by Cynthia Carr
David and Tom wanted to drive down a day ahead of time, and they volunteered to take Zoe—along with the twenty-five to thirty tombstones. ACT UP was sending buses, but Zoe called David a couple of times to ask whether this or that other person could also get a ride with them, and she could tell that it made him angry. Then on the drive, she kept asking both David and Tom to smoke less, and she thought they were both angry. She was still trying to figure out, years later, how this trip to Washington “ended up,” as she put it, “being something that made us not close for a really long time.”
David at ACT UP’s “Seize Control of the FDA” demonstration in Rockville, Maryland, on October 11, 1988. (Photograph by William Dobbs)
By the autumn of 1988, Tom and David were sharing a Plymouth station wagon that David had bought from his brother, Steven, with whom he had occasional but limited contact. David paid three hundred dollars for the car, and Tom paid for the insurance, and they took turns parking it. “It ate oil,” said Tom. It leaked constantly. When David picked Tom up for the drive to Washington, he assumed that David had added oil, but he hadn’t. “We busted a rod crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge,” Tom said. “It just blew.” So Tom took a cab to the airport, rented a car, and came back to pick up David and Zoe and the pile of foam-core tombstones. They left the station wagon at a gas station in Wilmington, and ultimately abandoned it there. David never owned another car.
Nearly a thousand protesters descended on FDA headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, on October 11. They blocked the entrances to the building. Someone climbed all the way to the roof. One group wore T-shirts that said, “We Die—They Do Nothing.” Another group, wearing lab coats spattered with red paint, carried signs that read, “The government has blood on its hands.” The Candelabras lay down holding tombstones behind their heads. David’s read: “Dead. As a person of color, I was exempt from drug trials.” Other tombstones said things like “AZT wasn’t enough” and “I got the placebo.” David had also painted the back of his jean jacket to read, “If I die of AIDS, forget burial—just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.” ACT UP had carefully studied the drug-approval process and produced a detailed list of demands, under headings like “No More Double-blind Placebo Trials” and “Allowance of Concurrent Prophylaxis.” It had also prepared an elaborate press kit and received worldwide media coverage. Within months, the FDA had accelerated its procedures.
Tom and David were among the 176 people arrested that day. Police bused them to a gym and handed them paperwork to fill out. They could come back for a hearing, or just mail in a twenty-five dollar fine—which they both did. Afterward, they drove Zoe to the place where she was staying. “David didn’t even want me to do that,” Tom said. “But I wasn’t going to tell her to get out of the car.” He never knew why David was so angry at Zoe.
She said, “I just remember at the end of that thing at the FDA feeling like ‘What happened? What did I do?’ But it was really clear that he had had enough of me. I ended up riding back on the bus.”
On October 18, David came home to find an envelope from the landlord’s lawyer pushed under his door, telling him that his tenancy had been terminated and that he must leave the loft by the end of November. He made note of the time and date in a journal, but whether he took immediate action is unknown. He had just a few days to finish a major mixed-media piece for a group show.
This piece would change his life. He’d set out to address the epidemic and the emotions it stirred in him. Once he’d filled his “history paintings” with messages about a civilization hurtling toward apocalypse, but now the apocalypse was personal: His community faced ruin. His best friend was dead. His own death seemed imminent. The authorities who could have helped had instead turned their backs.
At the center of this new piece, David silk-screened the deathbed photographs of Hujar. At the edges are supermarket posters so broken up—and intercut with U.S. currency—that they’ve become abstractions. Sperm shapes made from maps float on top of that. Then layered over everything is one of David’s more remarkable texts—a rant, really. It begins:
“If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility, not some person with AIDS …” says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what this official looks like because I reached in through the tv screen and ripped his face in half.
It’s a text filled not just with rage but with a kind of shocked disbelief at the government’s official indifference to the crisis—in fact, the government’s official malice. He goes on to parse the homophobia behind that malice, from the governor of Texas joking, “If you want to stop AIDS, shoot the queers,” to the devout standing outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral during Gay Pride parades chanting, “You won’t be here next year. You’ll get AIDS and die. Ha ha ha.”
But it’s also a text about fantasies of fighting back:
And I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping Amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians … and at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.
On October 22, the painting went on display in a group show at Mil-ford Gallery called “Still Trauma.” There it was seen by Karen Rinaldi, then an editorial assistant at Random House, who happened to be trolling the galleries on lower Broadway. She had never heard of David when she read the text on his painting. “It was one of those moments when you just stop in your tracks,” she said. “I was so overwhelmed by the writing.” She went to the front of the gallery where there was a copy of the Journal of Contemporary Art with another piece by David, “Living Close to the Knives,” his account of going to Long Island with Hujar. Rinaldi sat in the gallery and read the whole sixteen pages, telling herself, “I want a book by this person.” Eventually she made this happen. The book was Close to the Knives.
David’s piece was also seen by critic Jerry Saltz, who chose to cover it in his monthly Arts magazine column, in which he wrote in depth about a single painting. Wendy Olsoff, who—with Penny Pilkington—had just taken David on at P.P.O.W, cited this article as a turning point in how David was perceived by the art world. He wasn’t just the East Village primitive anymore. Saltz called Untitled (Hujar Dead) a piece with “the power to change lives.”
The persona he projected in this important work—the furious, even monstrous, gay man—would become the image of an increasingly public David. He was so comfortable with rage, so accustomed to it, and he could use it as armor or, at least, a mask.
Behind it, he hid his struggle to face mortality, his fears about what lay ahead. “I feel like it’s happening to this person called David, but not to me,” he wrote in his journal. “It’s happening to this person who looks exactly like me, is as tall as me and I can see through his eyes as if I am in his body, but it’s still not me. So I go on and occasionally this person called David cries or makes plans for the possibility of death or departure or goes to the doctor for checkups or dabbles in underground drugs in hopes for more time, but then eventually I get the body back and that David disappears for awhile and I go about my daily business doing what I do, what I need or care to do. I sometimes feel bad for that David and can’t believe he is dying.”
David devoted himself to the studio now, and that fall he began to generate a great deal of new work for his upcoming P.P.O.W show, “In the Shadow of Forward Motion”—both paintings and complex photo pieces.
/> David had been intimidated about working in Hujar’s darkroom. He felt like a beginner. Some of the Rimbaud photos had been printed by commercial labs, and some had been printed by him. He told Wendy Olsoff that he was proud of those prints but that they’d been hard to do. Then, early in the eighties, he’d worked in Tommy Turner’s darkroom. Turner described David as “really adept from the beginning,” but David had not printed anything since doing the photos pasted into Fuck You Faggot Fucker. David told me that he thought of his first work in Hujar’s darkroom as “experimenting.” Gary Schneider and John Erdman encouraged him. “They explained to me that the earliest prints a photographer does are the most interesting,” David told me, “because they’re full of all the struggle and tension of creating and finding something about how light acts on paper. That when you learn it more thoroughly, you can make amazing things but the energy is totally different.”
David did not consider himself a photographer. One essay in Close to the Knives begins with his declaration that he once accepted an invitation to speak at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia because they were going to call him a “visiting photographer.” And that amused him since, as he put it, “I don’t even know how to operate a camera on anything other than automatic.”
Still, now that he could “experiment,” he had years’ worth of negatives and contact sheets to go through. In some of his new photo pieces, he juxtaposed five or seven or even fifteen distinct (not collaged) photographs. They show that David had again become a poet. Maybe he’d never stopped being one, as he worked to get disparate images to resonate. But pieces like Spirituality (for Paul Thek) make it clear that, for him, photos functioned as the words he could not construct from an alphabet. As he put it, “I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.”
His preliminary sketches and “lists of associations” were always about working out ideas, not “how will I draw this.” When he planned the piece dedicated to Paul Thek, who had died of AIDS in August, he knew exactly which images he wanted—for example, Christ with ants, ecstatic slam-dancers in Louisiana, and Iolo (who died of AIDS about six weeks before Hujar did) exhaling smoke.
Weight of the Earth, Part I and Weight of the Earth, Part II each have fourteen carefully chosen photographs and one small drawing. David thought of these images as frames from “films of living, sounding a particular note like each word that makes up a sentence.” These pictures could stand on their own—a hand holding a burning globe, a wrestler flipping through the air, a frog breaking through the surface of a pond and seen from below (legs only), a man standing in a pool of white light, the midsection of a highway patrolman walking past a car window, the sad monkey at the circus, a homeless person asleep in a box with only his feet visible—but together they describe something enigmatic, poignant, and difficult about being alive. To him, this was an opera that could have a hundred parts, but at least he’d made two of them. He scribbled a note on a worksheet: “Weight of the Earth is about captivity in all that surrounds us.” In his “Notes to the Show,” he described it as “the weight of gravity, the pulling in to the earth’s surface of everything that walks, crawls, or rolls across it” and “the heaviness of the pre-invented existence we are thrust into.”
Untitled (Buffaloes), 1988–89. Gelatin-silver print, 27½ ×34½ inches. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)
On his first list of some thirty-five or forty possible images for Weight of the Earth is one he called “buffalo falling.” David had taken the picture in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of Natural History, where it’s part of a diorama illustrating a Native American method for hunting buffalo. Hunters could kill a large number of the animals if they chased them towards a cliff they didn’t know about. David recognized this as “a metaphorical image for the title of the show, a sense of impending collision contained in this acceleration of speed within the structures of civilization.” Untitled (Falling Buffalo) is now the image most identified with David, and a detail from it became the cover of Close to the Knives. David talked in his notes to this piece about his anger at the structure of things. But to me, this image is about the AIDS crisis, about those who ended up going off a cliff because they did not know that they were headed for one.
David took the negative of the falling buffalo to the Schneider-Erdman Lab. He told them he’d made five sixteen-by-twenty prints. That was as big as he could go in Hujar’s darkroom, and he thought the prints should be bigger. Schneider asked him to bring in one of the sixteen-by-twenties so he could use it as a guide, and David refused. But not because he didn’t think his was good enough. “My versions were an interpretation that he really appreciated,” Schneider said. “I think he truly believed that if he didn’t try to control how I produced anything, I would produce something better.” Eventually Schneider did see the buffalo print David had made, and he thought it was “unbelievably beautiful.”
The ant photos taken at Teotihuacán also fit his theme—“things quietly occurring” while life rushes past. Again, the ants represented human society to him. They go about their business, not heeding the symbols for spirituality (crucifix), control (toy soldier), time/money (watchface/coins), violence (toy gun), desire (photo of a naked man), and language (a sign).
“In the Shadow of Forward Motion” was the largest solo show David ever had. Marion Scemama came from Paris twice to help him, first in October and November 1988. She spent hours going through contact sheets, talking with him about which images were strong and had meaning. She cut sperm shapes out of maps. She ran errands. She did some printing in the darkroom. But perhaps most important to David, she understood what he was doing. “She really did energize him,” Tom observed. “There’s no question. At least creatively, the two of them set off sparks with each other.”
One day, waiting for Marion to arrive, he began another taped journal. He talked about his disgust with the art world. “I’m busting my gut to make these things that are part of my personal truth,” he said, and now the art world would judge them, quite possibly dismiss them. His anxiety over this made him feel like smashing all his work. He’d wait till Marion got there and she could witness it. He’d forget about the show. Then he imagined himself puking over the walls and fixtures and darkroom, putting his head out the window to throw up all over the street. And as he went off on this rant, he actually started to vomit. He couldn’t tell if it was “the fear that I’ve carried through my whole life” that made him sick or if it was the virus. He felt scared.
But when David created a piece for this show about his possibly imminent death, it was surprisingly serene. He used a grid of black-and-white photos showing gears and other industrial oddments—“the residue of the manufactured world I was born into”—as background. Where I’ll Go After I’m Gone is a collaged and painted piece dominated by a jungle fern on the left. His own face is among the beautifully arranged elements here—with blue moons, a winged foot, a fetus, a Native American doll, a donkey. In his “Notes on the Show,” he explained, “I thought if there was indeed a place one goes after death then it could only be a place determined by one’s vision of the world; of life; of concerns. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head. The garden is the place I’ll go if I die.”
He recorded a dream in his journal about meeting a hot guy at ACT UP. “I’m very attracted to him sexually but it’s more that I feel like he’d love me and even protect me take care of me,” he wrote. Eventually they end up on an escalator extending miles up into the sky and they somehow get separated. “I feel upset and need to find this guy also wondering when I’ll tell him about my diagnosis. Suddenly the gladness I feel with contact with him turns to memory of Tom. Sadness and feelings of love for Tom. I think that I don’t want to lose him. I can’t envision breaking up with him. I wake up sad and exhilarated simultaneously.”
On N
ovember 25, David brought Marion along to Tom’s birthday dinner at Gage and Tollner, a steak house in Brooklyn. This was unusual because most of David’s friends never met Tom or even knew he existed. Tom could remember walking around the East Village with David and running into Kiki Smith or Keith Davis—and David would act as if Tom wasn’t there. He wouldn’t even say “This is Tom,” much less “This is my boyfriend.” The only friends of David’s that Tom really knew were Gary Schneider and John Erdman. Sometimes the four of them would have dinner together. Tom was acquainted with Judy Glantzman. He’d met Zoe Leonard through ACT UP. That was it. When Tom asked why, David said that he just liked to keep his life private. But it ended up reinforcing how intimidated Tom felt about the art world. “Early on, at least, I was afraid to meet his friends,” he said. “I just didn’t know who I was in relation to any of them. It was like with Marion. I always felt outside when they were together. David was nervous about that. And then, as I felt bad, he would sense it, and it just was awkward all the time. And I really did sense that—when they were together, no one else existed, and it made me feel pretty superfluous. I remember him yelling at me about it, like it was my fault that I didn’t like Marion.”
Though Tom and David photographed each other, they were rarely photographed together. This stained photobooth picture of them kissing and the photo on their video rental ID card could well be the only two pictures that clearly show both their faces. (Photobooth: David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU; Video ID: Courtesy of Tom Rauffenbart)
Marion returned to Paris at the end of November, but planned to return in January to help him finish preparations for the show. They continued their marathon phone conversations. One day he mailed her a large print of a ship with a small circular inset showing a blow job, all of it printed to look like a negative. He had folded it into four parts and included a note to say he was experimenting with this. What did she think?