Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  And he was terribly unhappy.

  I remember running into him on the street—either after the plaster-heads show at Civilian or later that year when the Whitney announced who’d made it into the Biennial. When I congratulated him, he had such a look of distress on his face. He told me he just hated the art world. And then, I believe the exact sentence went: “If I were straight, I’d move to a small town right now and get a job in a gas station.”

  Dennis Cooper also ran into him on the street, probably after the Biennial opened. Cooper, of course, had published some of David’s Rimbaud in New York photos and some of David’s monologues in his literary journal, Little Caesar. Cooper had moved to New York in 1983. He and David weren’t close, but Cooper always went to see his shows and he didn’t like the new work—the burning children, the kissing men, the shark. It was all so obvious, he thought. He liked the early work and thought David had “lost the quality of complete and pure alienation that had given his talent its bite and specificity.” So Cooper analyzed it in Artforum’s special issue on East Village art, published in October 1999. When he saw David on the street that day in 1985, he expressed these misgivings, “half expecting one of his famous bursts of temper,” Cooper wrote.

  Instead, Wojnarowicz sat down with me on a stoop and launched into a tormented, self-righteous, hour-long harangue that has, ever since, struck me as definitive of East Village Art’s brief moment, for better or worse. He said that his success was destroying him because he couldn’t reject it in good conscience. He’d dreamed of this kind of recognition and had even fantasized about exactly the kind of black-sheep art world that the East Village scene encompassed in theory, a situation where art could be anything at all, and where walking into a gallery would always involve a disconcerting, confrontational experience with an uncompromised, individual vision. But this belief had been contingent on the idea that New York was secretly full of artists who had as clamorous a sensibility as his own. Instead, he found himself surrounded by peers whose talent was merely raw, and raw only by virtue of economic hardship, but whose sensibilities were as coddling and self-indulgent as those of the Salles, Fischls, and Longos who populated the official art world. As a consequence, similar delusions of greatness had settled over the scene. In response, he’d rebelled against his peers by giving his work a social conscience and physical grandiosity, both to counteract the ongoing romanticization of the homespun and to embody what he imagined an “East Village art” should be. But his rebellion had backfired. The political sheen had given critics and curators a way to pigeonhole his work and had led them to misdiagnose his personal rage as the spearhead of a movement with which he felt no camaraderie whatsoever. He said he was going to quit making art, and stormed off.

  Of course, David did not quit making art. He just quit painting for the rest of 1985. The only picture in his oeuvre with an ’85 date is Attack of the Alien Minds, shown in the Biennial; that’s dated 1984–85 and features the same alien head he used in his May ’84 show at Civilian. A couple of exceptions were paintings he included in the installations that occupied him that year—which really began with the burning child fleeing Dad’s Ship, at Gracie Mansion. These are the scenarios he created after that: Parents eating their children. Parents being murdered by their children. (That was both an installation and a film.) Then, a burning child fleeing the apocalypse. He also began work on a film about a murdering “satanic” teen. A fourth installation, in a show that raised money for a child victims’ fund, featured a kid being hunted down like an animal.

  What he realized later was that his newly secure foothold in the art world had relieved all that pressure just to survive—the pressure that had kept him from facing his past. “It was a rough time for me,” said David when I interviewed him. “I had more money than I’d ever had in my life. Which gave me access to time, gave me access to movement … and it shook up a lot in my life. I hit a really dark period. I think I became somewhat self-destructive, just—you know, I was hitting against that whole childhood.” He had tapped into a huge reservoir of neediness and rage.

  In 1985, he didn’t just make one installation after another about imperiled children or dead families; he began to lash out at people who were “like family.”

  Jim Stark, soon to start producing Jim Jarmusch’s films, decided to become the next to take on Sounds in the Distance after he saw the show in Brooklyn. He knew nothing of David’s reaction to that version. He just thought the material could use a bigger production and maybe get to a bigger audience. He enlisted a young director, Molly Fowler, who’d never heard of David but was fascinated by the monologues Stark showed her. Then they went to Gracie Mansion to look at David’s artwork.

  “I fell in love with what I saw,” Fowler said. “I knew there was real power in where he’d been and what he’d seen.” Her thought was to incorporate David’s life into the script, “to keep each monologue on its own and use him to draw us from character to character.” She asked if she could spend some time with him.

  “We met in various all-night restaurants on Second Avenue,” she said. “I don’t think we ever met before eleven o’clock at night, and we would sometimes talk for three or four hours about his life, about where the various characters came from, what he remembered about them, and how they’d affected him.”

  A new version of Sounds in the Distance would open in November, but Fowler soon realized that, for David, these meetings at the beginning of ’85 were less about a theater piece and more about his need to tell someone his story.

  Peter Hujar began a new project, setting out to photograph what he called “tribes,” meaning a kind of surrogate family. “Peter was amassing around him people that shared his ideas about life. That was your immediate tribe,” John Erdman said. “He loved to talk about his tribe.” Hujar had invited Erdman, then working more than full-time at the photo lab with Gary Schneider, to put such a group together. Erdman never did and always regretted it. Hujar soon got bored with the whole idea and stopped the project.

  But he was thinking “tribe” when he photographed David in a group shot with Chuck Nanney, Steve Brown, and Steve Doughton. Hujar selected these people. Nanney remembered him saying, “You guys are inseparable and you have this really intense relationship that I admire, and I just want to capture this moment.”

  David agreed to it, but had he assembled his own group, he might have included Keith Davis, for example. Some of his message tapes from this era survive, and the two Steves, in particular, seem to have called almost every day, sometimes more than once. Apart from art world activities and voyages to the Jersey woods, one thing the four of them did together was go bowling. David bowled with “a natural grace,” said Doughton. “When he released the ball, it would touch the floor almost silently. He had a fair amount of power in his delivery too.”

  Peter Hujar had begun to photograph certain of his friends and their “tribes” when he took David Wojnarowicz and Friends in 1985. From left: Steve Brown, Chuck Nanney, David, and Steve Doughton. Vintage gelatin-silver print, 20 × 16 inches. (© 1987 Peter Hujar Archive, LLC. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York)

  They went to Hujar’s loft to pose on March 19. “He gave us no directions,” Doughton said, “and I remember feeling awkward. I think we all felt awkward.” A couple of days later Hujar called them over to see the print. “This is a shitty portrait,” he announced. “I’m trying to capture what you guys have, and it’s not there.” He began pulling out other pictures to illustrate what he meant. He had one of himself and three other photographers, jumping.

  “Do you want us to jump?” asked Nanney.

  “I want you to act like you know each other,” said Hujar. But he did not reshoot the picture.

  Nanney ended up thinking it was funny, saying, “Instead of getting what he wanted, which was us exuding togetherness, he got the walls between us.”

  Shortly before the Biennial opened, the first AIDS antibody test became available. Gay groups immediately announce
d their opposition to testing—until there could be guarantees of confidentiality. Not that the test would be easy to get in New York in any case. Other cities set up drop-in centers where the procedure could be done quickly and often anonymously. Other cities allowed physicians to use private labs. But under health commissioner David Sencer, New York had what many regarded as the most restrictive testing policy in the country—along with the most AIDS cases. The antibody test could be conducted “only by a city laboratory on referral from personal physicians” and it took months to get the results, reported the New York Times when the policy finally changed at the end of 1985. Sencer was the health commissioner who’d told reporters in February that there was no AIDS crisis, that no education about the disease was needed, that “the people of New York City who need to know already know all they need to know about AIDS.”

  In her April 1985, East Village Eye column, “Dr.” Cookie Mueller answered a letter from a gay man who’d just broken up with his boyfriend and felt like a dinosaur at the bars. She told him it was OK to be more selective. “And don’t worry about AIDS, for God’s sake.… If you don’t have it now, you won’t get it. By now we’ve all been in some form of contact with it.… Not everybody gets it, only those predisposed to it. If everyone got it that was introduced to it, half the population of New York would be on death’s door by now.”

  After a couple of negative letters came in, Cookie responded that she simply wanted to speak against paranoia and fear. “I’m sorry if I offended anyone.” At this point, no one knew how likely it was for someone infected with the virus to actually get AIDS, or how quickly that might happen. With health officials like Sencer in denial, ignorance was not Cookie’s fault, but it was her problem. She died of AIDS in 1989.

  Newly ensconced at 155 Avenue B, Civilian Warfare managed to get a ten-thousand-dollar credit line from Citibank. “This poor bank officer probably lost his job over it,” Marisa Cardinale said. “He really believed in the East Village.” She was able to write checks at last—pay for the renovation, pay some artists, and pay rent until the end of ’84.

  Operation Pressure Point had not yet pushed out the drug traffic, and Avenue B still qualified as the Wild East. So the typewriter they’d finally acquired was soon stolen. “Somebody unplugged it and walked out with it,” Alan Barrows remembered. “Somebody stole my jacket that had my keys in it. I had to change all the locks. Greer Lankton lost a sculpture that was in the gallery, a little baby. This couple came in with a baby carriage, and when they left, the mother was holding the baby in her arms and pushing the carriage out.” They realized later that the couple had put Greer’s sculpture in the baby carriage. Greer was devastated. She began wheat-pasting the neighborhood with flyers that said: “Sissy Baby Stolen. Reward.”

  The January ’85 rent check bounced, and from then on, Civilian paid cash in bite-size payments. By spring it was $450 or $250 or $200 at a time.

  In February ’85, Civilian sent David a check for $337.50—and it bounced. He may have eventually been paid. No one remembers. But in April, he dreamt that he’d fought with Barrows and Savard over the money they owed him. It was part of his only journal entry for 1985. He woke up angry, not remembering details except that at the end of the dream, he showed Barrows the IOU they’d given him. “It’s like some strange poetry,” David wrote. “Won’t stand up in court.”

  The contrast at the gallery between Barrows and Savard grew sharper now as Savard’s drug addiction escalated, while Barrows, after experimenting, had stopped cold. At first, Marisa Cardinale recalled, Savard had just a “friendly” problem where, for example, he might pay her forty bucks he owed her, then ask for twenty back because he’d just “seen someone.” He’d disappear and come back, announcing that he now had two dime bags to share with her but he’d been shorted and he’d been charged “all that for just this.” So she knew he’d already used some of what he’d bought. And then he’d say, “Don’t tell Alan. It makes Alan crazy.”

  For a while, Judy Glantzman lived upstairs from Savard and his boyfriend, Steve Adams. She remembered Savard knocking on her door sometimes “late at night and saying, ‘You know, I just need twenty dollars for’—and it would be something like ‘for eggs.’ ”

  “Your work would get sold and you’d never hear about it,” said Bronson Eden, “because Dean would use the money to buy junk.”

  “He was taking money from the gallery,” Barrows said. “He was taking checks out of the back of the book so we wouldn’t know there was money missing, and then the accounts wouldn’t jibe.” Usually that was small money, ten or twenty dollars. But then he started stealing things. For example, Barrows learned that Savard had stolen someone’s purse and was passing bad checks written on the purse owner’s checking account.

  Barrows and his partner (also named Steve) had hired a friend of Savard’s to clean their apartment, not realizing that this woman, Martha, was actually Savard’s drug buddy. Barrows and Steve went out of town and returned to find that Martha and Savard had moved in. Savard was standing there in a necklace that Steve had inherited from his grandmother. He’d been stealing their clothes and their jewelry. Soon after they got Savard and Martha out, Barrows and Steve went to their local video store to rent a movie, only to be told that they had not returned that pile of porn movies they’d rented. Savard, of course, had used their account to get those films, then sold them. Barrows said of Savard: “It was like watching somebody become a vampire.”

  Savard announced that he and Martha were going to Provincetown to clean up. Bronson Eden remembered the day Savard made his grand reentry at the gallery, declaring that he was now off drugs and everything would be different. This probably occurred around the beginning of April, when Eden and Steve Doughton had a two-man show at Civilian. At the opening, Martha came in and gave Eden a congratulatory hug. “As she was hugging me, this guy came in and put his hand on her shoulder,” Eden said. “It was a cop. She’d just bought heroin someplace, and he busted her right there in the gallery. The cat was out of the bag. Dean was still on drugs.”

  When Barrows’s mother came to visit him at the beginning of May, he broke down crying one night and told her what was happening with Savard. She suggested getting his family involved. A couple of days later, they staged an intervention at Barrows’s apartment. Any focus on drug addiction got derailed, however, when Savard’s parents learned the (to them) startling news that Savard was gay. Barrows’s mother was the one who told them. She also declared that there was nothing wrong with it and that they should accept it. Barrows couldn’t remember how the topic even came up. He did remember Savard’s father announcing, “We are going to take the gay out of you,” and then driving Savard home to Connecticut.

  The next issue of the East Village Eye reported, “Dean Savard is taking an extended vacation from his gallery to travel, relax, and work on his own art.”

  That spring Judy Glantzman left Civilian for Gracie Mansion. She knew nothing of the intervention, but saw that “Dean was so far gone, it wasn’t going to get better.” She and David had been Civilian’s two biggest earners.

  In April, photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders began inviting artists, dealers, and critics from the East Village scene to pose in a series of six group portraits he called The New Irascibles. He’d been out looking at art with his friend Robert Pincus-Witten and told him, now that the scene was so big, wouldn’t it be interesting to document the first generation of artists, the second generation, the first dealers, and so on. Pincus-Witten joked that such a project would become “the central document in the history of world culture.” They laughed, but Greenfield-Sanders followed through, and Pincus-Witten helped him make the lists.

  For each grouping of twelve to fifteen people, Greenfield-Sanders used the same visual composition seen in Nina Leen’s historic 1950 portrait of the abstract expressionists, The Irascibles. Greenfield-Sanders’s pictures would run in Arts magazine with an article by Pincus-Witten describing how much in the scene had ch
anged since 1983. David ended up in the cover shot—the first artists from the first galleries—with Judy Glantzman, Greer Lankton, Mike Bidlo (center, where Jackson Pollock sat in the original, assuming Pollock’s pose), Futura 2000, Mark Kostabi, Rodney Alan Greenblat, Luis Frangella, and others. Rick Prol overslept and missed the shoot, thus joining the “second generation,” and he told Greenfield-Sanders he would never forgive himself.

  Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, The New Irascibles—Artists 1, 1985. Gelatin-silver print, 14 × 14 inches. Back row from left, after David: Futura 2000, Mark Kostabi, Craig Coleman, Greer Lankton. Second row from left: Judy Glantzman with knee up, Stephen Lack, Mike Bidlo, Luis Frangella, Arch Connelly, Rhonda Zwillinger. Seated at front, from left: Rodney Alan Greenblat, Joseph Nechtval, Richard Hambelton. (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 1985)

  Everyone understood that history was being recorded here. Glantzman remembered the buzz around the scene about “who was going to make it into the pictures, and what cut would you make it into.” The rivalry, the jealousy—it was unpleasant, she thought, even nasty, and it was new. She and David were acquaintances at this point, not yet friends, but her feelings echo what David had confessed to Dennis Cooper around the time of the Biennial. “I remember 1985 as the end of the East Village,” Glantzman said. “The whole thing had broken down.”

  Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, The New Irascibles—Dealers 1, 1985. Gelatin-silver print, 14 × 14 inches. Back row from left: Alan Barrows, cut-out of Dean Savard, Rich Colicchio, Gracie Mansion. Second row from left: Elizabeth McDonald, Bill Stelling, Sur Rodney Sur, Mario Fernandez, Peter Nagy. Front row from left: Doug Milford with knee up, Patti Astor, Nina Siegenfeld, Alan Belcher. (© Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 1985)