Life and Death in The Ashes
Wojnarowicz: F–k You F-ggot F–ker
Directed by Chris McKim
Featuring Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar and Richard Kern
Running time: 1 hour and 48 minutes
MPPA rating: Unrated
by Anthony Glassman
New York City used to be a magical place, something out of J.R.R. Tolkien’s darkest imaginings. This was, of course, before the Disneyification of the city, before every glory hole was plastered over and replaced with a Starbucks, before the strip clubs were replaced with chain restaurants, before the real estate developers became fully entrenched as the new mafiosi of a fully-gentrified Manhattan.
The drugs flowed as freely as the sex, the sex flowed like water down a mountain stream. Outsiders and rebels were feared and respected, not commodified into T-shirts and travel mugs.
This was the land of Andy Warhol, of Fran Lebowitz, of cognoscenti and beautiful people who lit up the earth and the sky and often flamed out like meteors crashing downwards from the heavens, a thousand Lucifers with feathers ablaze as they descended to rule in Hell.
Here was Jean-Michel Basquiat, with his Samo tag littering the streets before he was eaten by the art world. Here was Keith Haring, whose AIDS diagnosis sent his sales through the roof. Here was David Wojnarowicz, the angriest and most outside Outsider artist of them all.
Chris McKim’s Wojnarowicz: Fuck You, Faggot Fucker tells the story of the artist’s career, from his formative relationship, turned lifelong friendship, with photographer Peter Hujar to a brief stint living in Paris with his sister, which he left because he was too comfortable. He traveled across the country hitchhiking and jumping trains, he took Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet as his spiritual guides as Dante Alighieri was led through the afterlife by the poet Virgil.
Coming from a home with an incredibly abusive father, he would frequently run away from home after moving in with his mother, turning tricks in Times Square. He was everything a young gay man should be and shouldn’t be in the 1970s and 1980s, and it came out in his art, from a series of photographs of himself wearing a paper Rimbaud mask throughout the city to stints in punk bands and lifelong friendships with intellectual and artistic masterminds.
Wojnarowicz was a sacred heart wrapped in rage. McKim’s film uses footage and tapes the artist made of his own life to illustrate the two decades of his artistic career, fleshed out with interviews of people who knew him, worked with him and loved him. He narrates a story on one of his audiotape diaries of turning a trick with a very unappealing man with a sticky mouth, who would kiss his thighs while fellating him, leaving residue of gummy saliva. He was repulsed by the man, but also felt sorry for him, realizing that this was a man who probably felt no love in his life. So, despite the revulsion he felt and despite it being the “last thing” he wanted to do, he pulled the man’s face up to his and kissed him. His john burst into tears.
Noted wit Fran Lebowitz posits that it is almost impossible to describe the level of promiscuity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, before AIDS, or before people knew about AIDS. “We though having sex was good for you. We thought not having sex was bad, repression was bad.”
Peter Hujar encouraged Wojnarowicz’s art, appreciating and amplifying its darkness and radicalism, believing the young man too “talented in a chaotic way.”
He got his start, much like Basquiat and Haring, doing street art, although, “I didn’t have any intention of being a street artist, I just wanted to be provocative. All the paintings were diaries that I thought of as proof of my own existence.”
He scoped out an abandoned pier where men would meet to have sex, filled with bare walls and windows, and encouraged other artists to come and fill it with their art. The film points out that, because of this, men could no longer go there for sex, because there were always artists there working on some piece or another.
Thanks to an article by New York Times art critic Grace Glueck, the East Village art scene got noticed and Wojnarowicz was invited to submit for the Whitney Biennial, then commissioned by Wall Street vulture Robert Mnuchin and his wife (parents of Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin) to do an installation in their basement. Hating the rich, he drafted all his friends into picking up interesting garbage from lots and alleys around the city, painting a wondrous mural on the back wall and arranging disparate elements in front of it, from old dolls to cow skulls. Curator and critic Carlo McCormick said that it was beautiful, but, “So much of it just looked like tetanus.”
If Wojnarowicz was radical before, however, he became a nuclear bomb after first Hujar, then David’s boyfriend Tom Rauffenbart and then he himself were diagnosed with AIDS. He began working with ACT-UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, and had a few dust-ups with the National Endowment for the Arts, before going on to sue the American Family Association for copyright violations and taking his work out of context. They had been clipping scenes taken from gay porn from Wojnarowicz’s paintings and put out a flier claiming that this was his work. The court ordered Donald Wildmon and his AFA to send out a new flier asserting that they had misrepresented the artworks, paid for out of AFA coffers, and Wildmon had to sign a $1.00 check to Wojnarowicz for damages.
“David Wojnarowicz is more valuable than all these preachers who ever lived, as a person and as what he put into the world,” Lebowitz tells McKim in the film.
He died in 1992 and, 26 years later, a full retrospective of his career was exhibited, providing a moving ending to the film, which is a vivid, dark, funny, heartrending look at a glorious and dark era in American history, a life bridging the sexual progressiveness of the 1970s and the new repression of the 1980s through art and love and sex and drugs and rock and roll. McKim’s film is the queer Basquiat, and an excellent film made from fragments of a life gone now for 28 years.
Film will premiere at NY Doc Fest and available to watch November 11 to 19 - more information here.