Love Among The Ruins

Over the weekend, I read Edmund White’s article for T magazine, about the recent resurfacing of the key figures and artworks of the Downtown New York art scene, and watched the related video, where 28 still-living members of the aforementioned art scene gathered for a studio portrait. Perhaps proving his point, on that same afternoon I finished reading Fire In The Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz by Cynthia Carr, the biography of the multidisciplinary artist who was such an integral part of the late 1970s art scene and whose influence, I think, is only recently beginning to be recognized in wider circles, particularly as the Whitney prepares their 2016 retrospective of his work. As White points out:

Recently there’s been, in TV and film and certainly in books, an intense yearning for a specific five-year period in New York City, those years between the blackout in 1977, and 1982, when AIDS was finally named by the Centers for Disease Control. First was Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, whose heroine is a sharp-eyed bystander in the SoHo art scene, and now, the forthcoming novel City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg, which also concerns itself with the same time period. There are two television series in development that take place in the late 1970s as well, one directed by Martin Scorsese and co-written with Mick Jagger; the other by Baz Luhrmann. Next year, the Whitney will mount the first retrospective of David Wojnarowicz, the ultimate East Village grunge artist, in over 15 years; the work of his lover, the photographer Peter Hujar — which has recently been used both for an advertising campaign for the men’s wear designer Patrik Ervell and on the cover of the T editor Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life — will be the subject of a forthcoming retrospective at New York’s Morgan Library.

White tries to explain why, exactly, contemporary artists might turn to this time period for inspiration, and gets a predictably excellent quote from John Waters:

Collectively, these works express a craving for the city that, while at its worst, was also more democratic: a place and a time in which, rich or poor, you were stuck together in the misery (and the freedom) of the place, where not even money could insulate you. They are a reaction to what feels like a safer, more burnished and efficient (but cornerless and predictable) city. Even those of us who claim not to miss those years don’t quite sound convinced. ‘‘Well, I sure don’t have nostalgia about being mugged,’’ John Waters told me. Though then he continued: ‘‘But I do get a little weary when I realize that if anybody could find one dangerous block left in the city, there’d be a stampede of restaurant owners fighting each other off to open there first. It seems almost impossible to remember that just going out in New York was once dangerous. Do any artistic troublemakers want to feel that their city may be the safest in America? Who’s going to write a book about walking the safe streets of Manhattan? It’s always right before a storm that the air is filled with dangerous possibilities.’’

A few months ago I spoke to Marvin Taylor, the director of the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, where the David Wojnarowicz archive is kept in the Downtown Collection. He told me about a list he found in one of Richard Hell’s journals, of first and second-tier influences on the scene from about 1975, and Taylor noticed that there wasn’t a single Modernist or American on that list with the exception of Susan Sontag. It was almost entirely French or continental, like Baudelaire, Genet, Rimbaud, or Borges and Nabokov.

As he spoke, Taylor made a kind of L-shape with his fingers, describing the way Hell was circumventing the straight linear timeline of recent history to find only what was truly relevant to his interests and those of his peers. I thought about how knowing the history of art gives you the option to pick and choose what’s relevant to you and discard the rest, how there is no reason to see art as the exclusive product of what came directly before it (medieval to Renaissance to Baroque to neoclassical to etc. etc.), when two billion years of human history yield many sources.

The Downtown art scene is going to become part of the same nostalgic machine that sells half-hearted memoirs capitalizing on recently renewed fame and t-shirts with the logos of defunct and bankrupt clubs on the chest. But there is also, I think, a very deliberate collective effort to circumvent the work that immediately precedes our current time period to find something that feels maybe a little more urgent or necessary to work being done right now, to speak about people who are no longer able to speak for themselves. As Hanya Yanagihara points out in the intro to the video, the loss of people like Wojnarowicz and Hujar is just as deeply felt as the presence of the artists who survived them, and so much of their work was about surviving in an openly hostile city and world. My favorite part of Carr’s biography is also the saddest; it’s related to this passage from Wojnarowicz’s memoirs, Close to the Knives.

One of the first steps in making the private grief public is the ritual of memories. I have loved the way memorials take the absence of a human being and make them somehow physical with the use of sound. I have attended a number of memorials in the last five years and at the last one I attended I found myself suddenly experiencing something akin to rage. I realized halfway through the event that I had witnessed a good number of the same people participating in other previous memorials. What made me angry was realizing that the memorial had little reverberation outside the room it was held in. A tv commercial for HandiWipes had a higher impact on the society at large…I imagine what would it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbours would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington, D.C. and blast through the gates of the White House and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless forms on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbours, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.

After his death, Carr writes, Wojnarowicz’s partner Tom Rauffenbart scattered Wojnarowicz’s ashes in Paris, Mexico, places that Wojnarowicz had loved while he was alive. And then he went to the lawn of the White House and sprinkled the remainder there. “The ritual of memories” should not be exclusively reserved for mourning. I’m curious to see what this L-shape of references produces for those of us looking today.