Chris Kraus on David Wojnarowicz, influence and the sensibility of being a ‘total artist’

A few weeks ago I saw Marion Scemama’s poetic and powerful feature-length film about the artist David Wojnarowicz, Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1989–1991. Followed by a conversation between Wojnarowicz’s book editor Amy Scholder and Semiotext(e) co-editor Hedi El Kholti, the film was projected at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, on a Tuesday grad seminar night in February. About 70 people – a mixture of Art Center students and friends from the larger artistic community – were there.

In the opening shot, David sits at the kitchen table in his East Village loft. The table is also his office, piled high with correspondence, mechanical toys, drawings, medications, notes and lists, an ashtray, a coffee mug, bills, photos, books, a desk calendar, a heavy revolver, supermarket moisturiser and announcements for other people’s shows. Wojnarowicz’s teeth are imperfect. He’s about to light up a Marlboro and he’s wearing thick, Seventies- style gold-rimmed eyeglasses and a white button-down shirt. Lining the counter behind him, there’s a carton of trash bags, a bunch of dead roses, a can of El Pico coffee, Domino sugar, and an assortment of dish liquids, lotions and botanical stuff.

Composed around a five-hour interview with Wojnarowicz conducted by critic and theorist Sylvere Lotringer in May 1989, Self-Portrait partly exists as a time capsule. Before Whole Foods and Ikea, artists like Wojnarowicz did not live especially well. The relative poverty of working artists like Wojnarowicz and the messiness of their domestic lives has been mostly edited out of the East Village Eighties ‘downtown’ New York myth.

Wojnarowicz was a total artist in the truest sense, moving constantly between media. He made paintings, collages, videos, films, installation art, music, graphic novels and audiotapes; he also wrote journals that were turned into books. Born into a chaotic working class home in Red Hook, New Jersey, he’d intermittently attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, but did not go to art school. He remained wilfully ignorant of advanced fabrication techniques and saw his artlessness as a ‘practice’ than as a means to exist. Growing up, he tells Lotringer, “there was no image anywhere in the culture that gave me comfort, or helped my fears.” And: “I’ve always found reason to live by making things, ever since I was a kid.”

I remembered the artist Jason Yates using the phrase ‘total artist’ to describe his friend George Clinton, who moved freely between music and visual art, and as the film played, I wondered how the MFA students were seeing it, and if such a thing as a ‘total artist’ can even exist in 2019.

Wojnarowicz was 34-years old when he spoke with Lotringer in 1989. He was still in good health, but he’d been diagnosed as HIV-positive a few months before. He’d postponed taking the test for almost a year after losing Peter Hujar, his artistic mentor, lover and friend, to AIDS. During their five-hour conversation, he talks about coming to terms with the disease. “It was a relief,” he tells Lotringer, “when I was being diagnosed because it was something concrete.” Now, he found himself “trying to break things down, and make things very simple before I die.”

Scemama, a French photographer and cinematographer, arrived in New York from Paris for three months in 1983, and then stayed. She met Wojnarowicz while photographing him for a magazine. They both lived in the East Village, and became intimate friends and collaborators for a couple of years, until their friendship blew up. Scemama moved back to France and might never have seen him again, were it not for a chance meeting outside a restaurant in Paris in 1988. Reeling from Hujar’s death, Wojnarowicz had stopped working and was deeply depressed. Once reconnected, Scemama felt driven to help. Beginning that summer, for the rest of Wojnarowicz’s life, she returned to the US for long periods to travel and collaborate with him. During 1989, they made five videos together, and she made three independent video works using materials he’d given her. The conversation – which Scemama herself arranged – is intercut with scenes and images from these videos, alongside some of Wojnarowicz’s earlier work. That July, she and Wojnarowicz rented a house in upstate New York where she shot gorgeous, black and white wilderness footage of the artist rowing a boat and reading out loud to a cat from what seems like a prelapsarian time.

Although his artistic biography was already sensationalised, emphasising the years during his teens when he’d left home and was hustling in Times Square, Wojnarowicz had only recently begun to incorporate graphically sexual material in his visual work. These works included a series of ink drawings of men engaged in sexual acts at the Variety Theatre, and a videotape that Scemama made of him undressing and making love to a man. In Sex Series (for Marion Scemama) (1988- 1989), he collages small cutout discs depicting gay male sex acts into the fields of much larger works. “People warned me,” he told Lotringer, “that this show would destroy my career, but – what do I have to lose? I’m facing death.”

Scemama arranged the conversation between Wojnarowicz and Lotringer hoping to offset Wojnarowicz’s fear that his work, although highly visible in a sensationalised way, was not well understood. Lotringer was well known for his work with French theory in the US. The loft faced the street, and the two strained to hear over traffic noise. They didn’t share each other’s references but an understanding developed between them. At the time, Lotringer was researching sexuality and death for reasons of his own, and he acts as a formidable witness to Wojnarowicz’s effort to indelibly articulate his process and thought. Remaining off-camera, Scemama acts as a bridge between the two men. The stakes behind this conversation aren’t visible, but they are felt.

Thirty years in the making, Self-Portrait is an astonishing document of influence, friendship, love and the effort it takes to figure things out. Composed in the present from archival materials, it’s also the most historically truthful depiction of Wojnarowicz and the cultural moment he lived in that I’ve seen.

This article originally appeared in SLEEK 62, out now. Order your copy here.