Blessed Rage

 

The Whitney Museum in New York has currently dedicated its fifth floor to a retrospective of the work of David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), "History Keeps Me Awake at Night." It continues to the end of September.

Wojnarowicz stood at the epicentre of the culture wars incited by  Senator Jesse Helms and the allegedly Reverend Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association against art deemed blasphemous by religious conservatives. His photograph of a crucifix overrun by ants was one of a number of his works Wildmon coopted out of context to create a pamphlet entitled “Your Tax Dollars Helped Pay for These ‘Works of Art’.” (Wojnarowicz subsequently won a suit against Wildmon for infringement of copyright and damage to his reputation. He was awarded damages in the amount of one dollar. He insisted on a cheque signed personally by Wildmon, which he never cashed, and which is included in a display of ephemera as part of the Whitney exhibition.)

 

An abused kid from New Jersey who fled to the streets of New York and survived by hustling, and later mentored by photographer Peter Hujar, he became a self-taught member of the East Village art scene that included Jean-Michel Basquiat, Nan Goldin, and Keith Haring. His was a voice of outrage over the silence and indifference of the government toward the suffering of the marginalized, over the inhumanity of American brutality abroad, over the callousness of unchecked capitalist greed. You can read many of the same images that provoked the ire of the Christian Right as witnesses to the solidarity of God with the poor and abject.  His work often references his own suffering as a queer man at the hands of established power structures. But those works make it abundantly clear that he understood himself as standing with the other wretched of the earth whose cry for justice is one. In contrast with the hypocrisy of the fundamentalists who decried him, his was a genuine hunger and thirst for righteousness.