological paintings, Wojnarowicz remained committed to writing personal essays. Queer and HIV-positive, Wojnarowicz became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS at a time when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers – disproportionately gay men – were dying from the disease and from government inaction.
Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, remarked, “Since his death more than twenty-five years ago, David Wojnarowicz has become an almost mythic figure, haunting, inspiring, and calling to arms subsequent generations through his inseparable artistic and political examples. This retrospective will enable so many to confront for the first time, or anew, the groundbreaking multidisciplinary body of work on which his legacy actually stands.”
David Breslin noted, “With rage and beauty, David Wojnarowicz made art that questioned power, particularly why some lives are visible and others are hidden. Wojnarowicz wrote, ‘To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.’ Present throughout his work and this exhibition is the will to show the desires, dreams, and politics of outsiders – like him – queer, economically marginalised, sick, vulnerable, and vibrantly idiosyncratic.”
Largely self-taught, Wojnarowicz came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by great creative energy and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movements – graffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, neo-expressionist painting – made New York a laboratory for innovation. Unlike many artists, Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structures, a feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politics, Wojnarowicz varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the culture.
Wojnarowicz was a poet before he was a visual artist. His mature period began with Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), in which he photographed friends wearing a mask of the nineteenth-century French poet’s face and posing throughout New York City. He became, in the 1980s, a figure in the East Village art scene, showing his paintings, photographs, and installations at galleries like Civilian Warfare, Gracie Mansion, and P.P.O.W. During a time when AIDS was ravaging the artistic community of New York, Wojnarowicz emerged as a powerful activist and advocate for the rights of people with AIDS and the queer community, becoming deeply entangled in the culture wars.
His essay for the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (curated by Nan Goldin at Artists Space in 1989-1990) came under fire for its vitriolic attack on politicians and leaders who were preventing AIDS treatment and awareness. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) threatened to defund the exhibition, and Wojnarowicz fought against this and for the first amendment rights of artists.
The Whitney retrospective will include an excerpt of footage shot by Phil Zwickler, a filmmaker, fellow activist, and friend of Wojnarowicz who also died of AIDS, in which Wojnarowicz is seen preparing to talk to the press in the wake of the NEA controversy. Important text-photo works from this period, which incorporated writings from Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, a collection of essays published a year prior to Wojnarowicz’s death, will also be in the Whitney show, including When I Put My Hands on Your Body (1990), Untitled (One day this kid…) (1989), and the iconic photograph Untitled (Falling Buffalo) (1988-1989).
The Whitney exhibition begins with the artist’s early experiments in collage and photography that were contemporaneous with the Rimbaud in New York series and features three of Wojnarowicz’s original journals that he kept during the time he was living in Paris and conceiving the Rimbaud photographs. Also on view will be the original Rimbaud mask the artist had his friends wear to pose for the photographs.
Wojnarowicz’s early stencil works first appeared on the streets of downtown Manhattan. These show him developing an iconographic language that he also used on the walls of the abandoned piers on the Hudson River and would figure in the more complex studio paintings that characterise his art later in the decade. An important group of spray and collage paintings in 1982 focus on an image of the artist Peter Hujar, his great friend and mentor. A group of Hujar’s photographs of Wojnarowicz will be shown in conversation with these paintings. By the mid-1980s, Wojnarowicz’s paintings combined mythological subject matter with elements that explored urbanism, technology, religion, and industry.
His masterful suite of four paintings from 1987, each named for one of the four elements, will be shown in their own gallery both to emphasise the centrality of painting and image-making during this moment and to mark the beginning of a period of mourning, rage, and action (both aesthetic and activist) marked by the death of Hujar and others to AIDS-related complications. His never-completed film, Fire in My Belly, will be shown among other unfinished film work that later would become the source for much of his photographic work from 1988-89: the Ant Series, The Weight of the World, and Spirituality (for Paul Thek). A gallery will be devoted to a recording of Wojnarowicz reading from his own writings in 1992 at The Drawing Center in Soho.
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). Clockwise, from top left: Andreas Sterzing, Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34, NYC, 1983-1984; David Wojnarowicz, Fuck You Faggot Fucker, 1984; Peter Hujar, Untitled (Pier), 1983; Peter Hujar, Canal Street Piers: Krazy Kat Comic on Wall (by David Wojnarowicz), 1983; David Wojnarowicz, Untitled, 1982; David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Slam Click), 1983
Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018)
Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: Queer Basher / Icarus Falling, 1986; Unfinished Film (A Fire in My Belly), 1986-1987; Unfinished Film (Mexico, etc… Peter, etc…), 1987; Unfinished Film (with sequence in memory of Peter Hujar), c. 1987; Unfinished Film (Mexico Film Footage II), c. 1988; A Worker, 1986
Photograph by Ron Amstutz
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, July 13-September 30, 2018). From left to right: He Kept Following Me, 1990; I Feel A Vague Nausea, 1990; Americans Can’t Deal with Death, 1990; We Are Born into a Preinvented Existence, 1990.
Photograph by Ron Amstutz
About the Artist
After hitchhiking across the U.S. and living for several months in San Francisco, and then in Paris, David Wojnarowicz settled in New York in 1978 and soon after began to exhibit his work in East Village galleries. He was included in the 1985 and 1991 Whitney Biennials, and was shown in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Previous exhibitions to focus on Wojnarowicz include “Tongues of Flame” at the University Galleries of Illinois State University (1990) and “Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz” at the New Museum (1999). Wojnarowicz was the author of a number of books, including Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991). His artwork is in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.
Press release from the Whitney Museum of American Art
Gallery 1
Wojnarowicz, who aspired to be a writer in the 1970s, immersed himself in the work of William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet – two collages here feature them – but he felt a particular kinship to the iconoclastic nineteenth-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud. In the summer of 1979, just back from a stay in Paris with his sister, the twenty-four-year-old Wojnarowicz photographed three of his friends roaming the streets of New York wearing life-size masks of Rimbaud. Using a borrowed camera, Wojnarowicz staged the images in places important to his own story: the subway, Times Square, Coney Island, all-night diners, the Hudson River piers, and the loading docks in the Meatpacking District, just steps away from the Whitney Museum. Born one hundred years, almost to the month, before Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud rejected established categories and wanted to create new and sensuous ways to participate in the world. He, like Wojnarowicz, was the forsaken son of a sailor father, made his queerness a subject of his work, and knowingly acknowledged his status as an outsider (“Je est un autre” – “I is an other” – is perhaps Rimbaud’s most famous formulation).
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York
1978-1979 (printed 1990)
Gelatin silver print
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm)
Collection of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz
Courtesy P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York (On Subway)
1978-1979 (printed 1990)
Gelatin silver print
8 × 10 in. (20.3 × 25.4cm)
Collection of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz
Courtesy P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp, Pier)
1978-1979 (printed 2004)
Gelatin silver print
10 × 8 in. (25.4 × 20.3cm)
Collection of Philip E. Aarons and Shelley Fox Aarons
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W., New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Genet after Brassaï)
1979
Collage of offset-lithographs and coloured pencil
12 × 15 in. (30.5 × 38.1cm)
Private collection
Photo: Carson Zullinger
At the same time as he conceived the Rimbaud series, Wojnarowicz created homages to other personal heroes, including Jean Genet (1910-1986), the French novelist, poet, and political activist. Genet resonated with Wojnarowicz for his erotic vision of the universe, his embrace of the outsider, and his frank writing on gay sex. For Untitled (Genet after Brassaï), Wojnarowicz transforms the iconoclast writer into a saint; in the background, a Christ figure appears to be shooting up with a syringe. When later criticised by religious conservatives, Wojnarowicz explained that he saw drug addiction as a contemporary struggle that an empathetic Christ would identify with and forgive.
Gallery 2
In the early 1980s Wojnarowicz had no real income. He scavenged materials like supermarket posters and trashcan lids as well as cheap printed materials available in his Lower East Side neighbourhood. Incorporating them in his art, Wojnarowicz found radical possibilities in these discarded, forgotten artefacts and in the city itself. He embraced the abandoned piers on the Hudson River, particularly Pier 34 just off Canal Street, for the freedom they offered. He cruised for sex there, and he also wrote and made art on site. He appreciated their proximity to nature and the solitude he could find there.
Wojnarowicz began using stencils out of necessity. He was a member of the band, 3 Teens Kill 4, whose album, No Motive, can be played on the website. He produced posters for their shows, and to prevent their removal started making templates to spray-paint his designs on buildings, walls, and sidewalks. These images – the burning house, a falling man, a map outline of the continental United States, a dive-bombing aircraft, a dancing figure – became signature elements in his visual vocabulary, creating an iconography of crisis and vulnerability. Wojnarowicz frequently railed against what he called the “pre-invented world”: a world colonised and corporatised to such an extent that it seems to foreclose any alternatives. For him, using found objects, working at the abandoned piers for an audience of friends and strangers, and creating a language of his own were ways to shatter the illusion of the pre-invented world and make his own reality.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Burning House)
1982
Spray paint on paper
23 15/16 × 17 7/8 in. (60.8 × 45.4cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Print Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Falling man and map of the U.S.A.)
1982
Spray paint on paper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from the Print Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
“3 Teens Kill 4 – No Motive Poster”
1982-1983
Spray paint on paper
30 × 40 1/8 in. (76.2 × 101.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from the Print Committee
© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Diptych II
1982
Spray paint with acrylic on composition board
48 × 96 in. (121.9 × 243.8cm)
Collection of Raymond J. Learsy
Image courtesy Raymond J. Learsy
Photo: Brian Wilcox
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
True Myth (Kraft Grape Jelly)
1983
Screenprint, edition 42/50
31 1/4 × 22 1/2 in. (79.4 × 57.2cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from the Print Committee
© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Jean Genet Masturbating in Metteray Prison (London Broil)
1983
Screenprint on supermarket poster
34 × 25 in. (86.4 × 63.5cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Print Committee
Photo: Mark-Woods.com
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Fuck You Faggot Fucker
1984
Four black-and-white photographs, acrylic, and collaged paper on Masonite
48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9cm)
Collection of Barry Blinderman
Image courtesy Barry Blinderman, Normal, Illinois
Photo: Jason Judd
This work was one of Wojnarowicz’s first to directly tackle homophobia and gay bashing and to embrace same-sex love. Its title comes from a scrap of paper containing a homophobic slur that Wojnarowicz found and affixed below the central image of two men kissing. Made with one of his stencils, these anonymous men are archetypes, stand-ins for a multitude of personal stories. Using photographs taken at the piers and in an abandoned building on Avenue B, Wojnarowicz also includes himself and his friends John Hall and Brian Butterick in this constellation. Maps like those in the background here often appear in Wojnarowicz’s work; for him, they represented a version of reality that society deemed orderly and acceptable. He often cut and reconfigured the maps to gesture toward the groundlessness, chaos, and arbitrariness of both man-made borders and the divisions between “civilisation” and nature.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Fuck You Faggot Fucker (details)
1984
Four black-and-white photographs, acrylic, and collaged paper on Masonite
48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9cm)
Collection of Barry Blinderman
Image courtesy Barry Blinderman, Normal, Illinois
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Prison Rape
1984
Acrylic and spray paint on posters on composition board
48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9cm)
Private collection
Image courtesy Ted Bonin
Photo: Joerg Lohse
Andreas Sterzing
Something Possible Everywhere: Pier 34, NYC
[Wojnarowicz’s Gagging Cow at the Pier]
1983
Courtesy the artist and Hunter College Art Galleries, New York
“So simple, the appearance of night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films, the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light, sounds of plane engines easing into the distance.” ~ David Wojnarowicz
![Peter Hujar (1934-1992) 'Canal Street Piers: Krazy Kat Comic on Wall [by David Wojnarowicz]' 1983](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/peter-hujar-canal-street-piers-krazy-kat-comic-on-wall-by-david-wojnarowicz-web.jpg)
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
Canal Street Piers: Krazy Kat Comic on Wall (by David Wojnarowicz)
1983
Gelatin silver print
8 x 8 inches (20.3 x 20.3cm)
Peter Hujar Archive, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Two Heads)
1984
Acrylic on commercial screenprint poster
41 × 47 1/2 in. (104.1 × 120.7cm)
Collection of the Ford Foundation
Image courtesy the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Incident #2 – Government Approved
1984
Acrylic and collaged paper on composition board
51 × 51 × 7/8 in. (129.5 × 129.5 × 2.2cm) framed
Collection of Howard Bates Johnson
Gallery 3
For his exhibition at the East Village gallery Civilian Warfare in May 1984, Wojnarowicz created a group of cast-plaster heads that he individualised by applying torn maps and paint. He made twenty-three of them, a reference to the number of chromosome pairs in human DNA, and explained that the series was about “the evolution of consciousness.” At the gallery, he installed these “alien heads” on long shelves on a wall painted with a bull’s-eye. Suggesting a ring line, the installation evoked the conflicts then ravaging Central and South America, from the Contra War in Nicaragua to the Salvadoran Civil War to the Argentine Dirty War. The spectre of torture, disappearance, and human-rights abuses cast a shadow over all of the Americas.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1984
From the Metamorphosis series
Collaged paper and acrylic on plaster
9 1/2 × 9 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (24.1 × 24.1 × 24.1cm)
Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody
Image courtesy Beth Rudin DeWoody
Photo: Monica McGivern
Gallery 4
Wojnarowicz met Peter Hujar in 1980. They were briefly lovers, but the relationship soon transitioned and intensified into a friendship that defied categorisation. The two frequently made artworks using the other as subject. Twenty years Wojnarowicz’s senior, Hujar was a photographer and a known figure in the New York art world, esteemed for his achingly beautiful, technically flawless portraits. At the time of their meeting, Wojnarowicz was still finding his way. It was Hujar who convinced him that he was an artist and, specifically, encouraged him to paint – something Wojnarowicz had never done. After Hujar’s death in 1987 due to complications from AIDS, Wojnarowicz would claim him as “my brother, my father, my emotional link to the world.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: Saint Sebastian
1982
Acrylic and spray paint on Masonite
48 × 48 in. (121.9 × 121.9cm)
Collection of Matthijs Erdman
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
In this painting from 1982, Wojnarowicz composes a meditation on male desire. His friend and mentor Peter Hujar stretches across the bottom, reclining with his eyes closed, apparently dreaming the scene above. An image of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) masturbating dominates the centre of the composition; it is inspired by the writer’s description of his first masturbatory experience, initiated by a reproduction of a Renaissance painting of Saint Sebastian. The torso of the Christian martyr – young, statuesque, and pierced with arrows – rises above, a glowing aura linking him to the night sky and offering him up as an icon of queerness.
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
David Wojnarowicz (Village Voice “Heartsick: Fear and Loving in the Gay Community”)
1983
Gelatin silver print
10 7/8 × 13 5/8 in. (27.6 × 34.6cm)
Collection of Philip E. and Shelley Fox Aarons
© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
This photograph of Wojnarowicz with his head bowed appeared on the cover of the June 28, 1983, edition of The Village Voice. It accompanied the article “Heartsick: Fear and Loving in the Gay Community” by Richard Goldstein. At the time of publication, very little was known about HIV and AIDS, including how it spread. Goldstein wrote: “If one were to devise a course of action based on incontrovertible evidence alone, there would be no conclusion to draw. Should I screen out numbers who look like they’ve been around? Should I travel to have sex? Should I look for lesions before I leap? How do I know my partner doesn’t have the illness in its (apparently protracted) dormant stage?” By the end of 1983, there were 2,118 reported AIDS-related deaths in the United States.
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
David Wojnarowicz
1981
Gelatin silver print
14 3/4 × 14 13/16 in. (37.5 × 37.6cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from the Photography Committee
© The Peter Hujar Archive
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
David Wojnarowicz with Hand Touching Eye
1981
Gelatin silver print
14 3/4 x 14 3/4″ (37.4 x 37.4cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Fellows of Photography Fund
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
David Wojnarowicz Reclining (II)
1981
Gelatin silver print
14 11/16 x 14 13/16 in. (37.3 x 37.6cm)
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ
Gift of Stephen Koch
Peter Hujar (American, 1934-1992)
David Lighting Up
1985
Gelatin silver print
14 5/8 × 14 3/4 in. (37.1 × 37.5cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Promised gift of the Fisher Landau Center for Art
© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC
Courtesy PaceMacGill Gallery, N.Y. and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Green Head)
1982
Acrylic on composition board
48 × 96 in. (121.9 × 243.8cm)
Collection of Hal Bromm and Doneley Meris
Gallery 5
In the mid-1980s Wojnarowicz began to incorporate his disparate signs and symbols into complex paintings. A fierce critic of a society he saw degrading the environment and ostracising the outsider, Wojnarowicz made compositions that were dense with markers of industrial and colonised life. These include railroad tracks and highways, sprawling cities and factory buildings, maps and currency, nuclear power diagrams and crumbling monuments. Interspersed among them are symbols that he connected to fragility, such as blood cells, animals and insects, and the natural world. Wojnarowicz used these depictions as metaphors for a culture that devalues the lives of those on the periphery of mainstream culture. He made these paintings at a time when AIDS was ravaging New York, particularly the gay community. Although AIDS was first identified in 1981, President Ronald Reagan did not mention it publicly until 1985. By the end of that year, in New York alone there already had been 3,766 AIDS-related deaths.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
History Keeps Me Awake at Night (For Rilo Chmielorz)
1986
Acrylic, spray paint, and collaged paper on composition board
72 x 84 in. (170.2 x 200cm)
Collection of John P. Axelrod
Photo: Ron Cowie
In History Keeps Me Awake at Night (for Rilo Chmielorz) Wojnarowicz presents a dystopic vision of American life. Presenting simulated American currency and bureaucratic emblems alongside symbols of crime, monstrosity, and chaos, the painting’s threatening imagery runs counter to the apparently placid sleep of the man below. If the painting is about fear, perhaps the fear of staring down AIDS, Wojnarowicz presents it as an endemic condition in which new fears are built upon historical ones.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Das Reingold: New York Schism
1987
Acrylic and collaged paper on board
48 1/4 × 72 in. (122.6 × 182.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Promised gift of Emily Fisher Landau
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Photo: Tim Nighswander/Imaging4Art
A nightmarish allegory of violence and capitalism, Das Reingold: New York Schism makes reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (1854), in which the holder of a magical ring will gain the power to rule the world should he renounce love. This narrative assumed particular power at a moment when artists were joining the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies and government mismanagement of the AIDS crisis.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
The Death of American Spirituality
1987
Spray paint, acrylic, and collage on plywood, two panels
81 × 88 in. (205.7 × 223.5cm) overall
Private collection
© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York.
The Death of American Spirituality contains a number of Wojnarowicz’s recurring symbols and imagery densely layered in a single composition. With its radically juxtaposed motifs that suggest different temporalities – from geologic landforms to emblems of the American West and the Industrial Revolution – the mythical tableau depicts destruction proliferating alongside technological advancement and geographic conquest.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
I Use Maps Because I Don’t Know How to Paint
1984
Acrylic and collaged paper on composition board
48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9cm)
Rubell Family Collection, Miami
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
The Birth of Language II
1986
Acrylic, spray paint, and collaged paper on wood
67 x 79 in. (170.2 x 200.7cm)
Collection of Matthijs Erdman
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water
1986
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
78 3/4 in. × 157 1/2 in. (200 × 400cm)
Private collection
Image courtesy Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller, Cologne
Photo: Nick Ash
Gallery 6
Wojnarowicz filmed constantly during this period, bringing his Super 8 camera with him on his frequent travels. At the end of October 1986, he went to Mexico where he filmed the Day of the Dead festivities and other scenes at Teotihuacán. This footage includes fire ants climbing on objects such as clocks, currency, and a crucifix that Wojnarowicz brought with him. Wojnarowicz, who was raised Roman Catholic, would later speak of Jesus Christ as one who “took on the suffering of all people.” As the AIDS crisis intensified, he sought to find a symbolic language that encapsulated ideas of spirituality, mortality, vulnerability, and violence. He began to edit the Mexican footage into a film entitled A Fire in My Belly, but it was never finished. Ravenous for the world and its offerings, Wojnarowicz used film as form of second sight, a visual notebook, and a record for us to see the world – at least in ashes – as he did.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Still from an unfinished film
Super 8 film, black and white, silent, 3 minutes
Courtesy the Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Unfinished Film (A Fire in My Belly)
1986-1987
Super 8 film transferred to digital video, black-and-white and colour, silent; 20:56 min.
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University
Original Silent Version of “A Fire in My Belly” by the late David Wojnarowicz. This film was censored by The National Portrait Gallery in early December, 2010.
Gallery 7
On September 17, 1987, Gracie Mansion Gallery opened an exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s work called The Four Elements. These symbolically and technically dense paintings – allegorical representations of earth, water, fire, and wind – are Wojnarowicz’s take on a theme with a long history in European art. By linking his contemporary moment to a historical subject, he claims a lineage for his work as he suggests the particularity – and particular violence – of his time.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Water
1987
Acrylic, ink, and collaged paper on composition board
72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8cm)
Second Ward Foundation
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Water (details)
1987
Acrylic, ink, and collaged paper on composition board
72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8cm)
Second Ward Foundation
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Earth
1987
Acrylic and collaged paper on wood, two panels
72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Agnes Gund
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Wind (For Peter Hujar)
1987
Acrylic and collaged paper on composition board, two panels
72 × 96 in. (182.9 × 243.8cm)
Collection of the Second Ward Foundation
Wind (For Peter Hujar) is the most personal and self-referential of Wojnarowicz’s Four Elements paintings. A red line running through an open window connects a baby – based on a photograph of his brother Steven’s newborn – to a headless paratrooper. Wojnarowicz, in his only painted self-portrait, stands behind. The bird’s wing dominating the upper left quarter of the painting is a copy of one of Hujar’s favorite works – a 1512 drawing by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. Hujar would die less than two months after this painting was first exhibited and Wojnarowicz later had the wing carved into his friend’s tombstone. Three days after Hujar’s death, Wojnarowicz wrote in his journal after visiting his grave: “He sees me, I know he sees me. He’s in the wind in the air all around me.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Fire
1987
Acrylic and collaged paper on wood, two panels
72 x 96 in. (182.9 x 243.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Gift of Agnes Gund and Barbara Jakobson Fund
Gallery 8: Sound Gallery
Writing and engaging in readings was an important part of David Wojnarowicz’s practice. The transcript on the website is text from audio recordings of Wojnarowicz reading his own work in 1992 at the Drawing Center, New York, at a benefit for Needle Exchange. He read excerpts from his books Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992); a short work, “Spiral,” which appeared in Artforum in 1992; and another brief piece that begins with the phrase “When I put my hands on your body,” which also appears in one of his photo-based works.
Gallery 9
Wojnarowicz was in the hospital room when Peter Hujar died from complications related to AIDS. He asked the others who were there to leave so that he could film and photograph his friend for the last time. The three tender images of Hujar’s head, hands, and feet installed here come from this final encounter. While Wojnarowicz would continue to draw and paint after Hujar’s death, photography and writing would preoccupy him until the end of his life. He moved into Hujar’s loft, which had a darkroom, enabling him to reconsider – and experiment with – the vast number of negatives he had accumulated over the years.
Wojnarowicz found himself at the centre of political debates involving the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In a newsletter that the American Family Association distributed to criticise NEA funding of exhibitions with gay content, the religious lobby group excerpted Wojnarowicz’s work out of context. He sued for copyright infringement and won. Wojnarowicz’s hand-edited affdavit and related materials are included here. The searing essay he contributed to the catalogue for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, an exhibition curated by artist Nan Goldin in 1989, triggered the NEA to withdraw its funding. In it Wojnarowicz strenuously criticised – and personally demonised conservative policy-makers for failing to halt the spread of AIDS by discouraging education about safe sex practices. One of its most memorable passages is the pronouncement: “WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Bad Moon Rising
1989
Four gelatin silver prints, acrylic, string, and collage on composition board
36 3/4 x 36 5/8 x 2 1/4 in. (93.3 x 93 x 5.7cm)
Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
Phil Zwickler (b. 1954; Alexandria, VA; d. 1991; New York, NY)
Footage of Wojnarowicz speaking about the National Endowment for the Arts controversy (extract)
1989
Video transferred to digital video, color, sound; 7:23 min.
Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University; courtesy the
Estate of Phil Zwickler
Artist David Wojnarowicz discusses right-wing backlash against the NEA and arts funding (circa 1989).
This 1989 video by Phil Zwickler, a filmmaker, journalist, and AIDS activist, was shot in Wojnarowicz’s apartment days before the opening of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, an exhibition that presented artists’ responses to the AIDS crisis. John Frohnmayer, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), withdrew the NEA’s $10,000 grant to the exhibition in response to the essay that Wojnarowicz wrote for the catalogue. The grant was later partially reinstated, but with the stipulation that no money was to be used to support the catalogue. Zwickler filmed Wojnarowicz while the controversy was unfolding.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1987 (printed 1988)
Gelatin silver print
10 1/8 x 14 1/2 in. (25.7 x 36.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Photography Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1987 (printed 1988)
Gelatin silver print
10 1/8 x 14 1/2 in. (25.7 x 36.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Photography Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1987 (printed 1988)
Gelatin silver print
10 1/8 x 14 1/2 in. (25.7 x 36.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation and the Photography Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Hujar Dead)
1988-1989
Black-and-white photograph, acrylic, screenprint, and collaged paper on Masonite
39 × 32 in. (99.1 × 81.3cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol in memory of David Wojnarowicz
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
This painting presents an urgent condemnation of systemic homophobia and government inattention to people with AIDS – including, by that point, Wojnarowicz himself – and expresses the artist’s extreme anger at being at the mercy of those in power. The nine photographs at the centre of the painting are of Peter Hujar, taken shortly after his death. The painting was included in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at New York’s Artists Space from November 16, 1989, to January 6, 1990. Curated by Nan Goldin, the exhibition also included work by other artists responding to the AIDS crisis: David Armstrong, Tom Chesley, Dorit Cypris, Jane Dickson, Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Darrel Ellis, Allen Frame, Peter Hujar, Greer Lankton, Siobhan Liddel, James Nares, Perico Pastor, Margo Pelletier, Clarence Elie Rivera, Vittorio Scarpati, Jo Shane, Kiki Smith, Janet Stein, Stephen Tashjian, Shellburne Thurber, and Ken Tisa.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Childhood
1988
Acrylic, watercolour, and collaged paper on canvas
42 × 47 1/2 in. (106.7 × 120.7cm)
Collection of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams
Photo: Michael Tropea
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Something from Sleep III (For Tom Rauffenbart)
1989
Acrylic and spray paint on canvas
48 1/2 x 39 x 1 5/8 in. (123.2 x 99.1 x 4.1cm)
Collection of Tom Rauffenbart
Installation view of David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York showing some of the Ant series
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Time and Money)
1988-1989
From the Ant Series
Gelatin silver print
16 × 20 in. (40.6 × 50.8cm)
Collection of Steve Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Desire)
1988-1989
From the Ant Series
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8cm)
Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Violence)
1988-1989
From the Ant Series
Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8cm)
Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Spirituality (For Paul Thek)
1988-1989
Gelatin silver prints on museum board
41 × 32 1/2 in. (104.1 × 82.6cm)
Collection of Steve Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
Wojnarowicz often presented a series of photographs as a single composition, as he does with Spirituality (For Paul Thek). This method allows the images to retain their singularity as they merge into one entity, and to serve as potent metaphors for the role – and importance – of the individual in the larger society. The central image of the crucifix was taken while Wojnarwicz was in Teotihuacán, north of Mexico City. He wanted to stage an image that suggested the eternal conflict between nature and man-made culture. Wojnarowicz considered ants to be evolved beings, writing in a 1989 text that they “are the only insects to keep pets, use tools, make war, and capture slaves.” The photograph of the reclining man was taken in 1980 and depicts Wojnarowicz’s friend Iola Carew, then a coworker at the nightclub Danceteria. Carew was the first person Wojnarowicz knew to be diagnosed with AIDS. The work is dedicated to the artist Paul Thek, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1988.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Spirituality (For Paul Thek) (details)
1988-1989
Gelatin silver prints on museum board
41 × 32 1/2 in. (104.1 × 82.6cm)
Collection of Steve Johnson and Walter Sudol
Courtesy Second Ward Foundation
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1989
From the Sex Series (For Marion Scemama)
Gelatin silver print
16 × 19 13/16 in. (40.6 × 50.3cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from The Sondra and Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc., and the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The works in Wojnarowicz’s Sex Series are punctuated with circular insets containing an array of cropped details, including pornographic imagery. For Wojnarowicz, these voyeuristic “peepholes” evoked surveillance photos or objects under a microscope. This was one of his first projects after Hujar’s death and Wojnarowicz’s own diagnosis with HIV. “It came out of loss,” he said. “I mean every time I opened a magazine there was the face of somebody else who died. It was so overwhelming and there was this huge backlash about sex, even within the activist community… And it essentially came out of wanting some sexy images on the wall – for me. To keep me company. To make me feel better.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1989
From the Sex Series (For Marion Scemama)
Gelatin silver print
16 × 19 13/16 in. (40.6 × 50.3cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from The Sondra and Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc., and the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled
1989
From the Sex Series (For Marion Scemama)
Gelatin silver print
16 × 19 13/16 in. (40.6 × 50.3cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from The Sondra and Charles Gilman Jr. Foundation, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Inc., and the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Galery 10: World Made Flesh
The sole survey of Wojnarowicz’s work during his lifetime, David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, was held in 1990 at Illinois State University in Normal. In the lead-up to the exhibition, he began work on the four large-scale paintings of exotic flowers. Equating the beauty of the body with its very fragility, Wojnarowicz uses the flower as an allusion to the AIDS crisis, his own illness, and a continuum of loss. Importantly, the flower also suggests the possibility and necessity of beauty. The artist Zoe Leonard recalls showing Wojnarowicz, at the height of the AIDS crisis, her small work prints of clouds. Leonard, also an activist, recalls: “I felt guilty and torn. I felt detached – my work was so subtle and abstract, so apolitical on the surface. I remember showing those pictures to David and talking things over with him and he said – I’m paraphrasing – Don’t ever give up beauty. We’re fighting so that we can have things like this, so that we can have beauty again.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Weight of the Earth I
1988
Fourteen gelatin silver prints and watercolour on paper on board
39 x 41 1/4 in. (99.1 x 104.8cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Family of Man Fund
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Weight of the Earth II
1988-1989
Fourteen gelatin silver prints and watercolor on paper on board
39 x 41 1/4 in. (99.1 x 104.8cm)
Collection of Dunja Siegel
Through compositions like these Wojnarowicz sought to create a language out of images. To him, the combination of images described something painful but also mysterious about the experience of being alive – “about captivity in all that surrounds us,” in his words, and the “heaviness of the pre-invented experience we are thrust into.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Fever
1988-1989
Three gelatin silver prints on museum board
31 × 25 in. (78.7 × 63.5cm)
Collection of Michael Hoeh
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Something from Sleep IV (Dream)
1988-1989
Gelatin silver print, acrylic, and collaged paper on Masonite
16 × 20 1/2 in. (40.6 × 52.1cm)
Collection of Luis Cruz Azaceta and Sharon Jacques
Image courtesy Luis Cruz Azaceta and Sharon Jacques
Photo: by Dylan Cruz Azaceta
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
I Feel A Vague Nausea
1990
Five gelatin silver prints, acrylic, string, and screenprint on composition board
62 × 50 × 3 in. (157.5 × 127 × 7.6cm)
Collection of Michael Hoeh
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Americans Can’t Deal with Death
1990
Two black-and-white photographs, acrylic, string, and screenprint on Masonite
60 × 48 in. (152.4 × 121.9cm)
Collection of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
“Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it they will celebrate it…”
Gallery 11
Wojnarowicz’s work concerns itself with the mechanisms, politics, and manipulations of power that make some lives visible and others not. The will to make bodies present – the compulsion to clear a space for queer representations not commonly seen through language and image – was threaded throughout his work, exacerbated by the AIDS crisis, and crystallised in his work. Untitled (One Day This Kid… ) (1990-1991) is perhaps Wojnarowicz’s best-known work. Black script shapes the boundary of a boy’s body – a boy whom we know, with his high forehead, prominent teeth, and electric eyes, is Wojnarowicz as a child. He sits for what we assume is a school picture, and he’s no older than eight. The text that surrounds him projects the child into a future scarred by abuse and homophobia. This artwork, like many by Wojnarowicz, has rightly come to embody the spirit of protest, struggle, and resistance. Wojnarowicz died on July 22, 1992. By the end of that year, 38,044 others in New York had died from AIDS-related complications. In his essay “Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell,” Wojnarowicz states what is equally true of art and protest: “With enough gestures we can deafen the satellites and lift the curtains surrounding the control room.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Sub-Species Helms Senatorius
1990
Silver dye bleach print (Cibachrome)
16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Gift of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol
In this work, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina appears as a spider with a swastika on his back. In 1989, in response to the controversy regarding his essay for the Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing catalogue, Wojnarowicz drafted a press release that included a description of Helms as one of seven particularly bad actors in the fight against AIDS. It read, in part:
‘One of the more dangerous homophobes in the continental United States… Has introduced legislation that denies federal funding for any program that mentions homosexuality… Cut out any and all AIDS education funding that relates to gays and lesbians. Introduced legislation that we must now live with that prevents any HIV-positive people or PWA’s [people with AIDS] from entering any border of the U.S.A. as well as deporting people with green cards forcibly tested and found to be HIV-positive.’
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Act-Up)
1990
Screenprint
23 1/8 × 27 5/8 in. (58.7 x 70.2cm) each
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol
© The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Bread Sculpture
1988-1989
Bread, string, and needle with newspaper
11 1/2 × 14 1/8 in. × 6 in. (29.2 × 35.9 × 15.2cm)
Collection of Gail and Tony Ganz
Photo: Ed Glendinning
Wojnarowicz used red string as a material throughout his practice. From his early supermarket posters to the flower paintings, he stitched red string into the surface of his compositions to suggest the seams and irreconcilable breaks in culture. In his unfinished film A Fire in My Belly (1986-1987, see above), Wojnarowicz included footage of the stitching together of a broken loaf of bread. This sculpture is a physical manifestation of that earlier idea. The film also included footage of what appeared to be a man’s lips being sewn together. A version of that image by Andreas Sterzing – picturing Wojnarowicz himself – would become one of the most galvanising images to come out of the AIDS crisis.
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (One Day This Kid…)
1990-1991
Photostat mounted on board
29 13/16 × 40 1/8 in. (75.7 × 101.9cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase, with funds from the Print Committee
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
What Is This Little Guy’s Job in the World
1990
Gelatin silver print
13 3/4 × 19 1/8 in. (34.9 × 48.6cm)
Collection of Penelope Pilkington
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Sometimes I Come to Hate People)
1992
Gelatin silver print and screenprint on board
39 9/16 × 26 7/8 in. (100.5 × 68.3cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Purchase with funds from The Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation, Inc., the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation Inc., and the Richard and Dorothy Rodgers Fund
Image © Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (When I Put My Hands on Your Body)
1990
Gelatin silver print and screenprint on board
26 x 38 in. (66 x 96.5cm)
Collection of Eric Ceputis and David W. Williams
Promised gift to the Art Institute of Chicago
Wojnarowicz visited Dickson Mounds, a museum on the site of an ancient Indigenous community in Lewistown, Illinois, around the time of his 1989 exhibition at Illinois State University. There, he photographed a burial site displaying skeletons and artefacts that had been excavated in 1927. Wojnarowicz, facing his own mortality and the deaths of many whom he loved, returned to the photograph a few years later and layered it with his own text about loss to create this work. The exhibit at Dickson Mounds closed in 1992 after years of protests by Native American activists and their supporters who objected to the public display of human remains. Activists also were fighting at the national level around this time for legislation affirming Indigenous peoples’ right to protect the graves and remains of their ancestors. Wojnarowicz, who frequently wrote and spoke out in support of those who had been forgotten and disenfranchised due to U.S. policies, including Native Americans, recorded the following in an audio journal from 1989: “If I’m making a painting about the American West and I want to talk about the railroad bringing culture – white culture – across the country and exploiting or destroying Indian culture… I see that there’s a certain amount of information that is totally ignored in this country. That all this is built on blood.”
David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992)
Untitled (Face in Dirt)
1991 (printed 1993)
Gelatin silver print
19 × 23 in. (48.3 × 58.4cm)
Collection of Ted and Maryanne Ellison Simmons
Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
This photograph was taken in late May 1991 at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico while Wojnarowicz and his friend Marion Scemama took a road trip around the American Southwest. Cynthia Carr, Wojnarowicz’s biographer, describes how the photograph came to be:
‘He had been there before and knew exactly where he wanted to stage this. “We’re going to dig a hole,” he told her, “and I’m going to lie down.” They began digging without saying a word, a hole for his upper body and a bit for the legs. They used their hands. The dirt was loose and dry. He lay down and closed his eyes. Marion put dirt around his face till it was halfway up his cheeks and then stood over him, photographing his half buried face first with his camera and then with hers.’
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Exhibition: ‘Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017’ at Tate Modern, London
Tags: 17 Years Supply, a, abstract photography, Abstract Pictures, abstraction, activism, affection, Anders pulling splinter from his foot, architectural form, architectural form and function, Arms and Legs, astro crusto a, Atlantic Ocean, beauty, belonging, Berlin, Blushes, Book for Architects, Calle Real II, cameraless photographs, cameraless photography, CLC 800 dismantled, clubbing, Collum, Colourbox, Concorde, Concorde L433-11, Contemporary Photography, cultural attitudes, curatorial practice, destabilisation of the world, digital television, double exposure, Dusty Vehicle, Eleanor / Lutz, End of Broadcast I, Exposure, fake news, Faltenwurf (Pines) a, Fespa Car, frailty of the human body, freedom, gay, Gaza Wall, gender, German contemporary photography, german photographer, German photography, Greifbar, Greifbar 29, Headlight (f), HIV, HIV/AIDS, HM Prison Reading, homosexuality, human body, identity, Iguazu, images of the commonplace and the extraordinary, installation art, Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza, La Palma, Lampedusa, landscape, London Olympics, Market I, medium of expression, memento mori, Munuwata sky, nape of the neck, Neue Welt, NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN, nightlife, nightscape, Oscar Niemeyer, paper drop, paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse, photographic form, photographic paper, photographic processes, place, Playback Room, poetry, political marches, political marches and protests, politics, Port-au-Prince, portrait, portraiture, private and politica, queer, race, refugees, Saint Petersburg, self-consciousness, Sendeschluss, Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Separate System Reading Prison, sex, sexuality, Shit buildings going up left right and centre, Simon Sebastian Street, social and political themes, soft skin of the outer ear, Still life Calle Real II, still lifes, Studio still life c, Sunset night drive, talking about society, television white noise, the abstract and the representational, The Air Between, The Blue Oyster Bar, The Blue Oyster Bar Saint Petersburg, the body politics, The Cock (Kiss), the human soul, the physicality of the photograph, the private and political, The Spectrum Dagger, The State We’re In A, the world, Tillmans Abstract Pictures., Tillmans Blushes, Tillmans Book for Architects, Tillmans La Palma, Tillmans Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Tillmans The State We’re In A, time, traces light, Transient 2, truth study center, truth study center project, Tube escalator joint, visual archive, voyeurism, vulnerability, Wolfgang Tillmans, Wolfgang Tillmans 17 Years Supply, Wolfgang Tillmans Anders pulling splinter from his foot, Wolfgang Tillmans Apple tree, Wolfgang Tillmans Arms and Legs, Wolfgang Tillmans astro crusto a, Wolfgang Tillmans Book for Architects, Wolfgang Tillmans Calle Real II, Wolfgang Tillmans CLC 800, Wolfgang Tillmans CLC 800 dismantled, Wolfgang Tillmans Collum, Wolfgang Tillmans Concorde, Wolfgang Tillmans Concorde L433-11, Wolfgang Tillmans Double Exposure, Wolfgang Tillmans Dusty Vehicle, Wolfgang Tillmans Eleanor / Lutz, Wolfgang Tillmans Faltenwurf (Pines) a, Wolfgang Tillmans Fespa Car, Wolfgang Tillmans Gaza Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans Greifbar, Wolfgang Tillmans Greifbar 29, Wolfgang Tillmans Headlight (f), Wolfgang Tillmans Iguazu, Wolfgang Tillmans Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa, Wolfgang Tillmans JAL, Wolfgang Tillmans Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza, Wolfgang Tillmans La Palma, Wolfgang Tillmans Lampedusa, Wolfgang Tillmans London Olympics, Wolfgang Tillmans Market I, Wolfgang Tillmans Munuwata sky, Wolfgang Tillmans Nackt 2, Wolfgang Tillmans Neue Welt, Wolfgang Tillmans New World, Wolfgang Tillmans NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN, Wolfgang Tillmans Nude 2, Wolfgang Tillmans Oscar Niemeyer, Wolfgang Tillmans paper drop, Wolfgang Tillmans paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse, Wolfgang Tillmans Playback Room, Wolfgang Tillmans Port-au-Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, Wolfgang Tillmans Separate System Reading Prison, Wolfgang Tillmans Shit buildings going up left right and centre, Wolfgang Tillmans Simon Sebastian Street, Wolfgang Tillmans Still life Calle Real II, Wolfgang Tillmans Studio still life c, Wolfgang Tillmans Sunset night drive, Wolfgang Tillmans Tag/Nacht II, Wolfgang Tillmans The Air Between, Wolfgang Tillmans The Blue Oyster Bar Saint Petersburg, Wolfgang Tillmans The Cock (Kiss), Wolfgang Tillmans The Spectrum Dagger, Wolfgang Tillmans The State We're In A, Wolfgang Tillmans Transient 2, Wolfgang Tillmans truth study center, Wolfgang Tillmans Tube escalator joint, Wolfgang Tillmans Tukan, Wolfgang Tillmans Weed, Wolfgang Tillmans Young Man Jeddah, Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, Young Man Jeddah
Exhibition dates: 15th February – 11th June 2017
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The State We’re In, A (Room 14)
2015
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Cock (Kiss)
2002
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
If one thing matters, everything matters
(A love letter to Wolfgang Tillmans)
I believe that Wolfgang Tillmans is the number one photo-media artist working today. I know it’s a big call, but that’s how I see it.
His whole body of work is akin to a working archive – of memories, places, contexts, identities, landscapes (both physical and imagined) and people. He experiments, engages, and imagines all different possibilities in and through art. As Adrian Searle observes in his review of the exhibition, “Tillmans’ work is all a kind of evidence – a sifting through material to find meaning.” And that meaning varies depending on the point of view one comes from, or adopts, in relation to the art. The viewer is allowed to make their own mind up, to dis/assemble or deepen relationships between things as they would like, or require, or not as the case may be. Tillmans is not didactic, but guides the viewer on that journey through intersections and nodal points of existence. The nexus of life.
Much as I admire the writing of art critic John McDonald, I disagree with his assessment of the work of Wolfgang Tillmans at Tate Modern (see quotation below). Personally, I find that there are many memorable photographs in this exhibition … as valuable and as valid a way of seeing the world in a contemporary sense, as Eggleston’s photographs are in a historic visualisation. I can recall Tillmans’ images just an intimately as I can Eggleston’s. But they are of a different nature, and this is where McDonald’s analysis is like comparing apples and pears. Eggleston’s classical modernist photographs depend on the centrality of composition where his images are perfectly self-contained, whether he is photographing a woman in a blue dress sitting on a kerb or an all green bathroom. They are of their time. Times have changed, and how we view the world has changed.
For Tillmans no subject matter is trivial (If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters – the title of a 2003 exhibition at Tate Britain), and how he approaches the subject is totally different from Eggleston. As he says of his work, his images are “calls to attentiveness.” What does he mean by this? Influenced by the work of the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti whom I have also studied, a call to attentiveness is a way of being open and responsive to the world around you, to its infinite inflections, and to not walk around as if in a dream, letting the world pass you by. To be open and receptive to the energies and connections of the world spirit by seeing clearly.
Krishnamurti insightfully observed that we do not need to make images out of every word, out of every vision and desire. We must be attentive to the clarity of not making images – of desire, of prejudice, of flattery – and then we might become aware of the world that surrounds us, just for what it is and nothing more.1 Then there would be less need for the absenting of self into the technological ether or the day dreams of foreign lands or the desire for a better life. But being aware is not enough, we must be attentive of that awareness and not make images just because we can or must. This is a very contemporary way of looking at the world. As Krishnamurti says,
“Now with that same attention I’m going to see that when you flatter me, or insult me, there is no image, because I’m tremendously attentive … I listen because the mind wants to find out if it is creating an image out of every word, out of every contact. I’m tremendously awake, therefore I find in myself a person who is inattentive, asleep, dull, who makes images and gets hurt – not an intelligent man. Have you understood it at least verbally? Now apply it. Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. And if anybody says something to you, you are tremendously attentive, not to any prejudices, but you are attentive to your conditioning. Therefore you have established a relationship with him, which is entirely different from his relationship with you. Because if he is prejudiced, you are not; if he is unaware, you are aware. Therefore you will never create an image about him. You see the difference?”2
.
Then you are sensitive to every occasion, it brings its own right action. You are attentive and tremendously awake.
This is the essence of Tillmans work. He is tremendously attentive to the images he is making (“a representation of an unprivileged gaze or view” as he puts it) and to the associations that are possible between images, that we make as human beings. He is open and receptive to his conditioning and offers that gift to us through his art, if we recognise it and accept it for what it is. If you really look and understand what the artist is doing, these images are music, poetry and beauty – are time, place, belonging, voyeurism, affection, sex. They are archaic and shapeless and fluid and joy and magic and love…
They are the air between everything.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
.
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Installation view of room 4 (detail), which includes the latest iteration of the truth study centre project, with
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
The Tate show includes a room full of his “truth study centres”, which comprise often contradictory newspaper cuttings as well as photographs and pamphlets that aim to show how news is manipulated according to the political loyalties of those who produce it. As activists go, though, Tillmans is defiantly centre ground. “This is about strengthening the centre. I can understand left-wing politics from a passionate, idealistic point of view, but I do not think it is the solution to where we are now. The solution is good governance, moderation, agreement. Post-Brexit, post-Trump, the voices of reason need to be heard more than ever.”
Wolfgang Tillmans quoted in Sean O’Hagan. “Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘I was hit by a realisation – all I believed in was threatened’,” on The Guardian website Monday 13 February 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Installation view of room 13 (detail), which focuses in on Tillmans’ portraiture with Eleanor / Lutz, a (2016) at right
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Eleanor / Lutz, a
2016
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Portrait of Wolfgang Tillmans, Tate Modern Boiler House, Level 3, 14/02/2017 in front of his works, Transient 2, 2015 and Tag/Nacht II, 2010
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tag/Nacht II
2010
Ink-jet print
Dimensions variable
© Wolfgang Tillmans
What are we to make of the world in which we find ourselves today? Contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans offers plenty of food for thought.
This is Wolfgang Tillmans’s first ever exhibition at Tate Modern and brings together works in an exciting variety of media – photographs, of course, but also video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music – all staged by the artist in characteristically innovative style. Alongside portraiture, landscape and intimate still lifes, Tillmans pushes the boundaries of the photographic form in abstract artworks that range from the sculptural to the immersive.
The year 2003 is the exhibition’s point of departure, representing for Tillmans the moment the world changed, with the invasion of Iraq and anti-war demonstrations. The social and political form a rich vein throughout the artist’s work. German-born, international in outlook and exhibited around the world, Tillmans spent many years in the UK and is currently based in Berlin. In 2000, he was the first photographer and first non-British artist to receive the Turner Prize.
Room one
Static interference typically appears on a television screen when an analogue signal is switched off. This can occur when a station’s official programme finishes for the night or if a broadcast is censored. In Tillmans’s Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast 2014 it represents the coexistence of two different generations of technology. The chaotic analogue static was displayed on a digital television, which allowed Tillmans’s high-resolution digital camera to record the pattern as it really appeared, something that would not have been possible with a traditional cathode ray tube television. This work shows Tillmans’s interest in questioning what we believe to be true: the seemingly black-and-white image turns out to be extremely colourful when viewed very close up.
Other works in this room reflect on digital printmaking and photography today. For example, the technical ability to photograph a nightscape from a moving vehicle without blurring, as in these images of Sunset Boulevard, is unprecedented. Itself the subject of many famous art photographs, this iconic roadway appears here littered with large format inkjet prints in the form of advertising billboards. In Double Exposure 2012-2013 Tillmans juxtaposes images of two trade fairs – one for digital printers, the other for fruit and vegetables. Encounter 2014 shows a different photo-sensitive process. A pot had been left on top of a planter preventing light from reaching the sprouts underneath and leaving them white, while the surrounding growths that caught the daylight turned green.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
107 1/2 × 161 1/2″ (273.1 × 410.2cm)
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Television white noise that the artist photographed while in Russia. For Tillmans, the image signifies resistance on his part to making clear images, but without the text its ostensibly radical nature would not be known.
Installation view of room 1 (detail), with Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I, 2014, at left
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Double Exposure
2012-2013
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room two
Tillmans spends much of his time in the studio, yet he only occasionally uses it as a set for taking portraits. Instead, it is where prints are made and exhibitions are planned in architectural models, and where he collects materials and generates ideas. Over the years this environment has become a subject for his photographs, presenting a radically different view of the artist’s studio to the more traditional depictions seen in paintings over the centuries.
These works made around the studio demonstrate Tillmans’s concern with the physical process of making photographs, from chemical darkroom processes and their potential to create abstract pictures without the camera, to digital technology that is vital to the production of contemporary images, and the paper onto which they are printed. Tillmans’s understanding of the material qualities of paper is fundamental to his work, and photographs can take on a sculptural quality in series such as Lighter, 2005-ongoing and paper drop, 2001-ongoing, seen later in the exhibition.
In CLC 800, dismantled 2011 Tillmans uses photography to record a temporary installation, the result of unfastening every single screw in his defunct colour photocopier. He prefers to photograph his three-dimensional staged scenarios rather than actually displaying them as sculptures. He has often described the core of his work as ‘translating the three dimensional world into two dimensional pictures’.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
paper drop Prinzessinnenstrasse
2014
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Perhaps as a continuation of his more textural photographs – depicting fabrics and still lifes so close up they become difficult to read – experiments in abstraction followed suit, many of them featuring what is perhaps his favourite motif: the fold, which, as the exhibition’s curator Chris Dercon kindly reminded us, was considered by the philosopher Leibniz as one of the most accurate ways to depict the complexities of the human soul.
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso. “Inside Wolfgang Tillmans’s Superb Tate Modern Survey,” on the artnet website February 15, 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
CLC 800, dismantled
2011
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room three
Having spent the preceding decade working largely on conceptual and abstract photographs, in 2009 Tillmans embarked on the four-year project Neue Welt. Looking at the world with fresh eyes, he aimed to depict how it has changed since he first took up the camera in 1988. He travelled to five continents to find places unknown to him and visited familiar places as if experiencing them for the first time. Interested in the surface of things as they appeared in those lucid first days of being in a new environment, he immersed himself in each location for just a brief period. Now using a high resolution digital camera, Tillmans captured images in a depth of detail that is immediately compelling, but also suggests the excess of information that is often described as a condition of contemporary life.
Communal spaces, people, animals, and still-life studies of nature or food are just some of the subjects that feature in Neue Welt. Seen together, these images offer a deliberately fragmented view. Rather than making an overarching statement about the changing character of modern life, Tillmans sought only to record, and to create a more empathetic understanding of the world. Over the course of the project, however, some shrewd observations about contemporary worldviews did emerge. One related to the changing shape of car headlights, which he noted are now very angular in shape, giving them a predatory appearance that might reflect a more competitive climate.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
astro crusto, a
2012
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Installation view of room 3 (detail), with Headlight (f) 2012, at left; and Munuwata sky, 2011 at right
Image © Tate Modern showing Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 at Tate Modern 15 February – 11 June
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Headlight (f)
2012
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Munuwata sky
2011
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room four
In the mid-2000s, prompted by global events, such as the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, Tillmans became interested in the assertions made by individuals, groups or organisations around the world that their viewpoint represented the absolute truth about a number of political and ethical questions.
He began his wryly-named truth study center project in 2005. Photographs, clippings from newspapers and magazines, objects, drawings, and copies of his own images are laid out in deliberate – and often provocative – juxtapositions. These arrangements reflect the presentation of information by news outlets in print and online. They also draw attention to gaps in knowledge, or areas where there is room for doubt. For each installation, the material presented in the truth study centers is selected according to its topical and geographic context. In 2017, the subject of truth and fake news is at the heart of political discourse across the world. This iteration of the project focuses in particular on how constructions of truth work on a psychological and physiological level.
The Silver 1998-ongoing prints connect to reality in a different way. Made by passing monochromatically exposed photographic paper through a dirty photo-developing machine, they collect particles and residue from the rollers and liquids. This makes them, in effect, a record of the chemical and mechanical process from which they originate.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
truth study center
2017
Pigmented inkjet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room five
Tillmans has described how, as a photographer, he feels increasingly less obligated to reflect solely on the outside world through documentary images. In his abstract works, he looks inwards: exploring the rudiments of photographic processes and their potential to be used as a form of self-expression.
Like the Silver works in the previous room, the abstract Greifbar 2014-2015 images are made without a camera. Working in the darkroom, Tillmans traces light directly onto photographic paper. The vast swathes of colour are a record of the physical gestures involved in their construction, but also suggest aspects of the body such as hair, or pigmentation of the skin. This reference to the figurative is reflected in the title, which translates as ‘tangible’.
Tillmans has observed that even though these works are made by the artist’s hand, they look as though they could be ‘scientific’ evidence of natural processes. For him, this interpretation is important, because it disassociates the works from the traditional gestural technique of painting. That the image is read as a photographic record, and not the result of the artist’s brushstroke, is essential to its conceptual meaning.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Greifbar 29
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room six
Tillmans is interested in social life in its broadest sense, encompassing our participation in society. His photographs of individuals and groups are underpinned by his conviction that we are all vulnerable, and that our well-being depends upon knowing that we are not alone in the world.
Tillmans has observed that although cultural attitudes towards race, gender and sexuality have become more open over the three decades since he began his artistic practice, there is also greater policing of nightlife, and urban social spaces are closing down. His photographs taken in clubs, for example, testify to the importance of places where people can go today to feel safe, included, and free.
This concern with freedom also extends to the ways in which people organise themselves to make their voices heard. Images of political marches and protests draw attention to the cause for which they are fighting. They also form part of a wider study of what Tillmans describes as the recent ‘re-emergence’ of activism.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Blue Oyster Bar, Saint Petersburg
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
NICE HERE but ever been to KRYGYZSTAN free Gender Expression WORLDWIDE
2006
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room seven
Playback Room is a space designed for listening to recorded music. The project first ran at Between Bridges, the non-profit exhibition space Tillmans opened in London in 2006 and has since transferred to Berlin. In three exhibition (‘Colourbox’, ‘American Producers’ ‘Bring Your Own’) that took place between September 2014 and February 2015, he invited visitors to come and listen to music at almost the same quality at which it was originally mastered.
Whereas live music can be enjoyed in concert halls and stadiums, and visual art can be enjoyed in museums, no comparable space exists for appreciating studio music. Musicians and producers spend months recording tracks at optimal quality, yet we often listen to the results through audio equipment and personal devices that are not fit for perfect sound reproduction. Playback Room is a response to this. An example of Tillmans’s curatorial practice, he has chosen to include it here to encourage others to think about how recorded music can be given prominence within the museum setting.
The three tracks you hear in this room are by Colourbox, an English band who were active between 1982 and 1987. Tillmans, a long-term fan of the band, chose their music for Playback Room because they never performed live, thus emphasising the importance of the studio recordings.
Room eight
Tillmans began experimenting with abstraction while in high school, using the powerful enlargement function of an early digital photocopier to copy and degrade his own photographs as well as those cut from newspapers. He describes the coexistence of chance and control involved in this process as an essential ingredient in most of his work.
Ever since then, he has found ways to resist the idea that the photograph is solely a direct record of reality. In 2011, this area of his practice was compiled for the first time in his book Abstract Pictures. For a special edition of 176 copies Tillmans manipulated the printing press, for example by running it without plates or pouring ink into the wrong compartments, to create random effects and overprinted pages.
Some of his abstract photographs are made with a camera and others without, through the manipulation of chemicals, light, or the paper itself. Importantly, however, Tillmans does not distinguish between the abstract and the representational. He is more interested in what they have in common. The relationship between photography, sculpture and the body, for example, is expressed in abstract photographs made by crumpling a sheet of photographic paper, but also in close-ups of draped and wrinkled clothing such as Faltenwurf (Pines) a, 2016 in Room 9.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Concorde L433-11
1997
Ink-jet print
Tate
© Wolfgang Tillmans, courtesy Maureen Paley, London
Room nine
Artist books, exhibition catalogues, newspaper supplements and magazine spreads, posters and leaflets are an integral part of Tillmans’s output. These various formats and the ways in which they are distributed or made visible in the public space allow him to present work and engage audiences in a completely different manner to exhibitions. For him the printed page is as valid a venue for artistic creation as the walls of a museum. Many such projects are vital platforms on which he can speak out about a political topic, or express his continued interest in subjects such as musicians, or portraiture in general.
Recently, the print layout has enabled Tillmans to share a more personal aspect of his visual archive. Originally designed as a sixty-six page spread for the Winter 2015/Spring 2016 edition of Arena Homme +, this grid of images looks back at Fragile, the name he gave as a teenager to his creative alter-ego. Spanning 1983 to 1989 – the year before he moved to England to study – the photographs and illustrations provide a sensitive insight into a formative period in Tillmans’s life, predating the time when he chose photography as his main medium of expression.
The layout is also an example of the intricate collaging technique that he has employed in printed matter since 2011, deliberately obscuring some images by overlapping others on top of them
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Faltenwurf (Pines), a
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tukan
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room ten
An acute awareness of fragility endures across Tillmans’s practice in all of its different forms. Often this is expressed in his attentiveness to textures and surfaces. Collum 2011 is taken from Central Nervous System 2008-2013, a group of portraits featuring only one subject, where the focus on intimate details, such as the nape of the neck or the soft skin of the outer ear, both emphasises and celebrates the frailty of the human body.
Weed 2014, a four-metre tall photograph taken in the garden of the artist’s London home, invites us to consider the beauty and complexity of a plant usually seen as a nuisance. The dead leaf of a nearby fig tree appears as both a sculptural form and a memento mori. Dusty Vehicle 2012, photographed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, is highly specific in its depiction of texture, yet the reasons leading to this roadside arrangement remain a mystery.
The focus on a very few works in this room serves as an example of Tillmans’s varied approaches to exhibiting his prints. Though best known for installations comprising many pictures, he always places emphasis on the strength of the individual image. By pinning and taping work to the wall, as well as using frames, Tillmans draws attention to the edges of the print, encouraging the viewer to interact with the photograph as an object, rather than a conduit for an image.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Dusty Vehicle
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Collum
2011
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Weed
2014
Photograph, inkjet print on paper
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room eleven
In this room Tillmans highlights the coexistence of the personal, private, public, and political spheres in our lives. The simultaneity of a life lived as a sexual being as well as a political being, or in Tillmans’s case as a conceptual artist as well as a visually curious individual, plays out through the installation.
The entirely white view taken from the inside of a cloud, a word charged with multiple meanings, is presented alongside the close-up and matter-of-fact view of male buttocks and testicles. Like nackt, 2 2014, the small photograph The Air Between 2016 is the result of a lifelong interest in visually describing what it feels like to live in our bodies. Here the attention lies in photographing the air, the empty space between our skin and our clothes.
In still life, Calle Real II 2013, a severed agave chunk is placed on a German newspaper article describing the online depiction of atrocities by Islamic State. The image is as startling in its depiction of the finest green hues as it is in capturing how, simultaneously, we take in world events alongside details of our personal environment.
This room, which Tillmans considers as one work or installation in its entirety, is an example of his innovative use of different photographic prints and formats to reflect upon how we experience vastly different aspects of the world at the same time.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Air Between
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Still life, Calle Real II
2013
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Nackt, 2 (nude, 2)
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Room twelve
Tillmans has always been sensitive to the public side of his role as an artist, acknowledging that putting images out in the public world unavoidably places himself in the picture as well. His participation in activities such as lectures and interviews has been a platform for his voice from the beginning of his career.
Since 2014 he has also allowed performance to become a more prominent strand of his practice. Filmed in a hotel room in Los Angeles and an apartment in Tehran, Instrument 2015 is the first time that Tillmans has put himself in front of the camera for a video piece. Across a split screen, we see two separate occasions on which he has filmed himself dancing. The accompanying soundtrack was created by distorting the sound of his feet hitting the floor. In the absence of any other music, his body becomes an instrument.
On one side of the screen we see his body, on the other only his shadow. Referring to the shadow, New York Times critic Roberta Smith commented that:
“Disconcertingly, this insubstantial body is slightly out of sync with the fleshly one. It is a ghost, a shade, the specter that drives us all. The ease with which we want to believe that the two images are connected, even though they were filmed separately, might also act as a reminder to question what we assume to be true.”
Room thirteen
Portraiture has been central to Tillmans’s practice for three decades. For him, it is a collaborative act that he has described as ‘a good levelling instrument’. No matter who the sitter – a stranger or someone close to him, a public figure, an unknown individual, or even the artist himself – the process is characterised by the same dynamics: of vulnerability, exposure, honesty and always, to some extent, self-consciousness. Tillmans sees every portrait as resulting from the expectations and hopes of both sitter and photographer.
The portrait’s ability to highlight the relationship between appearance and identity is a recurring point of interest. In 2016, at HM Prison Reading, Tillmans took a distorted self-portrait in a damaged mirror once used by inmates. The disfigured result is the artist’s expression of the effects on the soul wrought by physical and psychological confinement and also censorship. Whoever looked into the reflective surface would gain a completely inaccurate impression of what they looked like, and how they are perceived by others.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, born 1968)
Separate System, Reading Prison
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Anders pulling splinter from his foot
2004
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
“The image’s reference to both Dorian Gray and Francis Bacon is evident. This catapults a new association: perhaps Bacon was painting Gray all along. Insistently, fearlessly, longingly.
As with much of Bacon’s oeuvre, and the very particular picture of Dorian Gray, a distorted, forward-facing male figure intimidates the viewer with his unmade face. However, Tillsman’s piece is not a picture, it is a photograph. Here, the artist (as was the case with Bacon/Wilde) is not the one dissembling what’s inside the frame, subjecting it with his brush. No. In Tillsman’s image, a piece of thick glass distorts the artist. Here, the artist is no longer the lens that is able to affect his surroundings. Here, the surroundings distort the artist.
The message Tillsman delivers is clear: things have changed. The world disfigures the subject while the artist is trapped, forced to stand there and watch.”
Text by Ana Maria Caballero on The Drugstore Notebook website [Online] Cited 07/06/2017. No longer available online
Room fourteen
Symbol and allegory are artistic strategies Tillmans is usually keen to avoid. The State We’re In, A 2015 is a departure from this stance: the work’s title is a direct reference to current global political tensions. Depicting the Atlantic Ocean, a vast area that crosses time zones and national frontiers, it records the sea energised by opposing forces, but not yet breaking into waves. Differing energies collide, about to erupt into conflict.
The photographs in this room deal with borders and how they seem clear-cut but are actually fluid. In these images, borders are made tangible in the vapour between clouds, the horizon itself or the folds in the two Lighter photo-objects. The shipwreck left behind by refugees on the Italian island of Lampedusa, depicted in this photograph from 2008, is a reminder that borders, represented elsewhere in more poetic delineations, can mean a question of life and death.
The text and tables sculpture Time Mirrored 3 2017 represents Tillmans’s interest in connecting the time in which we live to a broader historical context. He always understands the ‘Now’ as the history of the future. Events perceived as having happened over a vast gulf of time between us and the past, become tangible when ‘mathematically mirrored’ and connected to more recent periods of time in our living memory.
In contrast to the epic themes of sea and time, the pictures of an apple tree outside the artist’s London front door, a subject he has photographed since 2002, suggest a day-to-day positive outlook.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Italian Coastal Guard Flying Rescue Mission off Lampedusa
2008
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Lampedusa
2008
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Installation view of room 14 (detail), featuring at left, pictures of an apple tree outside the artist’s London front door and at right, La Palma 2014
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
La Palma
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Apple tree
2007
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Apple tree
Various dates
Ink-jet prints
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Book for Architects
Book for Architects 2014 is the culmination of Tillmans’s longstanding fascination with architecture. First presented at Rem Koolhaas’s 14th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice, 2013, it explores the contrast between the rationality and utopianism that inform design and the reality of how buildings and streets come to be constructed and inhabited.
In 450 images taken in 37 countries, across 5 continents, Tillmans hones in on the resourceful and ingenious ways in which people adapt their surroundings to fit their needs. These are individual and uncoordinated decisions that were not anticipated in architects’ plans, but still impact the contemporary built environment.
Across the double projection, we see examples of how buildings come to sit within a city plan, the ad-hoc ways in which they are modified, and the supposed ‘weaknesses’ of a space such as the corners where there are service doors, fire escapes, or alarm systems.
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Shit buildings going up left, right and centre
2014
Book for Architects Plate 083 2014
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Untitled
2012
Book for Architects 2014
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans has earned recognition as one of the most exciting and innovative artists working today. Tate Modern presents an exhibition concentrating on his production across different media since 2003. First rising to prominence in the 1990s for his photographs of everyday life and contemporary culture, Tillmans has gone on to work in an ever greater variety of media and has taken an increasingly innovative approach to staging exhibitions. Tate Modern brings this variety to the fore, offering a new focus on his photographs, video, digital slide projections, publications, curatorial projects and recorded music.
Social and political themes form a rich vein throughout Tillmans’s work. The destabilisation of the world has arisen as a recurring concern for the artist since 2003, an important year when he felt the world changed with the invasion of Iraq and anti-war demonstrations. In 2017, at a moment when the subject of truth and fake news is at the heart of political discourse, Tillmans presents a new configuration of his tabletop installation truth study center 2005-ongoing. This ongoing project uses an assembly of printed matter from pamphlets to newspaper cuttings to his own works on paper to highlight Tillmans’s continued interest in word events and how they are communicated in the media.
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 will particularly highlight the artist’s deeper engagement with abstraction, beginning with the important work Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast I 2014. Based on images the artist took of an analogue TV losing signal, this work combines two opposing technologies – the digital and the analogue. Other works such as the series Blushes 2000-ongoing, made without a camera by manipulating the effects of light directly on photographic paper, show how the artist’s work with abstraction continues to push the boundaries and definitions of the photographic form.
The exhibition includes portraiture, landscape and still lives. A nightclub scene might record the joy of a safe social space for people to be themselves, while large-scale images of the sea such as La Palma 2014 or The State We’re In, A 2015 document places where borders intersect and margins are ever shifting. At the same time, intimate portraits like Collum 2011 focus on the delicacy, fragility and beauty of the human body. In 2009, Tillmans began using digital photography and was struck by the expanded opportunities the technology offered him. He began to travel more extensively to capture images of the commonplace and the extraordinary, photographing people and places across the world for the series Neue Welt 2009-2012.
The importance of Tillmans’s interdisciplinary practice is showcased throughout the exhibition. His Playback Room project, first shown at his Berlin exhibition space Between Bridges, provides a space within the museum for visitors to experience popular music by Colourbox at the best possible quality. The video installation Instrument 2015 shows Tillmans dancing to a soundtrack made by manipulating the sound of his own footsteps, while in the Tanks Studio his slide projection Book for Architects 2014 is being shown for the first time in the UK. Featuring thirty-seven countries and five continents, it reveals the tension between architectural form and function. In March, Tillmans will also take over Tate Modern’s south Tank for ten days with a specially-commissioned installation featuring live music events.
Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 is co-curated by Chris Dercon and Helen Sainsbury, Head of Programme Realisation, Tate Modern with Emma Lewis, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing designed by Wolfgang Tillmans and a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Press release from Tate Modern
Images from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 with at left, Sunset night drive (2014) and at centre right, Young Man, Jeddah (2012)
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Sunset night drive
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Young Man, Jeddah
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Young Man, Jeddah (B)
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
17 Years Supply
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
“Now the camera is staring into a big cardboard box, half-filled with pharmacist’s tubs and packages, 17 years’ supply of antiretroviral and other medications to treat HIV/AIDS. I imagine the sound that box would make if you shook it, what that sound might say about a human life, its vulnerability and value.”
Adrian Searle. “Wolfgang Tillmans review – a rollercoaster ride around the world,” on The Guardian website Wednesday 15 February 2017 [Online] Cited 17/12/2021
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Market I
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Studio still life, c
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Juan Pablo & Karl Chingaza
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Iguazu
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Oscar Niemeyer
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Tube escalator joint
2009
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
JAL
1997
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Port-au-Prince
2010
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
London Olympics
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Fespa Car
2012
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
The Spectrum Dagger
2016
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Gaza Wall
2009
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Simon, Sebastian Street
2013
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (German, b. 1968)
Arms and Legs
2014
Ink-jet print
© Wolfgang Tillmans
Tate Modern
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom
Opening hours:
Daily 10.00 – 18.00
Tate Modern website
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