by Olivia Laing
The Rimbaud images are often mistaken for self-portraits, but in fact Wojnarowicz stayed behind the camera, using multiple friends and lovers to play the part of mask-wearer. Nonetheless, the work is deeply personal, albeit in a complicated way. The figure of Rimbaud served as a kind of stand-in or proxy for the artist, inserted into places that mattered to David, places where he’d been or which still exerted a power over him. In an interview carried out much later, he talked about the project and its origins, saying: ‘I’ve periodically found myself in situations that felt desperate and, in those moments, I’d feel that I needed to make certain things . . . I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographical outline of what my past had been – the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on some level.’
He wasn’t kidding about the desperate situations. Violence ran through his childhood like a fire, gutting and hollowing, leaving its mark. The story of Wojnarowicz’s life is emphatically a story about masks: why you might need them, why you might mistrust them, why they might be necessary for survival; also toxic, also unbearable.
He was born on 14 September 1954 in Red Bank, New Jersey. His first memory wasn’t of humans at all, but of horseshoe crabs crawling in the sand, the sort of image his dreamy, collaged films are filled with. His mother was very young, and his father was a merchant seaman, an alcoholic with a vicious temper. The marriage ran into trouble almost as soon as it began, and when David was two years old Ed and Dolores got divorced. For a while he and his siblings – a brother and sister, both older – were left in a boarding house, where they were physically abused: beaten; made to stand to attention or woken in the night and forced to take cold showers. Their mother had custody, but when David was around four the children were kidnapped by their father, who left them on a chicken farm run by an aunt and uncle before taking them to live with his new wife in the suburbs of New Jersey, in what David later described as The Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn – a place where physical and psychic violence against women, gay people and children could be carried out without repercussions.
‘In my home,’ he wrote in his memoir, Close to the Knives, ‘one could not laugh, one could not express boredom, one could not cry, one could not play, one could not explore, one could not engage in any activity that showed development or growth that was independent.’ Ed was away at sea for weeks at a time, but when he was home he terrorised the children. David was beaten with dog leashes and two-by-fours, and once saw his sister being slammed on the sidewalk until brown liquid oozed from her ears, while neighbours pruned their gardens and mowed their lawns.
Fear contaminates everything. He remembered playing chicken with the trucks that came over the hill by his house, remembered being left in a shopping centre with his siblings just before Christmas, walking miles home in the snow with two turtles in a takeout box. Often he’d spend whole days hiding in the woods, looking for bugs and snakes, an activity he never tired of, even as a grown man.
At some point in the early 1960s he was sent to Catholic school and around that time his father became crueller, more uncontrolled. Once he killed and cooked David’s pet rabbit, telling the kids they were eating New York strip. Another time, after a beating, he asked David to play with his penis. When David refused he dropped the subject, though the beating continued. Bad dreams in those days, recurring night images of tidal waves and tornadoes. A better one too, which visited periodically right to the end. In it, he was walking along a dirt road to a pond. He’d dive in, swimming beneath the surface. There was a cave at the bottom, and he’d duck down into it, going deeper and deeper, lungs bursting, until at the last possible moment he’d emerge into a chamber filled with stalactites and stalagmites, luminous in the dark.
In the mid-1960s the Wojnarowicz children found their mother by looking up her name in a Manhattan phone book: Dolores Voyna. They snuck away for a day visit, spending a few hours with her in the Museum of Modern Art. It was there, wandering through the galleries, that David decided to become an artist. More visits were sanctioned, but then out of nowhere Ed decided he was done with the kids he’d fought so hard to get, dumping all three of them on Dolores. It should have been a relief, but her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen was tiny and she was unused to playing the part of mother, especially to three by now deeply troubled children. She didn’t even like them using the word mom, and though she was warm and expressive, it soon transpired that she was also manipulative, erratic and unstable.
New York City: the smell of dog shit and rotting garbage. Rats in the cinema, eating your popcorn. All of a sudden sex was everywhere. Men kept trying to pick David up, kept offering him money. He had a dream about being naked in a stream, ejaculating into water, and after that he said yes to one of the guys, going with him to his apartment on Central Park, though he insisted on travelling separately, by bus. He had sex with the son of one of his mother’s friends and then thought frantically about killing him, almost hysterical with panic about his family finding out and sending him to an asylum, where he’d doubtless be given electric shock therapy. Could it be seen on his face: what he’d done, and worse, how much he’d liked it? It wasn’t a good time to be discovering you were queer, a year or two before the Stonewall riots kicked the gay liberation movement into life. He went to the local library to try and find out what a fag was. The information was limited, distorted, depressing; a litany of sissies and inverts, self-harm and suicide.
By fifteen he was regularly turning ten-dollar tricks in Times Square. He loved the energy of the place, though he barely ever visited without getting shoved around or having his pockets picked. The slam of the city, the assault of neon and electric light, the roiling mass of people, made up of mixed elements: sailors, tourists, cops, hookers, hustlers and dealers. He wandered through the crowds, fascinated; a skinny boy with big teeth and glasses, his ribs sticking out. At the same time he was drawn to quieter, more inward pursuits. He liked to draw, liked going to the movies on his own or wandering round the dioramas in the Natural History Museum; the dusty smell, the long unpopulated corridors.
A funny habit from those days: hanging by his fingers from the window ledge of his bedroom, his whole weight suspended seven storeys above 8th Avenue. Testing out the limits of his body, maybe, or maybe putting himself at risk as a way of overriding bad feelings, giving himself a series of self-administered shocks, ‘testing testing testing how do I control this how much control do I have how much strength do I have’. He was thinking about suicide all the time, thinking about suicide and stealing snakes from pet stores, liberating them in the park. Sometimes he’d ride the bus to New Jersey and wade into lakes fully dressed, the only time he ever washed (later, he remembered his jeans being so dirty that he could see the reflection of his face when he bent over). Feeling everything around him, all the architectural structures – school, home, family – crumbling, falling apart, the scaffolding struck.
Things came to a head at around the age of seventeen, when he was either thrown out or ran away for good from the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Dolores had already kicked out both his siblings, after escalating tension, escalating rows. Now David too was on his own, freefalling out of society, crash-landing, as Valerie Solanas had before him, in the slippery, perilous world of the streets.
Time blurred, getting shifty, no longer signifying in the same way. He was almost starving for one thing, eventually getting so emaciated and filthy that he couldn’t pick up a decent trick, settling instead for men who often beat him up or ripped him off. A walking skeleton, at the mercy of any vicious creep. He was so malnourished his gums poured with blood every time he smoked a cigarette. In Fire in the Belly, Cynthia Carr’s extraordinary Wojnarowicz biography, there’s a story about him ending up in hospital alone, in agony because of his rotting teeth, after persuading Dolores to lend him her Medicaid card. Push it under the door when you’re done, she’d said. She’d be on holiday in Barbados.
He never got enough sleep in those days. Sometimes
he’d spend the night on the roof of a building, curled against the heating vents, and in the morning would wake covered in soot, his eyes and mouth and nose filled with a choking black dust. The same boy, that is, who’d written in his diary a few months earlier of how frightened he was to spend a night alone. Stealing clothes, stealing reptiles from pet shops. Staying in halfway houses, or with a group of transvestites down by the Hudson River, drifting with them between welfare hotels and wretched apartments. Sleeping in boiler rooms or abandoned cars. Sometimes he was raped or drugged by the men who offered him money, but others were kind to him, especially a lawyer called Syd, who used to take him home and feed him, just treat him like a regular, lovable human being.
Eventually, in 1973, he managed to prise himself off the streets. His sister offered him a bed in her apartment, and slowly he worked his way back into something closer to a regular existence: a roof over his head, at any rate, even if things like steady work and steady money weren’t exactly easy to secure. In fact, in a covering essay for the book Rimbaud in New York, David’s boyfriend Tom Rauffenbart remembered that when they first met, David, who had by then become a successful artist, didn’t own a real bed and seemed to be subsisting on not much more than coffee and cigarettes. ‘I did what I could to change that,’ he added, ‘but essentially David was a loner. Although he knew many people, he preferred to relate to them one-to-one. Everyone knew a slightly different David.’
You don’t emerge from a childhood like that without baggage, without a sense of toxic burdens, which have to be somehow concealed or carried or otherwise disposed of. First there was the legacy of all that abuse and neglect, the feelings of worthlessness and shame and rage, the sense of difference, of being somehow inferior or marked out. Anger, in particular, and bedded underneath it a deep, maybe unquenchable sense of being unlovable.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was also the shame of having been on the streets at all, the worry that people would know he’d been a hustler, and judge him for it. He found himself plagued throughout his early twenties by an inability to speak, to acknowledge verbally what he’d been through, the experiences that he’d had. ‘There was no way I could relate them to anybody in a room full of people at any party anywhere,’ he told his friend Keith Davis in a taped conversation years later. ‘The sense of carrying experiences on my shoulder, where I could sit there and look at people and realize there was just no frame of reference that was similar to theirs.’ And again in Close to the Knives: ‘I could barely speak when in the company of other people. There was never a point in conversations at work, parties or gatherings when I could reveal what I’d seen.’
This sense of separation, of being profoundly isolated by his past, was intensified by the old anxiety about sexuality. It had been agonising, growing up in a world in which what he desired to do with his body was considered disgusting, tragic, deviant, deranged. He came out properly in San Francisco in the mid-1970s, on a brief stint away from Manhattan. Living openly for the first time as a gay man, he immediately felt happier, freer and healthier than he ever had before. At the same time he realised forcibly the weight of the antagonism stacked against him, the hatred lurking everywhere for a man who loved men and was not ashamed of the fact. ‘My queerness,’ he wrote in a biographical summary titled ‘Dateline’, ‘was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society.’
In Close to the Knives, he recalled how it had felt as a child to hear other kids screaming FAGGOT! at one another, how ‘the sound of it resonated in my shoes, that instant solitude, that breathing glass wall no one else saw’. Reading that sentence made me realise how much of his account reminded me viscerally of scenes from my own life; reminded me, in fact, of the precise sources of my isolation, my sense of difference. Alcoholism, homophobia, the suburbs, the Catholic church. People leaving, people drinking too much, people losing control. I hadn’t experienced anything like the violence of David’s childhood, but I knew what it was like to feel unsafe, to pass through chaotic and frightening scenes; to have to find a way of coping with a simmering sense of fear and rage. My mother was gay, deep in the closet. In the 1980s she was outed and we ended up running away from the village I’d lived in all my life, shuttling between houses on the south coast as her partner’s alcoholism grew more advanced.
This was the era of Section 28, when homophobia was enshrined in Britain’s legislation, let alone in any passing bigot’s mind, when teachers could not legally promote ‘the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. I’d always found straight society isolating and potentially dangerous. When I read that line in Knives I remembered vividly the sick feeling that used to come over me at school when other children talked in their hateful, stupid way about fags and gaylords, compacting and inflaming my already acute sense of being an alien, of standing outside. It wasn’t just about my mother. I can see myself then, skinny and pale, dressed as a boy, completely incapable of handling the social demands of being at a girls’ school, my own sexuality and sense of gender hopelessly out of kilter with the options then on offer. If I was anything, I was a gay boy; in the wrong place, in the wrong body, in the wrong life.
Later, after school, I dropped out altogether, living on protest sites, squatting in semi-derelict buildings in seaside towns. I can remember sleeping in a room of junkies, the backyard filled with ten solid feet of rubbish. Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth. And how do you break out, reclaim your right to difference? One of David’s strongest memories of his street years was periodic nights of rage, in which he and a buddy would get so choked up with hunger and frustration that they’d walk almost the length of Manhattan island, smashing the glass in every phone box that they passed. Sometimes you can change the psychic space, the landscape of the emotions, by carrying out actions in the physical world. I suppose in a way that’s what art is, certainly the near-magical art that Wojnarowicz would soon begin to make, as he turned increasingly from destruction to creation.
This is the context from out of which Rimbaud emerged, the kind of issues with which it struggles. David began taking the photos in the summer of 1979 with a 35mm camera he’d borrowed from a friend. He’d been experimenting previously with images shot at the hip, trying to build up a body of work that would testify to the world in which he’d lived, the experiences he still found it impossible to articulate in speech. He was beginning to understand that art might be a way for him to bear witness, to reveal ‘things I’d always felt pressured to keep hidden’. He wanted to make images that somehow told the truth, that acknowledged the people who were left out of history or otherwise disenfranchised, excluded from the record.
There was something very powerful about going back to his old stamping grounds as an adult and inserting Rimbaud into the landscape of his childhood, having him stand impassively by the painted barrier where David used to lean as a boy, waiting for ageing men to buy his skinny, unkempt body. Another self? A sexy, nerveless simulacrum, toughened by experience. Was it a figure he could enter (as later, in his diary: ‘I want to create a myth that I can one day become’), or a way of retroactively protecting the goofy, vulnerable little boy that he’d once been? Hard to imagine his Rimbaud being raped or forced to do anything against its will.
Either way, he was using the camera to illuminate an underground world, pouring light into the hidden places of the city, the hustling grounds, the locations where a struggling kid could make a buck or scrounge a meal. Taking a photograph is an act of possession, a way of making something visible while simultaneously freezing it in place, locking it in time. But what of the mood of the pictures, the loneliness that rolls off them in waves, radiating from Rimbaud’s uncanny, expressionless figure? It seemed to me that they testified not just to a way of life, but also to the experience of feeling different, cut off, incapable of confessing real feelings: imprisoned, in short, as well as liberated by a mask.
The more I looked a
t them, the more they tallied with the feelings that David was simultaneously exploring in his diaries (‘I found myself walking the streets alone most times, being home alone, and gradually falling into a state of very little communication, all because of the desire to preserve my own sense of life and living’). They express a sense of isolation, a conflict between the desire to make contact, to reach beyond the prison of the self, and to hide, to walk away, to disappear. Something sad about them, despite the toughness, the raw sexuality; a question not yet resolved. As Tom Rauffenbart put it in his essay at the beginning of the Rimbaud book: ‘Although the Rimbaud mask presents a blank, unchanging face, it seems to always be watching and absorbing sights and experiences. Yet in the end, it remains alone.’
*
I went back to England briefly, and when I returned I began frequenting the Wojnarowicz archive at Fales Library, which is housed inside the big Bobst Library at New York University, right opposite Hopper’s old studio in Washington Square. It was just the right distance for a walk and I took a different route each day, crisscrossing the East Village, sometimes dawdling past the little hidden cemetery on East 2nd and sometimes lingering to read the posters outside La Mama and Joe’s Pub. It was winter now, the sky bright blue, buckets of copper-coloured chrysanthemums outside the bodegas.