July 13 to September 30, 2018
99 Gansevoort Street, between 10th Avenue and Washington Street
New York City, whitney.org

In a counter-intuitive approach, the exhibition “David Wojnarorwicz: History Keeps Me Up at Night” opens with the photographic series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York,” (1979) a group of black and white photographs. Wojnarowicz disguises himself as the poet Arthur Rimbaud with a mask of his own creation and takes it on a journey through New York City. “I fashioned a mask of Rimbaud and brought him on a narrative trail – the places I haunted when living on the streets as a teen as well as the industrial sites that were like technological meadows where I could place New York City at my back,” he wrote.

These various locations that have drastically transformed over the past twenty-five years. Ironically, Rimbaud/ Wojnarowicz finds himself at several sites near to the current Whitney Museum, an area that was formerly operational in its now quaint name, the Meatpacking District, as well as a pick up zone for transvestite prostitution. The nearby piers were once a gay male sex destination. Other rapidly disappearing haunts, such a Greek coffee shop, graffitied interiors of subway cars, and an extremely seedy Times Square, are remnants of a lost cityscape. One notable image has him by a warehouse wall graffitied with the phrase “The Silence of Marcel Duchamp is Overrated.” Central to the installation of the series is the actual Rimbaud mask, encased in glass on a vertical axis, mounted on a pedestal. The mask, to some extent like the series itself, begs the question: artwork or archival object?

In the same gallery there are images that include other iconic gay literary figures, William S. Burroughs and Jean Genet amongst them, in works such as the photographic collage Untitled (Genet After Brassaï) (1979). The opening exhibition wall text is juxtaposed with a large-scale self-portrait of the artist that combines photography, painting and collage. The self-portrait contains leitmotifs such as maps, flames, globes, clocks and a fleeing man engulfed in flames that appear in numerous artworks throughout the exhibition.

Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre encompasses multiple media and genres: painting, sculpture, drawings, photography, installation and performance, as well as film, music, and literature. The stunning Gallery 7 contains the four remarkable paintings from his series on the four elements first exhibited at Gracie Mansion Gallery in the East Village in 1987. The layered imagery is powerfully compelling, bringing the viewer into multiple visual and symbolic readings of earth, air, water and fire.

Wojnarowicz’s prolific output is well organized by the curators in bringing together disparate works from his curtailed career (he died in 1992, aged 37). The later flower series (1990) includes the mixed media painting History Keeps Me Up at Night, revealing another innovation of the artist in terms of layering techniques. The series consists of painted (phallic) flowers with square cutouts and red yarn sutured in small black and white photographs. The floral images are overlaid with text blocks of the artist’s memoirist writings silk-screened onto the picture plane, the texts often referencing the AIDS crisis, his own activism, and personal, everyday experience. Sculptures of reconfigured globes are exhibited in the same gallery linking personal reflection to a geo-political context. Notable is Wojnarowicz’ use of black and white photography in multiple images that are individually framed within a single composition such as Spirituality (For Paul Thek) (1988-89).

Another gallery is filled with truncated bust-like sculptures both painted and/or covered with various materials such as maps, masks, collage, and paper currency. Despite working in the heyday of post-modern appropriation, Wojnarowicz consistently avoided seductively slick advertising materials, preferring, for example, to utilize cheap silk-screen posters that advertise food sale specials in grocery stores windows. These crude, ephemeral advertising posters serve as canvases on which the artist paints graphic stenciled images.

A prescient figure in his use of photography and innovative painting techniques, Wojnarowicz is all the more remarkable for harnessing this creativity to the pressing issue of the AIDS crisis, addressing the horrors of living with the disease and demanding political action. In an elaborate installation, The Lazaretto (1990), a collaboration with artist Paul Marcus AIDS organizations were invited to distribute informational materials in the gallery alongside the sculptural tableaux. This installation, however, and the activism it incorporated, isn’t reconstructed for the Whitney show. Similarly absent is Wojnarowicz’s literary contribution: a vitrine or reading area could have represented such works as “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration,” “Memories that Smell Like Gasoline” and “7 Miles a Second,” a prescient graphic novel created in collaboration with James Romberger & Marguerite Van Cook

This exhibition demonstrates the extreme depth and breadth of this artist’s work while concurrently leaving the viewer with the sense of profound loss. It is a loss of an extremely talented young artist and the work that he may have produced; as well as the magnitude of lost lives in the wake of the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz wrote of the Rimbaud Series, “I didn’t see myself as Rimbaud but rather used him as a device to confront my own desires, experiences, biography and to try to touch on those elusive ‘sites of attraction’; those places that suddenly and unexpectedly revive the smell and traces of former states of body and mind long left behind…” As a whole the exhibition is an elegy to a generation that lived and endured through the perils of the AIDS crisis. It stands both as a memorial to the era and as a testament to progress won, in part, through the efforts of activists like Wojnarowicz. In the landmark case, Wojnarowicz vs. American Family Organization and Donald Wildmon (1990) the artist defeated the misuse of his artwork in political propaganda leaflets that discredit the National Endowment for the Arts

An artist as complex, prolific and engaged as David Wojnarowicz rarely appears at so appropriate a moment within the arc of art history, as this exhibition hauntingly reveals.

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Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (June 22 – October 3, 2016)

Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris, surveys a far-flung group of over 80 artists, centered on William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who met in 1944 in New York City. It’s a literary group distinctly impatient with the printed text, and even language itself; they favor collective experience, collaboration across media, improvisation, and performance. Ginsberg presented “Howl” in a famous public reading, while Burroughs used texts for random “cut-ups”. Language migrates from one medium to another in the immersive, cave-like space of the show’s central gallery, where curator Philippe-Alain Michaud, assisted by film scholar Rani Singh and artist/curator Jean-Jacques Lebel, have orchestrated a comprehensive installation of original materials that encourage reflection on the interplay of European and American modernism.

Unlike a recent exhibition at the Orangerie dedicated to poet Guillaume Apollinaire, which focused on writers and artists in early 20th- century Paris, this one emphasizes travel across continents, fueled on a mix of Transcendentalism and Surrealism, on Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud. There’s an appealing narrative, with a French inflection, to this voyage of marginalized individuals, alienated from a conformist society, who, as America expanded its world influence, turned to Antonin Artaud and Apollinaire, and insisted on immediate, lived experience. They explored film and audio recording and new methods of composition in the “open field”, and questioned consciousness itself through meditation and drugs. The journey ends, appropriately, in Paris circa 1960, at the seedy “Beat Hotel”, where Ginsberg composed “At the Grave of Apollinaire” and Burroughs’ visionary works took form, in the context of the group’s ongoing struggles with poverty, mental illness and addiction. There’s inspiration to be found in their vision, in these times of renewed threats to the individual, but also enough darkness to recall the warning of poet Charles Olson, who observed that we revere Whitman because he gives us hope, but that Melville is “the truer man”, who gives us “America, all of her space, the malice, the root.”

To paraphrase Olson again, “SPACE” is the “central fact” of the Beat Generation, with Jack Kerouac’s typewritten scroll of On the Road extending like a highway for 120 feet across the main gallery. Typed over three weeks on sheets of tracing paper, taped together so as to obviate changing pages in the machine, it’s a performance as much as a text, configured here as a sculptural installation. Anonymous film clips of the American road are projected on screens suspended overhead, while piped-in recordings of vintage blues and jazz intermingle with the hum of film projectors to create a buzzing, flickering field, a realm of surrealist suggestion, in which visitors are encouraged to wander. Displays of vintage typewriters, microphones, and tape recorders ground it all in the material context of cultural production.

Candid, hand-captioned photos taken by Ginsberg himself punctuate the exhibition, insinuating the poet’s personal magnetism and blurring the line between work and documentation. Photos selected from Robert Frank’s famous cross-country road trip, The Americans, supply a gritty visual context for Kerouac’s text, reinforcing the journalistic intensity of his verbal snapshots of marginalized characters. In a neighboring alcove, Frank’s 1959 film, Pull My Daisy, a whimsical collaboration narrated by Kerouac under the direction of Abstract Expressionist painter Alfred Leslie, features Ginsberg and others in a casual sequence of daily interactions. The improvisatory structure of jazz provides an important model for this informal art, and gestural painting seems a sideline for a number of writers, including Kerouac and Julian Beck, whose Living Theater exemplifies the group’s transgressive, participatory spirit.

If there’s innocent exuberance to Kerouac’s hunger for experience, to the freedom of “having nothing”, the cathartic incantation of Ginsberg’s “Howl”, drawn from Blake and Rimbaud, and from his own experience on the road and in a mental hospital, provides a counterpoint. Here, one can listen to Ginsberg himself reading the poem, examine his original manuscript with handwritten revisions, or interact with the words more directly by reading aloud a phonetic transcription, broken down onto some 200 posters created by contemporary artist Allen Ruppersberg. Neighboring displays of tabloid headlines from the 1950s featuring the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg evoke the era’s hysteria over communism and fears of nuclear war, traumas that can’t help but resonate with current anxieties in Europe.

In an inspired contrast to the dark activity of the opening gallery, the curators have dedicated the north gallery and its panoramic view of Montmartre to a reading room. Among its bookshelves, a lone monitor features Ginsberg being interviewed by Lebel, while the silent presence of the city at large animates the room in a flood of natural light. Combining intimacy and spectacle, it informally celebrates the wonder of everyday life and the possibility of enlightenment, anticipating Michael McClure’s ecstatic “Peyote Poem”, reproduced in a neighboring gallery: “I KNOW EVERYTHING! I PASS INTO THE ROOM.”

In side galleries, we follow the group from New York to California, where they establish affiliations with a rich culture of artists and writers, including McClure and Zen environmentalist Gary Snyder. A film clip shows McClure reading poems to a lion at the zoo, engaging with his animal body, while Bruce Conner’s mural-scale film clips of mushroom clouds from nuclear tests ironically conflate American expansionism and hallucinogenic drugs. There’s much art based on clipping and splicing, including the intricate “paste-ups” of Jess, which integrate science, art and myth. Wallace Berman’s collages using early xerox technology underline connections between collage and montage that emerge dramatically in Stan Brakhage’s Desistfilm (1954), with its opening credits hand scratched onto celluloid and compressed editing that develops tensions in an informal gathering, not unlike the one recorded more digressively in Pull My Daisy. A similar hallucinatory intensity animates the magic lantern effects of Harry Smith’s color animations, noteworthy in an exhibition that’s largely black and white, which extend Apollinaire’s concept of Orphism by coordinating shifts in visual patterns to music.

Of the three central figures, Burroughs took longer to establish his literary career, migrating to Mexico and Latin America in search of hallucinogenic plants, and sojourning with writer and ethnomusicologist Paul Bowles in Tangiers, before rejoining Ginsberg and other poets in Paris. A dilapidated bed evokes the seedy atmosphere of the “Beat Hotel”, where he and British writer Brion Gysin developed the “cut-up” – a technique of slicing up texts and randomly recombining the pieces that helped him complete Naked Lunch. For Burroughs, who regarded language as a virus, it was important to rid the body of its control. The cut-up, which Ginsberg saw as an extension of Cézanne’s process of construction with patches of color, also generated a wealth of visual material, combining photography, painting and calligraphy, that culminated in the “Dream Machine” – a rotating light box informed by primitive cinema and by the orgone theories of Wilhelm Reich, designed to activate the electrical energy of the body and generate a hypnotic state in which light could transcend language altogether.

In Paris, Ginsberg sought out Apollinaire’s grave at Père Lachaise and wrote his tribute to the poet who coined the term “surrealism” and gave verses visual form in “Calligrammes” – bringing an American movement back to its European roots. Curator Lebel, who was a member of the group at that time, even introduced the Americans to Marcel Duchamp, envisioning a fusion of European and American avant-gardes; the writers were drunk, but Duchamp, who welcomed the rawness of America in his assault on high culture, was not put off, even as Ginsberg kissed his knees and Gregory Corso clipped off his tie. Beat Generation responds to American scruffiness and homegrown mysticism with a similar generosity of spirit. World-weary Europeans attuned to Baudelairean irony might respond more to Andy Warhol’s reduction of transcendence to celebrity and commodification than to Ginsberg’s raw hunger for life. But by bringing French ideas back to Paris fully embodied in American space and popular culture, this exhibition inspires visions of a Whitmanesque merger. There’s a bracing freshness to the abrupt word juxtapositions of Ginsberg’s “Apollinaire”, while the harshness of Burroughs’ bodily imagery recalls us to the unkempt power of everyday experience.

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