Wojnarowicz: Remembering a Voice of Protest and the New York AIDS-Generation Art Scene

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

Art isn’t necromancy though director Chris McKim’s finds some dark mojo in documentary Wojnarowicz: F**k You, You F*ggot F**ker, resurrecting the prickly, passionate spirit of the late New York multimedia artist, David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37.

In summoning the artist and his eighties’ art-scene milieu, the film also serves as memorial to the generation of creative voices silenced by the AIDS virus.

The film is framed by footage of Wojnarowicz in 1989, discussing the familiar question of whether the artist should be political. For a gay man with HIV and no health insurance, faced with a government that denied the seriousness of the AIDS crisis and attempted to shut down gay artists, the question was one of immediate survival. Along with the virus, he says, those infected with AIDS “confront a diseased society as well.”

Wojnarowicz emerged in his twenties from the same Lower East Side and East Village art scene as his peers, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, a self-taught artist who identified with the gay outlaw literature of Jean Genet and Arthur Rimbaud.

He began stencilling anti-war images in public spaces and using a tape-recorder to perform with the art-noise band 3 Teens Kill 4. His subsequent and more complex gallery work was increasingly personal, about his experiences of childhood abuse, homelessness, and adolescent prostitution.

“All the paintings,” he said, “are diaries that I always saw as proof of my own existence.”

To that same purpose, he kept letters, photographs, written, video and recorded journals, even answering machine messages. Often, they found their way into his work, along with sundry found objects, from supermarket posters to psychiatric files.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The film’s subtitle, for example, F**k You, You F*ggot F**ker, came from a piece of paper with a homophobic slur that Wojnarowicz found on the street, which became part of a collage that sold for the $3,000.

While he worked for money, Wojnarowicz didn’t care much for the rich. Commissioned to create an installation in the home of Robert and Adrian Mnuchin (parents of Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven), he made it out of trash, leaving in the live cockroaches. One commentator said the installation “looked like tetanus.”

This trove of sound and visual archives that Wojnarowicz left behind serves as the building blocks of McKim’s film. The pieces are assembled, linked by animator Grant Nellessen and editor David Stanke, to emulate the rough-edged collage style of Wojnarowicz’s work. The film is produced by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato’s World of Wonder production company, known for gay-themed work from Party Monster and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Context is provided by a constant stream of voice-over commentary is from Wojnarowicz’s contemporaries, including photographer Nan Goldin, East Village culture critic Carlo McCormick, biographer Cynthia Carr, and writer Fran Lebowitz, in her familiar New Yorker explainer role. Kids today, she says, can’t appreciate how promiscuous everyone was back then.

More pertinently, Lebowitz was a friend of both Wojnarowicz as well as his former lover and mentor, the photographic portraitist, Peter Hugar. Lebowitz took Hugar to a doctor for his HIV test. He died 11 months before Wojnarowicz had his positive result.

Wojnarowicz subsequently dedicated himself to raising his voice against the homophobia and racism of the government’s AIDS response. We see haunting images of Wojnarowicz, and his subsequent boyfriend, social worker Tom Rauffenbart, in a street protest. Rows of men lie down on the street in front of their own cardboard tombstones.

A closing scene, in 2018, sees an emotional Rauffenbart, in his seventies (he died in 2019) as he is pushed in a wheelchair into the Whitney Gallery for a retrospective of Wojnarowicz’s work, entitled History Keeps Me Awake at Night.

As the camera scans the gallery walls, the sense is less an exalted art collection than the high-pressure tracings of an imagination in a rush, and the bric-a-brac of his short life.

Wojnarowicz: F**k You, You F*ggot F**ker. Directed by Chris McKim. With David Wojnarowicz, Nan Goldin, Peter Hugar, Tom Rauffenbart and Fran Lebowitz. Available beginning March 19 through Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Digital.