David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren, Self-Portrait of David Wojnarowicz (detail), 1983–84, acrylic and collaged paper on gelatin silver print, 60″ × 40″.

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I was reading Close to the Knives in Mexico, where David Wojnarowicz spent significant amounts of time—Oaxaca, mainly, and Mexico City and the border towns—though I didn’t know that then. I was staying at an expensive resort, which was in a state of constant repair, as those kinds of resorts always are: stucco was being smoothed and repainted, bright clouds of bougainvillea were being trimmed, concrete was being resurfaced. It was an ultimately futile tussle between man and nature, one frustrating and poignant to watch; it took teams of people, and their collective diligence, to try to undo what nature would keep doing. One day, the resort would close, and within months or weeks or days, all of those years of vigilance would mean nothing—the rains would rust the metal lanterns, the sun would leach the color from the walls, the hibiscus would grow stalky and shaggy.

I mention this because we tend to associate Wojnarowicz with a specific moment in the culture, with a particular movement of art, and with a brief span of years. On one hand, you can’t not: His art was inextricable from his own biography. It was art that swept up the entirety of who the artist was and what he had experienced—and had seen and felt—into a single image and spat it back out at the viewer; there is a shimmering present-tenseness to it. My life flashed before my eyes, we say when we fear we have just only escaped death, and to look at his work is to realize how charged, how exhausting it must have been to live when your life was always flashing before your eyes, and not just your life but your friends’ lives, and to be so overwhelmed by that constant blur of images, that whir that both never ended and that you prayed would never end.  Read More