the Raw art of an aIDS Avatar

      It is a dilemma for art history when collected objects and artifacts are what remains of an artist’s legacy. The iconoclastic work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), a prolific artist/activist who produced photographs, graffiti, paintings, sculptures, performances, music, videos and essays ranting against governmental, medical and societal stigmatization is on view at the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, through November.  

      As an artist, he came of age in New York’s ’80s East Village gallery scene, alongside Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But he always remained an outsider. His art was highly political, angry and belligerent: his aggressive stance reflecting the harshness of his adolescence on the streets of Manhattan which included drugs and prostitution. He also lived with AIDS. His work was often in the crossfires of the culture wars before his untimely death in 1992. 

      The range of Wojnarowicz’s raw and visceral output was astonishing in a decade of artmaking: post-punk noise band, clandestine murals in abandoned piers, death-bed portraits of photographer Peter Hujar, staged tableaux of a masked Arthur Rimbaud, spray-painted collages featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, AIDS activist group shows and a solo exhibition at Illinois State University. Music groups as diverse as U2 and Kronos Quartet used his iconography for their records. 

      In November 1991, I presented Wojnarowicz’s multimedia collaboration with composer Ben Neill, ITSOFOMO, at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. We also exhibited his lithograph, Four Elements (1990), from the Walker’s permanent collection. Backstage, he was feverish. I let him know it was okay to cancel, but he replied, “I came here to witness.” He died a few months later, at the age of 37. 

      This is the first time the Hall Art Foundation is showcasing Wojnarowicz’s work, selected from its own collection in one of its spaces. In 2018, the institution loaned some of its pieces to History Keeps Me Awake at Night, a retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum, which toured to Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) and Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (Luxembourg). 

      The current exhibition’s centerpiece is an eight-foot square four-panel painting entitled Dad’s Ship (acrylic and enamel on Masonite, 1984). It depicts an ocean liner in flames with billowy clouds and churning seas, layered with frantic brush strokes that allude to the psychological and physical abuse inflicted by the artist’s merchant seaman father. In the upper quadrant, an image of a prone dog floats in relief. 

      On an adjoining wall sits a painting of a mugging (collaged paper, acrylic on Masonite, 1982), its violence cartoon-like, a wristwatch, ring and wallet flying into the air. A fiberglass model of a shark collaged with map fragments (1984) serves as a peaceful counterbalance to the mayhem in the paintings. Wojnarowicz often drew on animal imagery as a reassuring talisman. 

      A second gallery contains 11 disembodied head sculptures (acrylic on plaster, 1984). Each is embellished with its own distinct mix of torn-up maps, money, paint, and differently colored eyes representing what the artist called “the evolution of consciousness.” Bruises, gags and deteriorated bloodied bandages distinguish each head from the others. Two painted globes and a repurposed supermarket poster stenciled with bestial imagery fill out the display. 

      These Wojnarowicz creations are powerful but miss the firebrand I knew. While the pathos and violence were there, the 17 paintings and sculptures on view contain little of the sexually charged content that was an essential part of his dissident vision. His media works, published screeds and performance footage would have added considerably to the gestalt. 

      A pristine gallery with polished vitrines comes off as an antiseptic space to display the rage-filled, multidisciplinary art of this AIDS avatar. Even the informative contextual and historical information provided—accessible either online or in a binder, which includes images from early installations where the selected works originally appeared—feels inadequate. Although they did host two screenings of the 2020 documentary F**K YOU F*GGOT F**KER which provides a much more comprehensive view of the artist. 

      (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18X5dBp06Qs) 

      The Hall Art Foundation’s collection of 5,000+ contemporary artworks is housed on three campuses. Also, on view this summer in Vermont: paintings by pop artists Mel Ramos, James Rosenquist and Ed Ruscha, photographs by Joel Sternfeld, and colorful figurative canvases by Gladys Nilsson. There’s also a plethora of outdoor sculptures. 

      Visitors to MASS MoCA in the Berkshires can visit the Hall Foundation’s Anselm Kiefer pavilion. Internationally, a number of its holdings can be seen in a converted castle, Kunstmuseum Schloss in Derneburg Germany.

      This essay was adapted from one that originally appeared in Boston’s online The Arts Fuse (https://artsfuse.org).