Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  On November 23, David went to New Orleans with Tom. He returned on November 29, in time to participate in a reading at Artists Space with Eileen Myles, Richard Hell, and several others. David wore a Reagan mask and placed his text inside a copy of Horton Hears a Who.

  On the first Day Without Art, December 1, he read unmasked at the Museum of Modern Art. Also on the program was Leonard Bernstein, playing three pieces he’d composed in memory of friends who’d died of AIDS. Lavender Light Gospel Choir performed. Actress Jane Lawrence Smith (Kiki’s mother) read a piece selected by Philip Yenawine, who was the museum’s director of education and also part of Visual AIDS, the organization behind this observance. But Yenawine thought David’s reading was the most powerful moment. Yenawine had asked him to read from his targeted essay, a section related to its real subject: mortality.

  “I worry that friends will slowly become professional pallbearers,” David read,

  waiting for each death, of their lovers, friends and neighbors, and polishing their funeral speeches; perfecting their rituals of death rather than a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.… I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors 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 form on the front steps. It would be comforting to see those friends, neighbors, lovers and strangers mark time and place and history in such a public way.

  22 WITH A TARGET ON HIS BACK

  David became the third artist targeted in the culture war, just as he was entering his last months of relative vitality. His letter to the dean at Illinois State indicates that he anticipated more trouble, and more would come. What mattered to him in the meantime was getting certain messages out.

  He and composer-musician Ben Neill had about a week of rehearsal at the Kitchen before ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) opened there on December 7, 1989, roughly a year after they’d begun their discussions at Disco Donut.

  David had come up with an overarching theme for the show: the formation and collapse of the “one-tribe nation.” This was one of his tropes and had to do with homogeneity and conformity. As he put it in Close to the Knives, “To speak of ourselves—while living in a country that considers us or our thoughts taboo—is to shake the boundaries of the illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION. To keep silent is to deny the fact that there are millions of separate tribes in this illusion called AMERICA. To keep silent … is to lose our identities.” What he wanted to do in performance would be the equivalent of breaking a collage apart, moving the elements around, and commenting on them. He planned on a recurring motif of life and death images. To that end, he created a big papier-mâché egg and six to eight sperm, all of these covered with maps. The performance began with him cranking a big gear that pulled the sperm toward the egg. Periodically during the piece, he cranked it closer. Near the end he included a filmed sequence of a snake killing and ingesting a mouse.

  “We came up with this formal conceit of the gesture of acceleration on all these different levels,” said Neill, who used that conceit as a structural element in his music and in pacing the visual material David brought into the piece: images on four video monitors at the front of the stage and slides on a screen at the back. Most of the visuals had been pulled from photo pieces like The Weight of the Earth, films like A Fire in My Belly, and paintings like Fear of Evolution. David wanted movement in the piece, slithering, hopping animal movements that he knew he couldn’t do. So Neill brought in a choreographer he knew, and her small dance company. About halfway through the piece, David made himself a wolf mask from that day’s New York Times, along with a newsprint tutu he tucked into his belt, and did a little dance. He moved a strobe over a prone dancer’s body, and confronted a “politician” standing on a ladder. But mostly he read some of his texts. ITSOFOMO ended with the music and movement and imagery building to a frenzy while he shouted out the words from Untitled (Hujar Dead): “… and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg …”

  Neill played live computer electronics and his mutantrumpet (three bells, seven valves, a trombone slide, and interactive computer electronics). He’d gone to record a hollering contest in his native North Carolina, “these tribal yodeling hillbillies,” and sampled that throughout. He had a percussionist, Don Yallech, on vibraphone and timpani, the latter triggering other electronic sounds. “For its time, it was technologically advanced,” Neill said.

  They were able to tour the piece over the next couple of years, taking it to San Francisco, Seattle, and Minneapolis. When Tongues of Flame came to Exit Art in New York, they performed there too. But they never used the dancers again. Neill said David wasn’t happy with how that had worked. “I think it made the piece get a little out of control,” Neill observed. “Neither one of us had experience working with that kind of performing force. We never used any of the theatrical elements again, and it became more like a rock band—a trio onstage with the videos. David did more freestyling in terms of improvising the texts, and he took on way more of a central role.”

  At the Kitchen, they had the standard four nights to perform. On the last day, December 10, David spent the morning at ACT UP’s big “Stop the Church” demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Bill Gerstel, the musician who’d replaced David in 3 Teens Kill 4, happened to be one of thousands of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue. He remembered a tall skinny man in a ski mask wiggling his way to the front and throwing himself at a police barricade to knock it over. The crowd then surged past the barrier and the masked man ran around the corner. Gerstel decided to follow him to see who he was. He found David, mask off, sitting on the ground against a building, out of breath. With a performance to do that night, he couldn’t risk arrest.

  In the ITSOFOMO program, David inserted a page devoted to facts and statistics about AIDS, especially the role played by the Catholic Church in choking off the flow of safe-sex information. In David’s opinion, the facts were enraging, and they would be to anyone. He hated it when people attributed his anger to what he called “my diagnosis.”

  David worked on one writing project that he never finished but that may have helped him to deal with the rage he felt about the right-wingers piling on to attack him. They were far from done with him, but given the cast of characters he used in the project, called “The Private Lives of Saints,” he would have written it at about this point in his troubles. “Private Lives” was intemperate, to say the least. Part of it was a film script in which the president, Jesse Helms, Cardinal O’Connor, and others of their political persuasion engaged in orgies, murder, drug taking, and general depravity—the Cinema of Transgression meets Capitol Hill.

  But that was play. He had serious messages to get out. So he agreed to appear on a local public affairs show, The Eleventh Hour—on the condition that no one see his face. He wore his Reagan mask throughout the interview, taped at Artists Space, and hit listeners with lots of statistics, later edited to a few voice-over sentences.

  Asked to explain the mask (in a section that did not air), David said he thought it would be ironic for viewers to get their facts from the president, who had not said the word “AIDS” through six and a half years of an epidemic that killed twenty-one thousand Americans, and who’d thus inspired the phrase “Silence = Death.”v Also, David was now even more fearful about being queer-bashed. After Patrick Buchanan’s New York Post column calling the show “decadent,” with special opprobrium for David, and Ray Kerrison’s Post column comparing David to Louis Farrakhan, Artists Space received a bomb threat and had to evacuate the gallery.

  David had clearly prepared a set of talking points for this taping—the virus did not have a sexual orientation, the virus was runnin
g rampant in minority communities, the cardinal preferred coffins to condoms, and so on. He spoke for at least half an hour, but wearing the Reagan mask, hidden except for his buck teeth and the gap between them, he looked a bit goofy. In the end, The Eleventh Hour gave him three and half minutes.

  For most of that time he faced Untitled (Hujar Dead) on the Artists Space wall and read the text about the blood-filled egg, without the mask, while the camera focused on his back and on the clenching, unclenching fists at his sides.

  Early in 1990, he traveled to Philadelphia to lecture at the University of the Arts as a “visiting photographer,” and there in the audience sat Dean Savard, covered with Kaposi sarcoma lesions.

  They probably hadn’t seen each other since Savard left Civilian Warfare. He was living in Philly, driving a cab. When Savard later passed through New York on his way to see his parents in Connecticut, he and David got together for dinner.

  David felt nauseated for the first part of this meal. “I do have tremendous emotional reactions to the physical problems people have with this disease,” he told me. “It’s more a psychological thing because of my own fears about what I face.”

  Savard told David that when his parents came to take him to rehab all those years ago, he’d offered to gas up the car and then he just kept driving west while they stood waiting in front of the gallery. He’d gone all the way to Hawaii and spent a year there. Now he had so much KS that he could be a firehouse dog, he said. One of his legs was especially bad, and might have to be amputated. He’d gone to his local swimming pool with a friend, and as he dove in, a woman there with her kids started screaming at them, “Outta the pool!” Then he saw all these other parents yanking their kids out while his friend rolled on the ground laughing, saying, “Gotta bring you more often,” because she’d never seen so few people in the water. Savard was off dope, but just in case things got really bad, he had a “secret stash … guaranteed to kill me nicely.”

  David typed this up and labeled it “Dean’s monologue.” There’s no telling how much of it is true.

  “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” closed on January 6, 1990. David’s retrospective, “Tongues of Flame, would open at Illinois State University on January 23. With this suddenly controversial artist headed to Normal, the Village Voice planned a cover story and assigned a couple of features. I was to write about David’s life while art critic Elizabeth Hess went to Illinois to write about the show. I did my three interviews with him early in January 1990.

  We sat at what had once been Hujar’s blue kitchen table—though little blue was visible under the stacks of paper, books, plastic toys, and general clutter. Off mic, he told me he’d gone back into therapy. And he was a little apprehensive about this journey to the heartland. As I turned on the tape recorder, he hid the phone under some clothing and blankets on the bed so the ringing would be less audible. It rang constantly. The answering machine clicked. The crickets chirped.

  David flew to Normal a few days before the show opened. He’d followed up his letter to the dean of the College of Fine Arts with a phone call to curator Barry Blinderman. David thought Blinderman also deserved to know that a certain essay now in the “Tongues of Flame” catalog had become radioactive.

  Blinderman responded, “No problem.” The administration of Illinois State University would stand behind him. He told a reporter, “I’m simply carrying out the grant we received to the letter. We’re an educational institution. It’s not our job to squelch controversy.”

  The grant application Blinderman submitted late in 1988 stated: “David Wojnarowicz’s impassioned, intensely colored images cry out against oppressive socio-political contingents, and address societal and sexual taboos.… Wojnarowicz’s presence at our museum will provide our audience with an experience that may challenge or disturb them. We feel that one of our responsibilities is to reinforce the appreciation of art that transcends decorative function.” He included slides of David’s work and a copy of “Living Close to the Knives,” the essay about Hujar’s death. Blinderman figured the project budget at $57,200 and applied to the Endowment’s museum program for $23,300.

  The NEA’s peer panel approved a grant of $15,000 in February ’89, a couple of months before Reverend Donald Wildmon orchestrated the letter campaign against Piss Christ. This panel, which also approved the grant for “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” would have consisted of art world professionals from all parts of the country—curators, academics, and critics, for example—people familiar with the work of the artists and the reputations of the institutions applying. The panel would have convened in Washington, D.C., for several days to make choices based on artistic merit. Set up as a Great Society program in 1965, the NEA was designed to disseminate money for the arts across America. For example, its funding allowed dance companies to tour and world-class nonprofit theaters to thrive far from Broadway. It helped to support orchestras and museums and poetry festivals in communities that didn’t have the economic base to fund them. And it allowed a small museum at a Midwestern university to give a New York–based artist a retrospective.

  “Tongues of Flame” would test a familiar right-wing assertion. Jesse Helms and his cronies liked to characterize what they contemptuously called “the arty crowd” as either purveyors of perversion or some jewel-encrusted elite, a symbiotic gang of highbrows and lowlifes. According to Helms and crew, this crowd’s pornographic, sacrilegious art experiences were resentfully funded by the tax dollars of “average Americans,” some of whom might reside in a town called Normal.

  On the night of January 23, 1990, more than seven hundred people crammed into the gallery at Illinois State to hear David speak. “It just broke any record that we’ve ever had, including student annuals,” Blinderman said. “It was beyond what fire laws would allow.”

  Elizabeth Hess described David’s talk this way in her piece for the Voice:

  In a brilliant litany of questions, answers, statistics, and anecdotes, Wojnarowicz makes connections between his own life story, the defense budget, homelessness, AIDS, sex education, gay and lesbian teenage suicide, abortion, and the real killer—silence. Students sitting next to me are nudging each other with wide eyes. They can’t believe their ears. “If I tell you I’m a homosexual and a queer does it make you nervous? Does it prevent you from hearing anything else I say?” screams Wojnarowicz into the mike.

  He had surrounded himself with four video monitors playing the footage from ITSOFOMO. He ended by reading the text from Untitled (Hujar Dead). Afterward he spent nearly two hours shaking hands, signing posters, and accepting gifts before finally going out for dinner with Tom Rauffenbart and Anita Vitale, who’d come from New York for the opening.

  The next morning, he returned to the gallery with Blinderman and Hess, stopping at a McDonald’s drive-through for his usual two Egg Mc-Muffins. Hess reported that David gave his order to the disemebodied voice on one side of the building, then drove to the other side to pick up his food. When that window opened and the bag emerged, a voice over the speaker said, “Thank you, thank you. What a great performance!”

  He wasn’t yet able to take that in. Someone sent a box of flowers to the gallery that day, addressed to David, but after he picked it up, he put it right back down. It was too heavy for flowers! Blinderman took the box out into the hallway and opened it to find, not a bomb, but flowers with a waterpack. Soon enough, David was able to drop his anxiety about what was going to happen to him in the heartland. “A great performance” turned out to be the consensus.

  “Tongues of Flame” broke attendance records at University Galleries and got good reviews in the local press. The catalog sold out. David decided to stay an extra week, because the “average American” was so supportive—sending him letters, approaching him in restaurants to thank him. “It was my moment as a rock star,” he told me later. He also said he thought people were hungry for information, and if someone stood in front of them and told them directly, “This is my experience,” the aver
age American would listen. The Associated Press ran a story on the show headlined “ ‘Degenerate’ Art Exhibit Creates No Complaints.”

  “He endeared himself to the community,” Blinderman said. “He made such an impact. After you hear a voice like that, it changes you.” Bloomington-Normal’s first ACT UP chapter formed while David was there, and held its first meeting at the gallery, surrounded by his work.

  Blinderman recalled him being friendly, meeting with anyone who wanted to meet with him. “People just went crazy over him,” said Blinder-man. “So charismatic, sensitive, humble, and vulnerable. So open. And he enjoyed the attention because it was sincere.”

  David had arrived in Normal with a shopping bag full of sheet music, fake dollars, and supermarket posters to use in the lithographs he would create at Normal Editions Workshop, the University’s print atelier. He’d been planning another version of “The Four Elements.” On this visit, he began work on Earth and Wind (a brain emerges from a globe on a background of sheet music; a songbird and tornadoes on a background of dollars), but then turned to a more urgent piece. This new lithograph had the New York Post’s “Offensive Art Exhibit” editorial on one half, dollars on the other. He drew a voodoo doll on litho stone to be printed over the editorial, skeletons and a globe to be printed over the dollars, and a circle filled with blood cells uniting the two halves.

  After its run in Normal, “Tongues of Flame” was scheduled to travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Exit Art in New York, and Temple Gallery at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Blinderman was able to send the NEA a rapturous final report:

  Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the Wojnarowicz exhibition was watching the profound effect that the artist’s work and the attendant controversy had on our audience. Community members who had never stepped into the gallery before flocked in to see the work in person, after having read and heard so much about it. We received support and praise from town officials and university upper administrators, including the mayor of Normal and the President of Illinois State University.… The public’s enthusiastic acceptance of a so-called “difficult” show gave us great hope that the terms “average American taxpayer” and “playing in Peoria” could at last be redefined. In addition, hundreds of students of all disciplines at I.S.U. wrote papers on the social, moral and legal aspects of the exhibition. Some law students even did dissertations on the topic. As was the hope of our Dean of the College of Fine Arts, Tongues of Flame proved to be a unique educational experience for our immediate audience and people all over the country.