Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  One day he was walking down St. Mark’s Place when he saw Peter Hujar seated at an outdoor table at Dojo, a cheap vegetarian restaurant. Baynard and Hujar had known each other for at least twenty years. Baynard explained what he was doing. The group show. The burning house. The artist he couldn’t identify.

  “I know who it is,” Hujar said. He gave Baynard the unfamiliar name.

  Baynard asked, “Does he paint?”

  “No, not yet,” Hujar told him. “But he’s thinking about painting.”

  Baynard then called David, who invited him to the storefront studio on Houston. He said yes to participating—something like, this would give him the impetus to do a painting. He bought a Masonite board and created a diptych around an image of Hujar.

  David had photographed Hujar on a couple of occasions—specifically, Hujar lying on his back. These pictures were eerily similar to the very last photos David would ever take of him, moments after Hujar’s death. But in 1981, he photographed Hujar lying on the floor of his loft and then, another day, Hujar lying on a boardwalk in a dark shirt, eyes closed. It was this image that David began to incorporate into his first paintings. He made it into a stencil. For this first diptych, Untitled (Green Head), he made two red squares, one made from red brick. In each, Hujar is lying on his back in a blue shirt. In one, he has a green head. In the other, he has a yellow head that’s exploded into fragments. Around him David stenciled his military images—running soldiers, planes, a burning house.

  David used this photo of Peter Hujar to create a stencil he then used for Hujar Dreaming, for installations, and for more than a dozen other early paintings. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)

  “I bought the painting,” Baynard said. “But it never occurred to me till much later how full and resolved this was for a first painting. Totally resolved.”

  Baynard called his show “Fast.” It was one of those group exhibitions that galleries like to mount in the summer before everyone heads to a Hampton, but it was more distinguished than most. The eighteen artists included Anselm Kiefer and David Hockney, along with those named above. Each showed just one piece. Milliken printed a small catalog with an essay by Susan Putterman, who offered the first critical assessment of David’s art: “Using images of urban terrorism and violence, he constructs a universe devoid of moral reason. Although flatly and uniformly painted, the fore-shortened figure [Hujar] creates a sense of anxiety.… Wojnarowicz spotlights society’s inability to adhere to its own structures and confronts the viewer with a vision of anarchy and insanity.”

  David created at least fourteen other pieces using this same image of Hujar, most notably Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, one of his signature early works.

  Alexander Milliken was intrigued enough to offer David his first solo show. He began working on it that summer.

  The same day the “Fast” show opened at Milliken, David had another opening to attend on nearby Lafayette Street.

  Public Illumination Gallery had set up its own summer extravaganza, called “411,” with four one-week, one-person shows. David was one of the four. “They were all elaborate installations, deliberately over the top,” said gallery director Jeffery Isaacs, who was then using the name Zagreus Bowery. (“Bowery” also edited the pocket-size Public Illumination magazine.) “The idea was that since people mainly go to openings, we’d do an opening every Friday for a month,” he said.

  David’s show was all stencil work, applied directly to the walls of the tiny storefront. “I lived with my wife in the windowless room behind the gallery,” Isaacs said, “and I distinctly remember being not too wild about the spray-paint fumes. He only had a couple of days to do the installation, because of the ‘411’ schedule. I remember him working alone and me having to explain to him that no, he couldn’t work overnight, as we had to go to bed. The installation included a cassette player with an audio track playing. I don’t remember what.”

  David’s imagery was all aggression and vulnerability. He used running soldiers in three sizes, a small burning house, many small bombers, a figure who holds one bent arm over his head, a large falling man, a rampaging wolf, the prone Hujar. Isaacs said that since it was the last of the four installations, he couldn’t resist leaving a small section up in a corner until he vacated the space in autumn 1983.

  This was a period when David was taking photos of blindfolded men, and he used one of those images on the flyer he made for this show. Were they facing a firing squad? He never spoke or wrote about what these images meant to him.

  (Courtesy of Jeffrey Isaacs)

  That July, the Centers for Disease Control decided that, with GRID diagnoses coming in at the rate of 2.5 a day, it better start calling the disease an epidemic. Its scientists also had evidence now that GRID could be transmitted by blood. However, the Food and Drug Administration did not want the CDC meddling with the blood industry, which was the FDA’s turf. As Randy Shilts explained, “Many at the FDA did not believe that this so-called epidemic of immune suppression even existed.” Indeed, the FDA would not license a test allowing blood banks to screen their products until 1985.

  In the summer of ’82, the CDC was at least able to jettison the GRID acronym—which many there refused to use—when someone came up with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

  David bought his art supplies at the venerable New York Central and got to know one of the clerks there, Dean Savard. “I realized this guy knew just about everything there was to know about paper,” David told me. Like how different papers would react to spray paint. And then, David added a bit hesitantly—because Savard was still alive when we spoke—“he was giving art supplies away to anybody he thought was OK. He’d pack up a hundred sheets of paper, tons of paint brushes, and write up a bill for two dollars.”

  One day when David came to the store, Savard told him he was opening a gallery. So David went over to 526 East Eleventh and had a look. “I just loved that it was in this little storefront. I liked the energy of him and the guy he was working with.” That was Alan Barrows. Savard was then a painter, using the storefront as a studio and living in the tiny back room, where he’d installed a loft bed over the meager kitchen utilities.

  Barrows and Savard had met in Philadelphia while Savard was attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and working in an ice cream store. Barrows was a customer at that store until he decided that working there, with Savard, would be more fun than waiting tables somewhere else. They were never lovers. But two months after Savard moved to New York late in 1980, Barrows and his partner followed.

  One night Barrows and Savard went to an opening at Fun, where they talked to the gallery’s co-director, Bill Stelling. This was the first Fun, a small basement room on Eleventh Street. Barrows thought it “kooky” that someone had decided “let’s just hang things on the wall and have a show.” But Stelling suggested that Barrows and Savard do it too. Why not start a gallery? Savard had certainly met lots of artists at New York Central. So they decided, why not. They opened their gallery in May 1982, publicizing the early shows with flyers made from press type and wheat-pasted onto buildings or distributed at the Pyramid Club.

  Savard came up with the name. He told Barrows that on the way to work one day, he passed a woman standing on a milk crate, absolutely crazy and yelling out to no one in particular: “The Russians are coming! They’re going to invade! It’s going to be fucking civilian warfare in the streets of New York!” So, Savard told Barrows, they could call it “fucking civilian warfare.” Barrows laughed at this recollection. They ended up calling it Civilian Warfare Studio, at least while Savard was still living there. “It was a very amateur beginning,” Barrows said. But that too appealed to David, who said the gallery at first was sort of a goof, but “it felt very comfortable.” At that point, David recalled, Savard didn’t have any big illusions about where this would go. It would be many months before Civilian sold so much as a poster. Barrows and Savard both kept their day jobs and open
ed the place nights and weekends. Once the scene got rolling, however, the gallery quickly acquired a reputation for showing, as one critic put it, “the rawest, harshest work of quality in the East Village.”

  On September 15, 1982, Civilian Warfare Studio opened “Hit and Run Art,” its “third group show,” featuring Bronson Eden, Dean Savard, and David Wojnarowicz. This may have been the last time Savard showed his own work. He quickly figured out that he was better at dealing. Eden designed a computer game called “Suzi Head Goes to War,” which ran on a monitor in the window. The game got such a reaction, Eden said, “That convinced Dean to make me a regular.” David told me that he showed Science Lesson, specifically because it was so large—almost fourteen feet long and eight feet tall. He’d had to “work on it in sections and flop it” at the Houston Street studio. Once they installed the piece in Savard’s storefront, David said, “Your face was almost in the painting, so it was kind of hilarious. It was like a joke for us.”

  Eden worked with Savard at New York Central. He’d dropped out of sight while going through a divorce and thought his art career was over. Then he met Savard. “Within two years I was showing in Europe. Dean changed my life. But—he was also a heroin addict, a real pirate. It was a lifestyle. He used to wear these big, bulky overcoats so he could carry stuff out [of the store]. That’s how he paid for his heroin addiction, and he also used it to grease his way through the art world in the early days. Gave away a lot of free art supplies to people.

  “For me,” Eden said, “the East Village—a lot of it was about Dean Savard. I remember an opening in maybe ’84 when the scene was really hot, and he just looked like an angel. Like something from another planet. He was wearing mascara, a jacket with no shirt, and he had this white hair that stuck out in all directions. He was just so charismatic and so smart. He was like a nova. He was incandescent. But he was much more influential in the early years. Later on he made some pretty bad mistakes. He screwed up. And then he died.”

  The September 1982 issue of Arts magazine carried the first art world acknowledgment that something was stirring in the East Village: an article by Nicolas Moufarrege titled “Another Wave, Still More Savagely than the First.”

  His thesis: What rock musicians had been to the sixties, artists would be to the eighties. In the East Village, Moufarrege saw signs of art with “mass appeal,” more entertaining, more understandable, more relevant. We were done now with seventies “severity,” all that minimalism and conceptualism. “Everything is moving so much faster: waves, volcanic eruptions, high voltage currents. Boomtown, a pulsing heart within the metropolis, the East Village, Manhattan, where different drummers unite in a Zeitgeist despite their varying and very personal rhythms. The need to communicate is overwhelming; in more important ways than literally, the boundaries of art have gone beyond the stretcher and the canvas.” By now there were six spaces to cite: Nature Morte, East Seventh Street Gallery, and Life (which would soon become Life Café), along with Fun, 51X, and Gracie’s “Loo.” (Civilian Warfare was still off the grid, a “studio” and not yet a gallery.)

  Moufarrege came from Beirut by way of Paris, stopping at Harvard for a master’s degree in chemistry before moving to the East Village. He was the scene’s excited first champion—and an idiosyncratic artist in his own right. He painted on needlepoint canvas and did large embroideries that recycled and recombined imagery, from Picasso to Spider-Man, in thread. His “Another Wave” article contains what could be his manifesto. Or it could be David’s. Or it could belong to many of the other artists from this scene, at least in the early days:

  I want to draw. I want to paint. I have something to say, to everyone and as many as I possibly can. I am doing it on the streets, I am doing it in my room, I am doing it underground. I am doing it on the trains, on the billboards, in the mail. The palaces are full. But new ones are being built: in the nightclubs and in the bathrooms. I will work with and on whatever I can lay my hands on. I will carve on a tree or on a rock. I will use paint, chalk, or any stick that leaves a mark. I will draw pictures and color them. I will write words, in my language and in yours. I will build toys. I will make sounds and instruments that make sounds. I will rap and I will sing and I will dance to it all. I want you to know my name. I want you to know my sign.

  11 RAMPAGES OF RAW ENERGY

  By 1982, P.S. 1 was recognized internationally as the most prestigious venue to emerge from the “alternative space” movement. The former elementary school in Long Island City, Queens, had enough room to house both adventurous exhibitions and artists’ studios. The “New York/New Wave” show there in 1981 had rocked the art world by showcasing a bit of the raw creativity then emerging from various “downtown” clubs and streets; jaws had dropped before the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

  When a curator from P.S. 1 visited David’s studio in 1982, he was selecting work for an upcoming show on animal imagery. Given how little David had shown at that point, and how little of that was about animals, it’s amazing that he even got a studio visit. But David felt he belonged in “The Beast Show.” When he wasn’t chosen, he was pissed.

  On October 17, David went to the opening at P.S. 1 with Hujar. He’d spent the morning at Tommy Turner’s apartment, making about thirty cock-a-bunnies, which he carried to Queens in a plastic can with holes in the lid, stashed in his shoulder bag. He walked into the exhibit pulling out a few “bunnies” at a time, dropping them amid the Warhols and Clementes. One artist had made “a sculptural city,” as David described it. “I remember dropping a handful on that, so cock-a-bunnies were running through this city,” he said. “I dropped them on sculptures and pedestals. I dropped some in the administration office on the secretaries’ tables. Eventually someone would notice. They’d see this microscopic rabbit running, and it created all this commotion.” Guards began chasing them down while David went to see Moufarrege, who had a P.S. 1 studio. Moufarrege and Hujar were old friends. And Chuck Nanney was Moufarrege’s boyfriend. Nanney remembered David walking into the studio and depositing his last two cock-a-bunnies on a table, saying, “Check this out.” From then on, he included this contribution to “The Beast Show” (an “action installation”) on his résumé. David had an adversarial relationship with the art world, even as it opened its doors to him.

  That month David curated a show himself, at an East Village cafe called Lucky Strike. Artist Jean Foos—whose cool abstractions never fit the scene’s prevailing style—said that David told her, “Bring a big painting!” Foos ended up in a couple of what she called David’s “free for all” shows, including the biggest and best of them: the Ward Line Pier Project. There was a part of David that longed to be a protector and provider, and he constantly promoted the work of his artist friends. He never wanted to make a studio visit. He just told them, “Bring something!”

  He brought his collaborations with Kiki Smith into his first solo show at Civilian Warfare and got her into the group show “Climbing: the East Village” at Hal Bromm. Among his papers, I found a photocopy of a piece they’d done together—David’s footprint, David’s image of a tornado and Kiki’s childhood story about buying her classmates’ souls. Kiki couldn’t remember if they created the piece for a specific show. “But he did a lot of things like that where he somehow included me in his access to the universe,” she said. “I was one of the people he tried to take along with him.”

  Gracie Mansion had had two more Loo Division shows—E. F. Higgins III on May 4 and Stephen Lack on June 16. When the New York Post picked up on her press release for the latter and ran a blurb on Page Six, a mob showed up for the opening. People were lined up down the stairs of her apartment building and out onto the street. “There were even people on the roof. My landlord flipped out.” That was it for the Loo Division.

  Gracie decided to make some real money—as a cocktail waitress in a bar on St. Mark’s. She called in sick to the SoHo gallery for a few days, long enough to realize that she was “absolutely unqualified to be a bar-mai
d.” But when she quit, the bar owner offered to give her the space upstairs for a gallery, rent-free for a month if she fixed it up. “I was young and stupid and thought that was a really great deal,” she said. The space upstairs was a beauty parlor turned storage space. She’d have to move all the hoardings and take down the mirrors that still lined the walls. Gracie organized help from the artists she intended to show. They worked for a month. She called this space the Lieu Division and the first exhibition “Beyond American Standard.” (American Standard makes toilets.) The opening pulled in such a crowd that she had to turn people away at the door, many of whom ended up in the bar downstairs. The owner decided to give her another month.

  The opening of Gracie Mansion’s “The Famous Show” in November, 1982, with Hujar Dreaming suspended from the ceiling. (Photograph by Gary Azon)

  That was unexpected, and she had to pull a show together in a week. She decided—OK, portraits of famous people. “Word just went out—bring in stuff,” said Gracie. “People just arrived. I’d set the work up against the wall. ‘OK, that’s good. You can be in the show.’ That’s how it happened.” She ended up showing more than a hundred pieces, jamming the walls floor to ceiling. David arrived late on the day of the installation, with much of the show already hung. Hujar Dreaming ended up suspended from the ceiling by wires in the four corners. At the opening, artgoers again waited in line on the narrow stairway, and this time they crowded out into St. Mark’s Place, blocking traffic.