"Because I Don’t Know How to Paint"

On David Wojnarowicz's Political Skin

Before I knew him as an artist, I knew David Wojnarowicz as a writer. I’d stumbled across Close to the Knives when I was seventeen and picked it up because, of course, I recognized the cover. With hardly any supporting experience, I was fiercely affected by the author’s rageful, firsthand depiction of social murder via AIDS—a stark contrast to the non-discussion of the topic in Canadian suburbs during the back half of the nineties. The breathless run-on sentences of his ‘Self-Portrait in Twenty-Three Rounds’ beat out the Beats for sheer momentum, and the unflinching vignettes of the title essay, postcards of homophobic violence and its toll, scared me and urged me on at once. My impressions are less cursory today, and I can situate better situate the author’s style and its significance. But I remember that encounter for its innocence, down to the texture of the unremarkable paperback. It felt like a discovery.

Untitled (Buffalo), 1988

In the years to come, I would discover Wojnarowicz several times over—through his haunting photographs of ‘Rimbaud’ in New York; his short-lived post-punk band 3 Teens Kill 4; his eerie presence in the films of Richard Kern; and so on. As soon as my interest glommed onto one his various contexts, it seemed that Wojnarowicz would appear elsewhere; in punk, in experimental writing, and in the ferment of the East Village art boom of the nineteen-eighties, during which street artists seeking autonomy amid blight were rocketed to fame by frantic speculators.

Wojnarowicz is known for his variety of output across years and media. These works are mutually informative in spite of their unevenness; profligate and polemical by force of circumstance if not by choice. No artist’s statement could match the blaring articulacy of Wojnarowicz’s best work, as any retrospective will confirm in a cathartic, deceptively confessional, arc. That said, my interest in Wojnarowicz turned another corner over the course of a 2018 Whitney celebration, History Keeps Me Awake At Night, where an emphasis on Wojnarowicz’s painting seemed to recontextualize the terms of his political engagement, alluding to an underrated internationalism.