Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  So on June 29, 1990, Frohnmayer announced that he was defunding Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. These artists, soon known as the NEA Four, would file a lawsuit against the Endowment and Frohnmayer that September, charging that their grants were denied for political reasons.

  Finley was long gone from the East Village by this time, but she and David had reconnected when he filed his lawsuit. They’d been talking politics. “He was a very big supporter to me when I started having my legal problems,” Finley said. “I would talk over the decisions I was making. And from my perspective, I didn’t feel that I had many artists I could talk to about it. We had been friends before, but at this time we became colleagues. He would know what I was talking about, because he was living it. He gave me strength.”

  23 “DESPERATE TO BRING A LIGHT”

  Between the end of the trial and the end of 1990, David created his last pieces of visual art. He still had none of the opportunistic infections that so often afflict people with compromised immune systems, but he knew he was getting weaker.

  “I have reached a point where my life feels like it fits in a tiny funnel, and I can see something of its shape and form and end and that is the worst feeling in the world,” David wrote that July to Judy Glantzman, who was upstate for the summer. “I always needed room to drift or dream and my sense of mortality and Luis’ illness and phone calls bringing more slices of reality/mortality into my home just sent me over the edge.”

  Luis Frangella, being cared for at his New York apartment by his ex-boyfriend Russell Sharon, could barely speak. “He could just push out a few words with a whole lot of effort,” Sharon said. “There were very few people he would allow to be near him.” David was not one of them.

  Glantzman had written from upstate because David was acting so strangely when she left town, and she wondered if things were OK between them. David explained in his letter that he had a character trait that sometimes made him keep people at bay. “It’s the big wall of fear that I can’t seem to circumvent and I realized that somewhere I couldn’t connect with you and I felt angry at what I carried and the fact you were leaving and life was going on around me.”

  He had committed to two exhibitions at P.P.O.W, the first an installation to be done with friends and the second a solo show of new work.

  But first—he worked that summer with printmaker Richard Deagle on a diptych called Untitled for ACT UP, something the organization could use to raise money. In 1989, Deagle had created one of ACT UP’s better-known placards—the picture of Mayor Ed Koch next to the words “10,000 New York City AIDS Deaths. How’m I Doin’?”

  David selected the images for this piece and Deagle did the labor, printing them with activist Joe Wollin. David wanted to use the text from Untitled (Hujar Dead) on top of a picture from a Red Cross lifesaving manual, one man on the ocean floor and another floating just above him. This could be viewed as intended, one man saving another—or as something erotic. Untitled for ACT UP would not be the standard diptych with side-by-side images but would have one image above the other. For the bottom piece, David wanted a map of the United States with a target on it. He thought they needed something there to balance the text on top, so David suggested stock quotes. “I got a Wall Street Journal,” said Deagle, “where each alphabetical section of stock has the letter repeated three times. I picked the one that says KKK, and I said, ‘Is this too gimmicky for you?’ and David said, ‘No I kind of like it.’ “

  In mid-July, David learned that construction crews planned to work in his loft on a daily basis for two and a half months beginning August 6. They would leave the place “broom clean” each day but he should remove all valuables, as they would not be responsible for the loss, theft, or destruction of his belongings.

  On July 20 and 21, he wrote letters to the loft board and to his lawyer, explaining what he’d already witnessed of the crew’s habits during earlier periods of work. He had asked that the darkroom equipment be fully protected and they showed up with a filthy piece of plastic full of holes to cover it. He had set part of his day aside for them to come in and measure for new baseboards; a week or two later, they wanted access to do the same measurements again. They’d spent twenty-three days replacing fifteen feet of exposed gas pipe. They’d left his bathroom a mess and thrown a shower curtain and rods into a pile of his paintings. They’d left the loft door unlocked numerous times while the street door was propped open with a cinder block, leaving him vulnerable to anyone who wanted to wander in from the street. Worst of all, he didn’t see how he could get his work done for the two upcoming shows.

  His retrospective began its tour, and David wanted to see it in each new location. On July 22, he flew to Los Angeles to prepare for the “Tongues of Flame” opening at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

  He stayed with Norman Frisch on Venice Beach, and Frisch remembered that David arrived “fuming mad”—at Marion Scemama. He and Marion had reconnected, by phone, in late June when she called from Paris on her fortieth birthday. “He was sweet,” she said. “Not too surprised.” They had begun calling each other again, and she felt they had reconciled. A month later, she felt confident enough to propose that she come and help him in Santa Monica. “He got angry at the way I was asking him,” she said. “He felt manipulated. I didn’t say ‘I’d love to come help you’ but ‘do you want me to come.’ “ David’s version is unknown; it’s not part of the list of grievances against Marion he eventually wrote out. But it seems to have been one more irrational rupture.

  “He was in such a state emotionally when he landed in Venice,” Frisch said. “It took him days to calm down.” Frisch remembered some intense phone conversations between David and Marion, to the tune of “I never want to fucking see you again.” And he remembered David’s agitation over the loft. “He was afraid that the landlord might try something if he found out he was away. So he had someone staying there or coming by every day or two.” Walking on the beach seemed to help.

  It also helped that he loved how the show looked in Santa Monica. “I guess there was more space or nicer space,” said Frisch. “He spent a long time installing the show with the staff. He was also painting directly on the walls of the museum, and he was very into it. But I think that was the first time I really saw him not feeling well. That was a struggle for him because he was very excited about the exhibition, and he was going to get press that had not come to Illinois. It was a high-profile venue for him because at the time it was a very hip museum. But his energy was limited.” David had occasional bad headaches, he had trouble keeping food down, and he tired easily. He would need to lie down on the cement floor of the museum even as people worked around him.

  On the night of the opening, July 27, David gave a reading. There in the audience was Jan Mohlman, the woman who’d shared a studio with him on Houston Street in 1982. She had moved to Los Angeles after the East Village scene ended, and she’d lost touch with David. “As soon as our eyes met, I burst into tears in front of everyone in a crowded gallery,” she said. “He was so kind. He spent a good ten minutes just standing with me, making sure that I was OK. I think he was a little freaked out by all this emotion I was displaying. That kind of thing made him uncomfortable, but that might have been the first time I’d seen him in person since he had gotten his diagnosis, and so it was a huge thing for me to see him.”

  The day after the opening, David left to perform ITSOFOMO with Ben Neill, first in Seattle and then in San Francisco, where David stayed for several days. This is probably the point when he actually met Amy Scholder at City Lights, after corresponding with her for a couple of years. She was interested in publishing David’s monologues, since Sounds in the Distance was long out of print and he had more to add. This project, The Waterfront Journals, would appear several years after David’s death.

  Philip Zimmerman went to see ITSOFOMO at the San Francisco Art Institute and found it disconcerting that his old friend had become the Angry Art Star. “It was a rant and
people were cheering at the end. This was foreign to the David I knew,” said Zimmerman. “It was weird and creepy for me. I didn’t enjoy it.”

  Zimmerman took David to see Anna Halprin’s workshop for HIV-positive men. A revered postmodern dancer and choreographer, Halprin believed that movement could be a healing art. Zimmerman’s boyfriend, Allan Stinson, had worked with her since the seventies, so Zimmerman joined in, admitting that it wasn’t really his style—“a session of rolling around on the floor rearranging your emotions through sketching with oil pastels and yelling at the virus.” David watched for about forty-five minutes, then told Philip he’d meet him later. He pronounced it “hokey.”

  “It was too West Coast weird for him,” Zimmerman said. “I understood what David meant, but also in the back of my head I was thinking that maybe something she was working with would click with David—something about neutralizing the rage, that thing that was eating him and making him sicker. He was beginning to get seriously ill, and in my own way I was grasping at straws trying to offer some alternative to what he was getting back in New York. I think that if he had been able to pull out of the stress of New York, there might have been a turnaround. I talked to him about moving to San Francisco for a while. He wouldn’t do it. That darkness energized him. While he was here, we would go to Polk Street and hang out in the coffee shops, watching the hustlers and junkies.”

  David was retracing his steps. He actually stayed at the Y where he’d lived in 1976 while working as an egg sorter. Back then he’d romanticized life in the Tenderloin neighborhood. Now his impulse among the runaways and crack addicts and beaten-down homeless was to withdraw to his “bummy room” and to watch “people being violent with each other from the eighth floor windows,” and to find it simply depressing.

  David got back from California on August 5. On August 8, Judge William C. Conner dismissed the charges related to copyright and libel in the case of Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association. While acknowledging that David’s copyright had been infringed, the court bought the AFA’s “fair use” defense, i.e., that it was free to use the artist’s work for the purpose of criticizing and commenting on it. Then, to prove libel against someone who’d been designated (as David had been) “a limited use public figure,” plaintiffs had to prove that Wildmon intended actual malice against David, and the court was not convinced.

  The court did find, however, that the AFA had violated the state law, the New York Artists’ Authorship Rights Act. Wildmon had “largely reduced plaintiff’s multi-imaged works of art to solely sexual images devoid of any political and artistic content.” The judge cited Philip Yenawine’s testimony “that there is a reasonable likelihood that defendant’s actions have jeopardized the monetary value of plaintiff’s works and impaired plaintiff’s professional and personal reputation.” He ordered the AFA to send a corrective mailing to everyone who had received the original pamphlet, telling them that the images were fragments of larger artworks. But, because David could not provide evidence of lost income or canceled shows, he would be awarded damages of just one dollar.

  He called me and many others that day to say that he’d won this dollar and that, depending on how he felt, he would use it to buy either a condom or an ice cream cone. He got a little chuckle out of that. In fact, he specified that the AFA write him a check, no doubt intending to use it in some future piece. The AFA’s check for one dollar remains uncashed among his papers.

  That summer David wanted Patrick McDonnell to come to New York from Illinois. He knew Patrick had little money, so he gave him a print, telling him, “Sell this and come visit me.” It was one of the supermarket posters with Romulus and Remus. “I didn’t know what it was worth and I was embarrassed to ask David,” Patrick said. “So I shopped it around and no one would buy it. Then my boss at an art store told me he’d give me six hundred dollars. So I sold it to him. I thought six hundred dollars was pretty good. Then I got to New York, first time I’d ever been there, and David yelled at me immediately. ‘That was worth three thousand dollars!x You just gave it away!’ He was so mad at me. He said, ‘You could have stayed in a nice hotel, and you could have had a much different experience if you’d done it the right way.’ And he goes, ‘Now you’re going to have to stay with Tom.’ “

  The first morning Patrick woke up in New York, he walked the few blocks from Tom’s place to the loft to find that David was distraught. He had just learned about the suicide of Ethyl Eichelberger, the drag performer who’d been close to Hujar.

  This was one of those deaths that shook what was left of the East Village community, especially the performance artists. To Patrick, who hardly knew who Ethyl was, David said, “I could have talked him down. He was too powerful a force to give up. He wasn’t sick!”

  But he was. Few people knew that Ethyl had been HIV-positive for years. Reportedly he could not tolerate the few medications available in 1990. On August 12, he slit his wrists. People then began to recall that at his last show, Ethyl had—for the first time—failed to deliver his signature song at the end of the performance: “We Are Women Who Survive.”

  By the time of Patrick’s visit, David had completed much of Why the Church Can’t/Won’t Be Separated from the State, a large painting that addressed much of what he’d been through over the past year.

  According to Patrick, who saw this in progress, David used maps of Iraq as a base. On top of that he painted a river that runs into a tunnel, then circles back around the hill. The water is red before entering the tunnel and it’s labeled “artery.” The part that’s come back around is blue and labeled “vein.” So this is a painting about one body, making separation impossible.

  He made ten openings in the barren landscape around the river, and in these he inserted photos, stats, and one lithograph, all held in place with red string: three images of men underwater from the Red Cross lifesaving manual, including the one used in Untitled for ACT UP; a picture of a Greek statue with right arm bent, a pose he’d once used as a stencil; the photo of graffiti reading “Fight AIDS. Kill a quere [sic],” which he’d contributed to the “Witnesses” catalog; the first page of the Wildmon pamphlet, labeled “Your Tax Dollars Helped to Pay for These Works of Art”; the lithograph made with the New York Post editorial; Patrick posing in the “culture” headdress; a small photo of the homophobes who protest at every Gay Pride parade; and the Wildmon fundraising flyer stating that David wanted five million dollars. (This last item he had decorated with a large swastika.) He left one hole empty, with red strings hanging, as if something had been ripped out. Patrick said this was his suggestion when David could not decide on a final photo to include.

  Elsewhere David fixed small circles with some of his standard iconography—ants on a crucifix, blood cells, a snake catching a frog, and so on. A small seated skeleton, cut from dollar bills, wears a pope’s miter.

  The piece completely coheres despite all the disparate elements, though it invites the viewer to spend some time taking it in.

  “Tongues of Flame” was on view in Santa Monica until September 5, and while it was there, religious right activists came up with another line of attack.

  Reverend Louis Sheldon had convened a meeting of conservative ministers at a nearby church to “discuss options” a week before the show opened. Sheldon, founder and chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, wrote to church leaders, “I am told the exhibit includes photos of men having sex with men and animals.” Later, he told the Los Angeles Times that the meeting had drawn a large crowd and among the actions discussed was a possible class-action lawsuit.

  The lawsuit filed in U.S. district court on August 29, 1990, however, made no mention of Sheldon or his group. It was the work of the Rutherford Institute, a legal organization dedicated to promoting the Christian right’s agenda through the courts. One of its lawyers, Larry Crain, had represented Wildmon during his deposition.

  The lawsuit, Fordyce v. Frohnmayer, alleged that the NEA’s support for “Tongues of Flame” violat
ed the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Tax dollars had partially paid for a catalog in which a recurring theme, the complaint said, was “sacrilegious, defamatory, and scurrilous depictions of the person of Jesus Christ.” Plaintiffs David Fordyce and Yvonne Knickerbocker were devout Christians who regarded the public display of this work as a violation of their right to practice their religion free from government intrusion. Fordyce, a Los Angeles lawyer, told the New York Post that he wanted a permanent injunction to bar the NEA from “funding, sponsoring and endorsing works which promote blasphemous and sacrilegious hate material.” The plaintiffs also claimed that they had suffered “spiritual injury.”

  In dismissing the case, the court pointed out that nowhere had they even declared that they had seen the show or studied the catalog. “Plaintiffs have failed to show that they endured any special burdens that justify their standing to sue as citizens.” Nor, the court said, did they have standing to challenge decisions made by an agency of the executive branch.

  David probably knew about that lawsuit, but he never commented on it. He spent much of August working on a huge installation at P.P.O.W called The Lazaretto with artists Paul Marcus and Susan Pyzow.

  Marcus was then represented by P.P.O.W. He and David had met there in the office shortly after David joined the gallery. They vaguely remembered each other from the High School of Music and Art. Marcus recalled David as “the type of kid who’d hang outside smoking cigarette after cigarette.” They had not been friends.