Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  David had Untitled (Hujar Dead) in this show, along with the three photographs of Hujar (face, hand, foot) he had silk-screened into that piece, and four prints from The Sex Series. For the catalog, he contributed a photo not in the show, a picture of some graffiti that reads, “Fight AIDS. Kill a quere [sic].”

  Kiki Smith’s piece featured figures of many naked women and some babies silk-screened onto muslin, in memory of all the sisters “disappeared by AIDS,” as she put it. The plight of HIV-positive women had gotten relatively little attention at this point, and her sister Bebe had died of AIDS in 1988.

  Styles ranged from that to Vittorio Scarpati’s cartoons drawn in the hospital, where he spent months after his lungs collapsed from Pneumocystis. If any type of art predominated in “Witnesses,” it was portraits, both paintings and photographs. Goldin included some Hujar portraits in the show, for example. Philip-Lorca diCorcia contributed a photo of Scarpati looking spectral in his hospital bed, like he was literally fading, while the bandages covering much of his bare chest and festive balloons hanging from an IV stand look more permanent. Married to Goldin’s old friend Cookie Mueller, Scarpati died on September 14, 1989, at the age of thirty-four.

  There wasn’t much nudity in Witnesses, apart from the Kiki Smith piece, Dorit Cypis’s photo installation with nude female body parts, and Mark Morrisroe’s enlarged Polaroids of naked men. None of this was pornographic, none of it obscene. Indeed the most shocking thing in the show was a description Morrisroe wrote of his treatment in the hospital (reprinted in the catalog), about how he had “smashed the vase of flowers Pat Hearn sent me so I would have something to mutilate myself with by carving in my leg ‘evening nurses murdered me.’ “ Friends with Goldin since art school, Morrisroe had died of AIDS that summer at the age of thirty. In his last portrait, he looks sixty.

  Goldin wanted an essay for the catalog from her friend Cookie, the writer, actress, and quintessential free spirit Goldin had been photographing since 1976. But Cookie also had AIDS, and by the summer of 1989, she was walking with a cane and had lost her ability to speak. (Goldin’s last photo of Cookie alive was taken at Scarpati’s funeral about two months before Witnesses opened.) The catalog reprinted a piece Cookie wrote earlier for City Lights Review. Half of it was devoted to the last letter she ever received from her best friend, Gordon Stevenson, the no-wave filmmaker (Ecstatic Stigmatic) and bass player for Teenage Jesus and the Jerks who died of AIDS in 1982. Stevenson felt that the illness was punishment for being different, for being a “high-risker.” For her part, Cookie advised, “Watch closely who is being stolen from us.… Each friend I’ve lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture.… They tried to make us see.”

  When Goldin sent David a description of what would be in the show, she added a handwritten note: “I’m so happy you’ve agreed to write a piece for the catalogue.… As for how you want to approach this, it’s up to you.”

  David had begun taking AZT, though it often made him vomit. He still had no opportunistic infections (like Pneumocystis). But he knew that it was time to write an essay dealing with his own mortality. As always, he would then step back to look at the context, the landscape devastated by plague—and this time, he would name some villains.

  But he began by talking about a friend who’d dropped by unexpectedly, who sat at the kitchen table trying to find language for what he was going through now that his T-cell count had dropped to thirty. David wrote:

  My friend across the table says, “There are no more people in their thirties. We’re all dying out. One of my four best friends just went into the hospital yesterday and he underwent a blood transfusion and is now suddenly blind in one eye. The doctors don’t know what it is …” My eyes are still scanning the table; I know a hug or a pat on the shoulder won’t answer the question mark in his voice. The AZT is kicking in with one of its little side effects: increased mental activity which in translation means I wake up these mornings with an intense claustrophobic feeling of fucking doom. It also means that one word too many can send me to the window kicking out panes of glass, or at least that’s my impulse.… The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.

  That passage, with its angry desperation, sets the tone. He wrote of how he resisted being comforted, of his need to witness, of his tendency to sometimes forget the disease for whole hours, of the inadequacy of memorials, of trying to “lift off the weight of the pre-invented world,” of how important it was to see his reality represented in the culture—on gallery walls, at least.

  He also wrote one sentence fantasizing about the deaths of Helms and Dannemeyer: “At least in my ungoverned imagination, I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw Congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building.” Elsewhere, referring to the attacks on Mapplethorpe, Serrano, and the NEA, David called Helms “the repulsive senator from zombieland.”

  He devoted an entire paragraph to local villain Cardinal John O’Connor. The cardinal’s name came up frequently among queer activists and at ACT UP meetings. He opposed safe-sex education and preached against condom use. He had representatives on the New York City Board of Education’s AIDS advisory committee, where they lobbied to stop all sex education and AIDS education in public schools. He served on Reagan’s know-nothing Presidential Commission on the HIV Epidemic. He prohibited the gay Catholic group Dignity from holding Mass in any church in the diocese; when Dignity members protested by standing in silence during the cardinal’s homily at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, eleven were arrested, and the cardinal banned them from ever entering the cathedral again. O’Connor fought vigorously against the passage of any legislation guaranteeing civil rights to gay people. He was also strident in his opposition to reproductive freedom for women. While at work on his essay, David read an article in the paper about O’Connor’s wish to join Operation Rescue in blocking abortion clinics.

  David wrote, “This fat cannibal from the house of walking swastikas up on fifth avenue should lose his church-exempt status and pay taxes retroactively for the last couple of centuries.… This creep in black skirts has kept safer-sex information off the local television stations and mass transit spaces for the last eight years of the AIDS epidemic therefore helping thousands and thousands to their unnecessary deaths.”

  The comments on all three villains would soon be extracted from his 3,700-word piece and excoriated, but he had no reason at the beginning of October to anticipate trouble. Goldin loved the essay. And he had other things to do.

  In autumn 1989, David had distractions at home to deal with almost daily. He lived above what had once been one of the great Yiddish theaters, a space the landlord began converting that year into a multiplex. In June, the theater roof collapsed, but most of the irritations suffered by tenants were less spectacular: no lights in the hallway, phone cables cut, interruptions to electrical service, severe leaks, drilling and loud tapping during daylight hours.

  The tenants had been keeping a “harassment list” all year, but problems began to intensify in August. For nine days in September, roof demolition created “noise so loud that a normal conversation cannot be heard,” the list reported. David got his lawyer involved to try to stop the removal and replacement of the roof. On October 2, the list noted: “Water pouring down D. Wojnarowicz’s west wall, down wall in common hall area, and pouring down the stairs.” The complaints cited most often were high-decibel noise and leakage.

  David wanted to devote the remainder
of the year to ITSOFOMO and to his upcoming retrospective at Illinois State University. He had a new piece in mind and ideas about the catalog. Barry Blinderman, director of University Galleries, suggested to David that they call the show “Tongues of Flame.” He had secured a fifteen-thousand-dollar NEA grant toward the exhibition and catalog.

  On October 7, David flew to Bloomington-Normal, the twin cities of central Illinois. He and Blinderman worked on an interview for the catalog, some of it conducted in the car while they drove around town, discussing, for example, the idea Blinderman would eventually use as the interview’s title, “The Compression of Time.” David said, “You look down there and you see a white car moving by, and now it’s gone; the fraction of time that the action inhabited is so brief that all we can do is carry the traces of memory of it. That’s what life is. Every minute, we pick up the traces of what just happened; perception and thought and memory are continuous, and yet somehow we make these delineations or these borders between what’s acceptable and what’s not. Time is not something that’s set to a strobic beat. For instance, if you’re in a place where violence is occurring—possibly occurring to yourself—time takes on a totally different quality than it would be if you were in an introspective quiet place. Time expands and contracts constantly, and yet we set it to a meter which is completely unreal.” Since David was staying with him and his family, Blinderman also saw how sick David was, constantly nauseated from AZT. He was in Illinois for a week.

  Back in New York, David asked Jean Foos to design his catalog. She’d just become art director at Artforum, but they’d been acquainted since the early East Village days. She’d painted at the pier, she’d introduced him to Keith Davis, and her boyfriend was Dirk Rowntree, one of the few people David was still in touch with from the seventies. David explained that he would be giving her a painting in lieu of payment.

  He knew what he wanted for the cover—either a photo by George Platt Lynes or an image that would approximate it. Lynes is best known for his erotic male nudes, photographed when such pictures were completely taboo. (He died in 1955). The picture David loved, though, was not a nude but an image of a man’s head in profile. The man appears to be screaming. John Erdman and Gary Schneider owned this photo, and David wanted to buy it from them. “He often asked to see it when he came over,” said Erdman, who refused to part with the picture. “I don’t know if he was going to use this for the cover of the catalog or if he was just going to study it. But whatever coolness happened between us was because of this. He was angry that I wouldn’t give it to him.”

  David then photographed a number of people standing in strong red and blue light—just their heads with mouths open, as if screaming. The dancers who would be part of ITSOFOMO were all photographed that way, as was Steve Brown. David decided to use the picture of Brown, screaming, on the cover of his catalog. Back in 1985 when David was in the Whitney Biennial, Brown teased him about Robert Hughes’s panning of the show in Time. (Hughes called David’s work “repulsive” and declared that edition of the Biennial to be “the worst in living memory.”) In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Brown recalled telling David that he couldn’t wait for the day when Time had David’s face on the cover with the caption “Misfit or Messiah.” David thought Brown was making fun of him, and said he was putting his face on the catalog to get back at him.

  David also began work with Foos on a new piece that would appear in the catalog but not hang on the wall in Normal, a school photo of himself as a boy, surrounded by type. “One day this kid will get larger,” the text begins. “One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth.… One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid.”

  This would become one of David’s best-known, most widely distributed works, translated into German—he hoped to get it into other languages as well—and also presented with a little girl at the center. Critic Maurice Berger remembered encountering it in a show in 1990. “The juxtaposition of freckle-faced, jug-eared innocence with the poisonous reality of homophobia moved me deeply,” Berger wrote. “And while I have been ‘out’ for almost a decade, the work helped me to accept a part of my queer self that I had never before owned: the gay-bashed, self-hating kid who struggled to survive.”

  Untitled [One day this kid …], 1990. Gelatin-silver print, 30 ×40 inches. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)

  David’s essay “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” had been typeset while he was in Illinois. On October 17, Susan Wyatt, executive director at Artists Space, looked at the galleys for the “Witnesses” catalog and read his piece for the first time. She was alarmed. Artists Space had received an NEA grant of ten thousand dollars toward the exhibition and catalog. (The total budget for “Witnesses” stood at thirty thousand dollars.) Wyatt now anticipated difficulties because of the new Helms amendment. She also worried that the essay could be libelous. Artists Space had never even published a catalog piece that used four-letter words. Wyatt felt that she had to protect the organization, but she also wanted to protect the NEA. As she put it later in her written account of this incident: “It’s an incredible responsibility when you realize the whole future of the public funding of art has come to rest on your shoulders.” That’s what she felt was at stake.

  She sent the “Postcards” essay to a lawyer on the Artists Space board. Then she called David Bancroft, the NEA program specialist responsible for the grant, and asked if they could change their award letter to state that NEA money would fund the exhibition only—not the catalog. She already had a five-thousand-dollar grant from the Mapplethorpe Foundation and could allocate that money to the catalog. Bancroft didn’t think there’d be a problem with that, but said he would call her back.

  Meanwhile, the lawyer on her board advised her to get David to take out the names of Helms, Dannemeyer, and O’Connor. He could just say “government officials.” But Wyatt realized after a “difficult” first phone call with David that there was no way in hell he would do that.

  According to Nan Goldin, Wyatt also called her. “She asked me to censor,” said Goldin. “I talked to David. He said he refused to censor. She read me the lines she wanted censored. ‘The fat fucking cannibal in black skirts.’ The only thing he agreed to do was to take ‘fucking’ out. And I quickly became aligned with him. First, she talked to me and tried to get me aligned with her. And I didn’t initially understand why it was so important to David to keep those lines in. But then of course I supported him a hundred percent.”

  Wyatt did not recall asking Goldin to contact David, but said, “I tried to keep Nan in the loop. She did get to be very difficult. She got very angry at me.” Goldin was still based in Watertown, Massachusetts, near the hospital where she’d recovered, and was commuting to New York. But Connie Butler, who’d just taken a curator job at Artists Space, remembered her as “a really forceful presence. She was very emotional and trying to be protective of the artists and of David.”

  When David later typed up notes for himself labeled “NEA—Artists Space Flap,” he recounted his first couple of conversations with Wyatt this way: “Susan Wyatt calls to ask that I change certain things I refuse she asks disclaimers I refuse she says [Artists Space] will do disclaimers—she tells me her lawyer asks me to sign liability waver in case of lawsuits—I say send it to me.”

  David went to the Center for Constitutional Rights, where he was advised that the cardinal could sue over the assertion that he’d suppressed safe-sex information. But if the cardinal did that, the CCR would defend David pro bono. He then signed Artists Space’s liability waiver, assuming financial responsibility for all “losses, liabilities, damages, and settlements” resulting from his essay.

  Wyatt spent the next few days trying to dete
rmine whether the NEA would even want credit for funding “Witnesses.” Goldin had commissioned new work from some of the artists, but nothing had come in yet, so Wyatt wasn’t sure what would be in the show. She speculated that some of it could be sexually explicit. When she couldn’t get an answer from NEA staff, she decided to go ahead with crediting the agency—usually standard practice—on the outgoing press releases.

  On October 24, NEA program specialist David Bancroft called Wyatt to confirm that she could change the award letter, deleting the catalog from what would be funded. He advised her to simply revise her budget and to formalize the change in writing. (He later called this “Susan’s interpretation of our conversation.”)

  On October 25, Wyatt was in Washington to meet the new NEA chairman, John Frohnmayer, with a delegation from the National Association of Artists’ Organizations. Frohnmayer had held the job for three weeks. Now, briefed on Wyatt’s queries, he asked to have a word with her in private. Later, when he too wrote an account of all this, he said he did not know at that point that she wanted to excise the catalog funding from the grant, while Wyatt maintains that she told him that day. (Her letter formalizing that change did not arrive at the Endowment until November 7.) Frohnmayer then asked her to remove NEA credit from the catalog and to print a disclaimer. She decided that was only fair. She’d already included a disclaimer on behalf of Artists Space, stating that the organization and its board “may not necessarily agree with all the statements made here.”