by Cynthia Carr
Kern asked David to appear in “Stray Dogs,” one of the four sections of a film called Manhattan Love Suicides. David plays a man identified as “a fan” who’s obsessed with an artist (Bill Rice) and follows him home. For some reason, the artist allows this demented fan into his apartment. David wildly overacts—mugging, leering, and twitching. The artist paints while the fan jerks off. Then the fan approaches, and the artist pushes him away. The fan begins literally to explode, first bursting a blood vessel in his neck, then losing an arm. That gets the artist interested. He wants to draw the fan, now lying in a puddle of gore. The cheap special effects are one of the film’s major charms. David loved playing out this cartoon version of repressed emotion. It was done over a weekend, and David kicked in $250, which probably covered most of the budget.
When David analyzed his attraction to the Cinema of Transgression later on, though, he didn’t even discuss the movies. He said that he’d found a group of people who saw “unarguable truth” in violence.
The art world had turned upside down. Suddenly, a Fifty-seventh Street gallery could close while full-page ads in Artforum might be purchased by the occupant of an unheated shoebox between Avenues A and B. It took me quite a while to realize that this was largely an illusion. No one had actually uncovered a pot of gold in the East Village. Hardly any of these tiny galleries made big money. Hardly any of them would survive the scene.
Civilian Warfare, for example, was a hot gallery with a horrible cashflow problem. The gallery had no backers, and no one working there had any business training. Major collectors would walk out with a number of pieces and promise to pay, for example, a thousand dollars a month. The gallery had to pay rent, utilities, and three salaries, along with the artists whose work had been sold. “We didn’t understand the ramifications,” Marisa said. “You can’t call your artist and say, ‘We sold ten pieces,’ and then not be able to pay them. We wouldn’t have been able to pay them in years, at the rate money was coming in.… And I was making, like, two hundred dollars a week.”
Back in more innocent times, someone had once come in and paid cash for a piece—a large sum. Savard was there, and Marisa, and David. Maybe Barrows too. “We laid the bills out end to end because we had never seen that much money before,” Marisa said. “I don’t remember how many thousands of dollars, but it took up a lot of the floor.”
In March 1984, however, David deposited a check from Civilian for forty-five dollars, and it bounced. In May, he sold quite a bit of work from the plaster-heads show, but the gallery could not afford to give him his cut. Not all of it, at least. Marisa remembered David and Savard arguing over it.
One day David came into the gallery and saw a receipt push-pinned to a shelf in the back—a receipt for a limousine ride. Savard and Gracie Mansion had taken a limo together to an event uptown, and they were dividing the cost, so Gracie had brought the receipt over. Apparently Savard had some sort of explanation but David couldn’t hear it. “He was livid. Just screaming,” Marisa said. “We were spending this money, and he hadn’t gotten paid. He could not be talked down. He stormed out.”
Savard’s drug problem hadn’t yet begun to wreak havoc with their everyday operations. It was his spirit that was driving Civilian Warfare. People who knew the gallery’s directors would describe Alan Barrows with words like “steady” and “mature” while Dean Savard was “charismatic” and “outlandish.” Judy Glantzman analyzed it this way: “Dean’s strength was also his weakness. That very far-reaching ambition and imagination made Civilian what it was. He was a visionary.” But then he’d go too far. He reveled in hyperbole. The gallery’s summer show that year was called “25,000 Sculptors from Across the U.S.A.” Glantzman estimated that there were maybe a hundred pieces crammed into the storefront. And that was amusing. But she also remembered being with Savard at the home of some important collectors one night and feeling embarrassed by his absurd fabrications. That particular night it was “we’ve sold five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of work.”
“He was a pathological liar,” said Barrows, who believed Savard’s stories for years and then suddenly saw that they didn’t add up. Marisa agreed: “He told gigantic lies. He said he’d been raised in Vietnam and was airlifted off the roof of the embassy at the end of the war. He used to bleach his hair and people thought he was Scandinavian—they couldn’t wrap their mind around the fact that a man would bleach his hair. So he told those people he was born in Sweden.” He’d told Alan that his father was in Kuala Lumpur.
In August the East Village Eye reported that Civilian Warfare was going to buy a building—another fantastic lie from Savard. What did happen that summer was that Savard and Barrows decided to leave their storefront for something bigger. They weren’t playing anymore. (They definitely had a typewriter now, though according to Barrows, “Someone probably gave it to us.”) And they had to keep up appearances in the ever more glamorous and growing scene. Savard seemed to feel especially competitive with Gracie Mansion, and she was moving to a larger space on Avenue A while turning her old storefront on East Tenth into the Gracie Mansion Museum Store. Savard and Barrows found a place on Avenue B and Tenth Street where they would pay $900 rent instead of $550. They hired someone to renovate the space, then couldn’t pay him.
David went to Marisa and asked her if she would start a gallery. Luis came to her with the same idea. But she didn’t want to own a gallery. She stayed with Civilian and was there the day David came to the new space on Avenue B and demanded his slides and his clippings. “He said he was going to have a show at Gracie Mansion,” she remembered. “It was terrible. Dean cried.”
David walked the one block to Gracie’s with his loose slides, press releases, and clips in a shopping bag.
14 A BURNING CHILD
With his installation at Gracie Mansion Gallery in November 1984, David began addressing the events of his childhood for the first time.
He covered a child mannequin with maps. He added flames to the child’s arms, legs, and back. The burning child runs across the bottom of the sea. David brought sand into the gallery to create his ocean floor, and added aquatic plants made from newspapers. At the back of the sandy area he placed a map-wrapped cow skull clamping a small globe in its jaws. Suspended above this from the ceiling was a shark covered in maps. Looming over it from the back wall—the specter the burning child ran from—was a large four-paneled painting of an ocean liner titled Dad’s Ship. On another wall, he depicted impending doom on a larger scale with his painting Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins. He lit the scene with tiny white Christmas lights and added a soundtrack he’d done with Doug Bressler from 3 Teens.
The day of the opening, scheduled for six P.M., David didn’t show up to install the work until five thirty—with Marion Scemama and Greer Lankton in tow. The opening was delayed for at least an hour and a half while they worked.
David had decided to include some of Greer’s work—six human figures, maybe a foot tall, with arms raised in supplication or distress, made from wire frames wrapped in black tape. Greer was a transsexual who made dolls that addressed issues of gender and identity—their mutability. They could be “sissies” or hermaphrodites or Siamese twins, usually anatomically correct. She had had the first show at the new Civilian on Avenue B, but apparently it hadn’t sold too well. David put her in his installation because she needed money. The cow skull and Greer dolls were sold as a package. According to Sur Rodney Sur, the collector who bought them threw Greer’s dolls away and kept the Wojnarowicz. But Greer got paid.
David had also been invited to show with Greer at the Timothy Great-house Gallery in January ’85. David told Greathouse that he would do it only if he could collaborate with Marion. She was an unknown but Great-house wanted David enough to agree. “It was unbelievable,” Marion said. “I never showed in my life. David was the first person who said to me, ‘but you’re an artist.’ This guy made an eruption in my life and changed everything about how I considered myself.”
They would use this in one of their collaborations for Greathouse, and in a poster they were making for Between C & D magazine. David wanted to pair the photo with a text about a recent court decision ruling that homosexuals had no constitutional right to privacy, probably a reference to Bowers v. Hardwick, then winding its way toward the Supreme Court.o David also spoke of how a person could get away with murder by saying the victim was a queer who tried to touch him. So in his text, he becomes the aggressor. “Realizing that I have nothing to lose in my actions, I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons.… In my dreams … I enter your houses through the smallest cracks in the bricks that keep you occupied with a feeling of comfort and safety.… I will wake you up and I will welcome you to your bad dream.”
Marion went home and processed the film immediately. Then she spent the night printing. “I start getting scared about having taken this photo” she said, “because I thought maybe one day he’s going to die this way. Because when you’re European, you have this image of Americans who just can come from nowhere, come with a gun and kill somebody if they don’t like what he represents. I thought maybe I took a fiction photo but one day it could be reality. So I called David. It was early in the morning, and I said, ‘I’m kind of scared of this photo.’ He said, ‘But do you like it?’ I said, ‘Just come and see it.’ It was six or seven in the morning, and I showed him the photo, and he said, ‘Wow that’s great.’
“But I said, ‘Are you sure you want to use this?’
“He said, ‘Yes, of course. Why?’
“And I said, ‘I feel a kind of responsibility about this image. Imagine that one day this happens to you.’
“And he got really, really angry. Really angry. I mean, later I understood that David could become angry at a point where you were not expecting it. But this was the first time he yelled at me: ‘How can you say that? If you say that, it means you want that for me!’ ”
So David began 1985—his year of fury.
He’d always had a temper, but now he was leaping into rages that were both irrational and damaging to some of his closest friendships. He and Marion went on to make four or five pieces for Greathouse. They produced the poster for Between C & D (which was folded into quarters and slipped into each ziploc bag). They remained on speaking terms. But David withdrew. Marion didn’t understand it. She just knew that suddenly “something was gone, something was broken.”
Years later, David tried to analyze his ups and downs with Marion, and he made the following notes about this first break with her: “Couldn’t leave me alone—together all the time. I asked for a week alone. I thought I was going to kill myself or that she was pushing me to kill her. Asked for week. She said yes. She called screaming about poster collaboration in show. I rejected her.”
David did put the poster in a group show without telling her. Then she happened to see him on the street and asked why. He replied, “I don’t need to tell you everything.” That made her so angry that she went to Keith Davis’s loft, where they’d stored the posters, and crossed her name off each one with a black marker. “It was a way of saying, ‘OK, I don’t want this to be considered a collaboration.’ Which was infantile,” Marion says. “Later Keith told me that when David saw that, he laughed.” However, David told people later that he had crossed off Marion’s name. Whatever the case, this was the beginning of discord.
Allen Frame had continued to experiment with Sounds in the Distance after the run in Bill Rice’s garden. He took it to Berlin during the film festival there and staged it in someone’s loft. Then at the end of November 1984, he directed Sounds at BACA Downtown in Brooklyn. The new cast included Steve Buscemi, Mark Boone Junior, John Heys, and Richard Elovich. They didn’t get reviewed, but Frame was gratified by the packed houses and positive feedback from theater people.
This time, David did not hesitate to attend, and as Frame put it, “he was not that gracious.” Frame had been much more ambitious this time. He had fifteen actors instead of eight. He had sets. One actor stepped out of a locker room at the back for his monologue. Another stepped out of an office party. One woman performed a monologue zipped up to her neck in a steam sauna. Onstage until intermission was a sculpture by Robin Hurst—a house sitting on a train trestle.
Frame asked David what he thought, and David responded, “Do you have four hours?”
David’s complaints amounted to the fact that he didn’t want these monologues reinterpreted. He could accept the locker room and office party ideas, but he certainly hadn’t gotten a story from anyone in a steam sauna; he wouldn’t have been interested in such a person. And how could the truck driver monologue be assigned to a woman—who then played it as a lesbian trucker? Changing the gender changed the content. On the positive side, one actor sounded so much like the guy he’d originally talked to that David was floored.
Frame felt disappointed that David saw things so literally but dutifully took his “notes” back to a couple of the actors—who were not happy to hear them.
David spent most of January 1985 in Paris, and while there he purchased some real human skeletons along with a baby elephant skeleton. He shipped them in one big crate to Keith Davis’s loft. Keith seemed to have infinite patience for any adventure or demand, if art was involved. When he left David a phone message saying, “Termites are coming out of the elephant; we have to bomb it some more,” he did not sound perturbed. David told people that the baby elephant had died in a game preserve, crushed in a closing gate or maybe electrocuted on a fence.
In February David bought a car—a green ’67 Chevy Malibu station wagon. He’d been renting cars periodically ever since he first had some money. Often he just drove to New Jersey with Hujar or Steve Doughton or Marion Scemama or some other friend to visit junkyards and swamps. He loved looking for snakes, frogs, and bugs. David and Hujar were especially fond of the industrial wasteland near the Meadowlands and another such site along the Hudson at Caven Point. They would both take pictures.
Almost immediately, David began adding tchotchkes and totems to the dashboard of the Chevy. Doughton recalled that among the very first was a figure of the leprous St. Lazarus, attended by helpful dogs. Then came the items that seemed to have floated off one of his paintings—a small skull to which he’d added bulging eyes and fangs, globes, dinosaurs, a bust of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns, assorted monsters, and a hollow green, red, and yellow frog. He once told Tommy Turner that the spirit of the car lived in the frog and had to be fed. Look inside, he told Turner, who found himself staring at a mound of dead grasshoppers, moths, bees, and other bugs collected from the grill and the windshield. A Day of the Dead skeleton decorated with baubles hung from the mirror. Over the glove compartment he eventually pasted a bumper sticker reading “I Brake for Hallucinations.”
One night near the end of February, a big crowd gathered at 8BC for an art auction to benefit Life Café, a sort of community canteen that was having trouble paying its rent. The New York Times sent a reporter to cover this exotic event. The club, “a dark ruin,” was packed. The unnamed auctioneer had accessorized his full-length evening gown with a beard and red hornrimmed glasses. Bidders held up not paddles but numbered paper plates.
The dramatic highlight came during the bidding over a sculpture by “David Wojnarowicz—the hottest among hot East Village artists.” It was a cat’s skull, two inches high and covered with maps. Bids jumped in $25 and then $100 increments. When they hit $800, the auctioneer cried, “Push it to a thousand! Think what you’d be doing for the community!” It topped out at $1,100 to wild applause.
The custom at benefits was for artist and beneficiary to split the proceedings, t
hough an artist could always decline to take his half. David did take his $550, but not for himself. Early in March, he stopped in at the old Civilian Warfare storefront, which had become Ground Zero. Now living in the tiny back room were James Romberger, the artist who had once mistaken David for a lumberjack, and Marguerite Van Cook, then pregnant with their child.
James and Marguerite had become dealers almost by accident. Late in the summer of ’84, they’d curated an exhibit at Sensory Evolution Gallery called “The Acid Show”—so-called because they handed out LSD at the opening. The show was such a hit that it moved to a nightclub called Kamikaze for a short run. One of the artists they’d included was Dean Savard, thrilled to be able to show one of his own paintings for a change. Walking home from Kamikaze one night, they ran into Savard on the street. Civilian was about to move to Avenue B, and Savard said, why don’t you take the Eleventh Street space and bring the Acid Show there? He handed them the keys.
James and Marguerite ran Ground Zero in the spirit of the original galleries. “We’re not serious art dealers,” Marguerite told no less than the New York Times. “We do and show what we like.” David had heard from Marion Scemama that Ground Zero needed money at least as much as Life Café did. He had never even met Marguerite until the day he came by and handed her a check for $550. She did not allow herself to look at the check while he was there—thinking, wow, maybe it’ll be for fifty dollars.
The day after David wrote that check, he went to the opening of the 1985 Whitney Biennial. He had two paintings in the exhibition. He had wanted this since his first year at Civilian, and they couldn’t make it happen in ’83, when he was such a beginner. Now, just two years later, he was one of two “East Village” painters in the show. (The other was Rodney Alan Green-blat.) He’d arrived.