Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  That was the first print David made for The Sex Series. He’d gotten the idea to work with negative images after talking with Marguerite Van Cook about manipulations that could be done in the darkroom. She told David about a photo series she’d made by using color slides in the enlarger—a positive would become a negative, though the red light in the darkroom would knock out a certain portion of the light spectrum coming through the slide. So the prints would look like negatives but a little “off.” She also explained how to make contact prints and reminded him that if you took the negative holder out of the enlarger, you could burn a circular image into the paper. Or you could make your own negative holder, as she had in order to print from Super 8 film, which is quite small. He seems to have tried all of the above.

  The eight photomontages in The Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) were immediately hailed as a remarkable achievement. “Motion is of primary importance in these X-ray visions of a world gone awry,” critic David Deitcher wrote in Artforum, “and a discomfiting sense of time’s accelerating passage emerges as its coefficient: a steamship ascends a storm-tossed sea; a military airplane disgorges paratroopers; the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges converge like luminous arteries seen from the air; a train snakes its way through a desolate region; a massive tornado obliterates a landscape; a clapboard building and watertower are glimpsed as if from the window of a speeding car. Only the shot of tree trunks in a forest, seen from near ground level, hints at stasis and duration. But the fact that these trees are rooted in the flooded terrain of a bayou hints at both death and decay.”t Set into each landscape described above are circular images David lifted from Hujar’s porn collection. Most have other insets as well—ants on money, a fetus, typed texts, blood cells, part of a newspaper piece about a queer-bashing. Deitcher remarked, for example, on an image of two women embracing—one of the circular images flanking the tornado: “That an image of an embrace should be juxtaposed with one of nature out of control underscores the emotional sense of peril and ambivalence that suffuses the entire series.”

  Writing in Art in America, critic Lucy Lippard noted that David related these insets “to surveillance photos, to suppressed information and to cells seen through a microscope. Most of the circular cameos contain explicit homoerotic or occasionally heterosexual scenes. The reversal to negative suffuses them with a nocturnal glow and generates unexpected sources of light and energy, haloing heads, cocks, bony hands. The larger underlying images are often quite ordinary to begin with … but they take on, through the inversion of light and dark, a menacing, oneiric aura.”

  David wrote in his “Notes to the Show” that he’d been inspired by his rejection from a Paris exhibition about sexuality. He’d collaborated on a piece about attempts to repress sexuality in the age of AIDS, and the curator, an American, told him, “This is not a show about AIDS.” David declared that this curator was thought to be a nice guy. “That reminds me of Hitler’s passion for painting flowers. I’m in the throes of facing my own mortality and in attempting to communicate what I’m experiencing or learning in order to try and help others I am effectively silenced. I am angry.”

  When I asked David about The Sex Series, he said, “It came out of loss. I mean every time I opened a magazine there was the face of somebody else who died. It was so overwhelming and there was also this huge backlash about sex, even within the activist community. The thought police were jumping out left and right about what’s proper.… And it essentially came out of wanting some sexy images on the wall—for me. To keep me company. To make me feel better. It was fairly democratic. The lesbians and homosexuals outnumbered the heterosexuals, but I thought that was proper.”

  And he wanted to see sexy images connected with Hujar, who had thrown away all his porn soon after he was diagnosed. David rescued it from the trash. Much of that collection comes from the fifties, judging by hairstyles. Most shocking in the heterosexual scenes is how homemade they seem, how cheesy and unglamorous—though that isn’t detectable once they’re negatives. The “man-on-man action” looks a bit more professional and includes pictures from the coy bodybuilder magazines of that era. David told me, “There were some images in there that were really evocative of a time that I always wished I could go to—just for the sexual part of it.”

  David made just one of each photomontage in The Sex Series and then went to the Schneider-Erdman Lab to discuss whether they could be reproduced. “He was really having kind of a breakdown because this was a unique set of prints, and he was worried that they would be sold,” Schneider said.

  “He was passionately in love with them,” Erdman added.

  “They’re miraculous prints,” said Schneider. “That’s very complicated masking.u Really difficult. He knew he could never repeat them. And he knew how important they were.”

  The set David made was twenty by twenty-four inches, probably because he’d found it easier to do all the insets at that size, but Hujar’s darkroom wasn’t set up to print images that big. Schneider told him to bring in the three hardest (i.e., those with the most subtle tones) and he would make sixteen-by-twenty-inch versions of them. “Avedon and Scavullo and the Kertész Estate would bring me retouched printing—or vintage prints in the case of the Kertész Estate—and I would make a large-format negative plus masks and a new version that was basically a copy print but a really, really high-end version.”

  “You couldn’t tell the difference,” said Erdman.

  “So I made these three prints for him, and of course it was enormous labor to do, and usually I charged a fortune for that work. Really a fortune,” Schneider said. “Because for all of those artists, it was worth it.”

  “We didn’t charge David anything,” Erdman said.

  “And he was overwhelmed by the quality of them,” Schneider said.

  The Schneider-Erdman Lab had been processing David’s film and making him contact sheets since 1984—and had never charged him. “He made it very clear that he couldn’t cope with it ever being a commercial relationship, and it would have to be an exchange relationship of some sort,” said Schneider. “He laid that out very clearly. From the beginning. Even with film processing.”

  “Then after every trip he seemed to come in with hundreds of rolls of film,” said Erdman.

  “And we were poor,” said Schneider. “But Peter kept telling us that David had no money.” They’d had the same arrangement with Hujar. Schneider processed his film in exchange for the occasional print.

  In 1984, while he was still at Civilian Warfare, David asked them what work of his they’d like in exchange. Schneider wanted Fuck You Faggot Fucker, but it was already sold. So he asked for one of the small black and gray watercolors depicting sexual situations in a porn theater, pictures that ended up in David’s last book, Memories That Smell like Gasoline. Apparently David decided that one watercolor wasn’t enough, because he showed up at the lab one day with a huge painting done on a school map. Schneider described it as “vertical poles, men climbing the poles, a big screaming head, a red open mouth, and a meteor in the sky—all the icons.” It was the size of an East Village apartment wall, and very fragile. Hujar came by to advise them not to roll it up. They had to put it in a big acrylic box. Eventually they sold it to the Newark Museum.

  In preparing for “In the Shadow of Forward Motion,” Schneider printed for David for the first time, and David compensated him by giving him art. One falling buffalo. A couple of prints from the “Ant Series.” But with The Sex Series, David suggested that Schneider-Erdman co-own the edition. Earnings were split evenly between David, the lab, and the gallery.

  Dedicating The Sex Series to Marion Scemama was “a joke between us,” David told me. “She was extremely helpful in getting me out of depression, getting me working. She helped me focus through conversations and excitement about sharing time and making things. So I did it as a thanks—and also to get all her friends to ask, “Why is this homosexual dedicating The Sex Series to you? What does this mean?”

&nb
sp; David had his retrospective at Illinois State University coming up, but for all he knew, “In the Shadow of Forward Motion” would be his last show of new work, and he wanted a catalog. The gallery budget would allow for only a photocopied effort. Even so, Marion promised to solicit her friend Félix Guattari to write the introduction.

  In this country, Guattari—psychotherapist, philosopher, and semiotician—is best known for his two collaborations with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. In academia and in an art world enthralled in the 1980s by postmodernism, Guattari had enormous cachet. Marion had known him since the early seventies—he was first her therapist, then her friend. In 1988, she and her boyfriend, François Pain, were living at Guattari’s place in Paris.

  Guattari knew nothing of David’s art, but Marion prepared a slide show for him. David called her one night to talk about what his work meant: “Hi, Marion, this is David. OK. If I start out with the idea that we’re born into a completely pre-invented existence where everything is regulated …” It was a seamless 3,500 words that could have been a lecture, but he was clearly not reading. Marion translated this into French for Guattari, then rendered the resulting essay into English before she returned to New York.

  Almost half of Guattari’s introduction quotes from what David said on the phone. Still, David was pleased to have some words from this important thinker. He felt that his work had never been taken seriously, that critics and journalists always focused instead on his perilous childhood. That would change with “In the Shadow of Forward Motion.” At least, his life story would move to the background more often.

  Certainly Guattari described the work with an intellectual framework never before applied to David, with phrases like “the concatenation of semiotic links.” But Guattari seemed most moved by the way David was dealing with his diagnosis. “His revolt against death and the deadly passivity with which society deals with this phenomenon give a deeply emotional character to his life work,” Guattari wrote, “which literally transcends the style of passivity and abandon of the entropic slope of fate which characterizes this present period.”

  Again—David never disclosed the terror and dread his diagnosis churned up in him. “I just hope it’s not something prolonged and painful, and I hope it’s not fearful,” he said in a taped journal entry sometime in December 1988. “I just hope it’s something I can slip into, like slipping into a tub of water. Warm water. Something restful. But when I think about dying and I suddenly have fear about it, it’s fear of going before I’m ready. And then I think, how can I ever be ready?”

  He came back to the tape later, talking with a stuffed nose, as if he’d been crying. “I guess what scares me the most,” he said, “I feel afraid of what the end of my life will be. It’s the idea that I would lose my mind. Maybe the threat all my life of trying to maintain some kind of complete control of myself. Coming from where I come from—all the scenes as a kid hustling and all the scenes from the streets and the times I came close to death and the times that I nearly starved and the times that lack of food or sleep sent my body into a tailspin.… And maybe, as somebody suggested, that need for self-control is the mask, this enormous rage that I either carry or may carry from all those experiences. I guess I fear loss of control, that that rage will spill and become indiscriminate in terms of what it attacks. And really and truly I think I’m afraid of losing my mind.… I want to be able to provoke some change in whatever limited fashion, whatever small sense of shift that anything I could do or say could create in people, in a person, in numbers, in subtlety and whatever. I just want to be able to make that gesture. And I hope that my mind remains consistently clear despite rage, despite illness, despite weakness or despite comfort or despite pain.”

  The Hujar Estate’s tenancy at the loft had ended on November 30, a date on which it was to turn the unit over “broom clean” and vacant. The landlord went so far as to inform the estate that there was never any intention to renew Hujar’s lease either; the loft was being converted into a commercial space. David realized then that he was going to have to hire a lawyer.

  On December 20, 1988, he appeared in civil court to fight his eviction from Hujar’s place.

  The result was a stipulation signed in January that allowed him to remain at 189 Second Avenue, and its wording was rather extraordinary. He would consent to the issuance of a warrant of eviction, but the execution of said warrant would be stayed until January 15, 1990, “by virtue of the fact that respondent Wojnarowicz is currently suffering from and has been officially diagnosed as having Acquired Immune Deficiency (AIDS).” If he still had AIDS on January 15, 1990, and his health had not improved, the stay would be extended for as long as he continued to suffer from AIDS. He would furnish the landlord with written statements about his health from his doctor. “It is further stipulated and agreed by the parties hereto that in the event respondent Wojnarowicz is cured of AIDS or otherwise recovers from this disease, the stay shall be vacated and petitioner may execute the warrant of eviction.”

  The lawyer who’d worked this out was someone David kept on retainer until early in 1991. The building was about to be converted into a multiplex, and his problems at the loft were just beginning.

  Early in January 1989, David and Tom went to New Orleans for the fourth time. Tom had fallen in love with the unique feel of this city and its hybrid culture—even the romantic aura surrounding its deterioration and rot. But above all, he loved the food. He had introduced David to New Orleans during their first year together, and David found that he too loved this city—and the alluring nearby swamps.

  They always rented a car. David liked to make day trips into the bayous to look for critters. “No matter where we’d go, he’d pick up a slimy thing,” Tom said. On one early visit they found a dilapidated snake farm, and on another visit, an alligator farm where they watched bull alligators feasting on rodent skulls.

  They talked about buying a house in New Orleans. David was especially keen on this idea after Lydia Lunch moved there and told him, “People don’t even stare at you.” It would be a shotgun house, maybe in a neighborhood like Faubourg Marigny. Maybe across the river in Algiers, where they sometimes went to eat. They’d pick a street where it looked like a vampire could live.

  It was all talk and such a wonderful fantasy.

  On the way to the airport for their flight home, they stopped at a pet store that specialized in tarantulas. David intended to buy some red-legged ones to bring back to New York. Once inside, though, David spotted a couple of box turtles and recognized that one was sick. He also knew that they were an endangered species and illegal to sell. So he bought only the turtles and, though he and Tom were already running late, he insisted that they drive the turtles back into town to the Audubon Zoo, where they could be treated. “We raced back to the zoo,” said Tom, “and the staff confirmed that the turtles were in bad shape. They were moved by David’s concern and agreed to try to save them.”

  Back home, David compensated for not buying the tarantulas by rescuing a scorpion from a Lower East Side pet shop. They’d kept it under bright lights, but scorpions like the dark. David made a cave for it from a few lean-to rocks and named it Lucy (short for Lucifer). It left little snowmobile tracks in the sand of the terrarium, and at night he could hear it scuttling to climb the glass walls. He worried that he hadn’t given it a good-enough home, and he wondered how poisonous it really was. When someone asked him why he wanted such a thing, he told them he wanted to own death, “to have death in my house outside of myself, outside of this virus.” Now most of his to-do lists carried the instruction: “Buy crickets.” This scorpion food lived in an adjacent terrarium—always singing. It was part of the natural history ambience prevailing at the loft, with its baboon and baby elephant skeletons, small cactus shaped like a brain, globes and plastic lizards, framed pictures of frogs and toads. David had a bed and a kitchen table with chairs. That was it, apart from the enormous clutter. Near the front door he’d hu
ng a framed self-portrait of Hujar. Every time he left for the outside world, that was the last thing he saw.

  Marion Scemama arrived in New York about ten days before David’s show opened. The photos were done by then, but they had to be framed. And he had paintings and collages to finish.

  He dedicated to Tom Something from Sleep III, an image of a man covered with the solar system, peering into a microscope. This had come to him in Paris, he explained in his “Notes to the Show,” after his niece was born. He wrote of looking through his journals at accounts of dreams from past years: “I see the threads of the unconscious revealing to me that this virus was making its way through my body.” And he realized that this baby was on its way to replace him. On the day of her birth, he sensed the “historical thread” leading from earliest organisms to dinosaurs and then all of human history. “I saw a vague transparency of my self disappearing beyond the brick and mortar of the buildings surrounding the clinic and the tips of trees beyond the roofs and at some point around then I had this dream”—about the man with the microscope. He had also finished Something from Sleep IV (a stegosaurus with letters instead of plates along its spine spelling “WOJNAROWICZ”), Fear of Evolution (a monkey in bib overalls pulling a globe in a wheelbarrow), and much more for “In the Shadow of Forward Motion.”

  On February 8, David rolled up at P.P.O.W in a truck with Marion and all this artwork sometime around three or four in the afternoon. The show opened at six. So his punctuality had actually improved since the East Village days, but Olsoff and Pilkington were frantic. While they hung the work, David sat down at the gallery’s typewriter and pounded out seventeen single-spaced pages for the show’s catalog, writing what each piece meant to him. He’d brought Guattari’s introduction, along with some of his worksheets, with their rough sketches and lists, to show his process. He did not write from notes. “He didn’t labor,” Olsoff observed. “It was all in his head.” Nor did he make any changes. The pages went out to be photocopied.