Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  On December 18, David requested that a piece of his be removed from a group show, “Art What Thou Eat: Images of Food in American Art,” opening that night at the New-York Historical Society. This exhibit of eighty food-related paintings and sculptures included work by such luminaries as Alice Neel, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. What stuck in David’s craw was the presence of Mark Kostabi. “I’d never be in the same show with that bigot,” he told a reporter.

  Once known for glib pronouncements like “paintings are doorways into collector’s homes,” Kostabi had been branded a vicious homophobe after the June 1989 Vanity Fair quoted him saying, “These museum curators, that are for the most part homosexual, have controlled the art world in the eighties. Now they’re all dying of AIDS, and although I think it’s sad, I know it’s for the better. Because homosexual men are not actively participating in the perpetuation of human life.”

  Kostabi reacted to the public outcry by telling Newsday, “I feel terrible for saying something that was an unfair generalization based on a few specific experiences with gay curators and critics that left me very angry. The day of the interview I was in a very bad mood and took it out on a whole group and it was an insensitive and angry remark and I apologize to all who were offended.”

  Ten days later, he retracted the retraction, telling the Post’s Page Six that he’d been pressured to apologize by Abbeville Press, which was about to publish Kostabi: The Early Years. “They’re scared to death. They made me write all these phony apologies,” he told Page Six, adding that he still thought the art world was dominated by homosexuals and “that’s why there’s so much bad art in the world.”

  When Art Positive, an offshoot of ACT UP, organized in the summer of ’89 to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts, Kostabi had been the flashpoint.

  “Art What Thou Eat” originated at the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College, where it opened under the radar in September 1990. (David either didn’t know about it, or didn’t know Kostabi was included.) Bill Dobbs, an activist with Art Positive, took note of the show’s imminent arrival at the New-York Historical Society when an announcement ran with a photo of a Kostabi painting. Dobbs organized an opening-night protest with picketers from Art Positive as well as Queer Nation and ACT UP. David called Dobbs the day of the opening to say he would try to pull his piece, Tuna—one of the supermarket posters. He wasn’t sure he could, since he no longer owned it. Gracie Mansion did. But she agreed to David’s request, and the Historical Society museum director took Tuna off the wall during the opening.

  That night, Kostabi left a long message on David’s answering machine. The core of it was this: “I just wanted to clarify matters and let you know that I’m not the person who I suspect you think that I am, and if you are specifically thinking about that quote in Vanity Fair, that was part of a performance art piece and the quote was actually a quote of what other people were saying. I was not quoting my feelings but things that I’ve heard other people say and it was used out of context, and I explained this about two years ago when it happened. And most of the people, like people at GLAAD and in the gay community—we talked it over and I had pretty much come to an understanding with everyone and I made numerous apologies. Apparently some people are still under the impression that I’m a ‘quote’ homophobe, or whatever, and I’m sure that will never die down with some people. And I sympathize with their and I presume your anger and I understand that. But I just wanted you to hear from me that that’s not the case, that I am exactly the opposite of what you think.”

  Linda Weintraub, director of the Blum Art Institute and curator of the show, had Tuna rehung after the opening. She told a reporter that she had sympathy for David but that “his absence would have compromised the entire show.” In fact, the Historical Society had used Tuna as the press photo when they sent out the publicity. The final absurdity here was the way the catalog described Tuna, as “a comic-like portrait of Superman.” The figure painted on the supermarket tuna ad is clearly an outlaw in a green shirt, tying a red bandanna over his face. A small inset in that portrait shows a gun held by someone in a green shirt blowing the head off someone in a blue shirt.

  In January, Weintraub sent David a letter: “I am anxious for you to know that the events that took place at the opening of the ‘Art What Thou Eat’ exhibition have not altered my regard for your work nor my respect for you as a spokesperson for your cause. My insistence that your work remain in the show is based on admiration.” She went on to offer him a chance to speak in a public forum at Bard on issues like “the rights of artists to control the sale, exhibition, and reproduction of their works of art after they leave the studio.”

  “Art What Thou Eat” was up at the New-York Historical Society until March 22. On February 8, the museum director again removed Tuna, this time without consulting Weintraub.

  On February 1, 1991, “Tongues of Flame” opened in Philadelphia at the Tyler School of Art’s Temple Gallery. Wendy Olsoff drove David there to do a reading, similar to what he’d done in Normal, with video running on several monitors.

  “I have the worst sense of direction, but I thought, ‘I’ll just get us to Philly.’ I didn’t even have a map,” Olsoff said. “So David and I are talking on and on about dreams, about life, about death—and smoking so much there must have been smoke coming out the roof. And suddenly I realize we’re forty minutes past Philadelphia. I was going, ‘Oh my god, we have to find the school,’ and I realized, he did not care. I’ve thought about it since. For him, it was about the journey, the traveling. So I was in a panic and he was not in a panic, and he was not going to help navigate the route at all. I leaned out the window and got directions, and we were significantly late.

  “There was a massive crowd waiting for him, because he was a legend at this point. So they had all the monitors set up and the microphones, and David starts getting really angry because the equipment wasn’t set up right. Everyone was a little scared of David. But they got it together, and once he started performing, everyone seemed to stop breathing. He had total control. I remember feeling bad, because he gave so much in the performance, and he was really sick.”

  Early in February, David got a letter inviting him to appear in a Gap ad, for television, to be shot by Matthew Rolston. If he agreed, he would, talk on camera about an issue of importance to him. “The Gap will be encouraging subjects to use this important media access to affect positive social change,” said the invitation. Among the others the company had approached were Martin Scorsese, Philip Glass, Spalding Gray, and I. M. Pei. The print campaign included Miles Davis, Spike Lee, and Joni Mitchell. The Gap would pay scale, which many subjects donated to charity. He would wear his own clothes plus one Gap item.

  David walked over to the Schneider-Erdman Lab to tell Gary and John.

  Erdman remembered asking him, “Are you going to do it?”

  And he remembered David’s reply: “Are you kidding? That’s a sellout. That’s so commercial.”

  David also received a letter that month from Amy Scholder in San Francisco, proposing that he do an artists’ book for a new imprint she was editing. Though she was still at City Lights, Scholder had taken on this project with Artspace, whose director, Anne Marie MacDonald, wanted to begin publishing books that paired a visual artist with a writer. They would be the same size and shape as the Golden Books for children. David would be first in the series, providing both words and visuals.

  Scholder also invited him to participate in Out/Write, a gay and lesbian writers conference in San Francisco at the end of February 1991. He would be part of a panel titled “AIDS and the Social Function of Art.” To that end, he jotted a list of ideas in his journal: “disease on two legs,” “self-protective cliques even in the activist community,” “the need to have fantasies that don’t acknowledge AIDS issues,” and more. But he elaborated on only one of the points he wanted to make: “I’m not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of wha
t I’ve witnessed or experienced. Writing and rewriting until one achieves a literary form, a strict form, just bleeds the life from an experience. How do we talk, how do we think, not in novellas or paragraphs but in associations, in sometimes disjointed currents.” On February 24, he flew to San Francisco for the conference.

  He did some journal writing there, none of it about Out/Write. He was too preoccupied with his depression: Two entries, “Guy on Polk Street” and “Kid on Market Street,” evoke the monologues of old, but David never spoke to those two for their stories, only noted their apparent suffering and their potentially imminent deaths.

  Soon after his return to New York a week later, David received a four-page letter from a young writer he’d met at the conference. It began: “Dear David Wojnarowicz, First off, I want to tell you I think you’re one of the very few people in the world I could fall deeply in love with.” The young man said he now dreamt of David, felt he’d always known him, and spelled out an elaborate sexual fantasy about him. Though he was currently living with Dennis Cooper, he thought that relationship was over. He didn’t want to tell Cooper, however. He thought that, first, he and David should “just see what happens.”

  David didn’t respond for almost two weeks. Then he wrote:

  I haven’t answered right away because I’ve been pretty ill and also needed to think about your letter. I was feeling pretty sick at the conference and it got worse on the plane home. Your letter really surprised me. I mean, you don’t really know me at all and it’s a pretty intense letter to receive from someone I don’t know at all either. I don’t know what I represent to you but I really have none of the feelings you describe as having towards me.… The stuff you say about your relationship, I mean—that’s all normal stuff. The intensity at first is always wild because you can fill a person up with all associations and projections and myths and desires and when they and you reveal the subtle stuff underneath, it all becomes kind of mundane or “normal” and the intensity shifts. You need to accept that it is always like that and just put your energy into the subtle stuff and real communication; your fears, your desires, whatever. You should be exploring that with Dennis, otherwise you end up just repeating it over and over and over.… If you knew me at all, you would see that I really don’t want a love affair with anyone at this point in my life. I have a relationship that I’ve been involved with and all the issues you raise about yourself are things I’m dealing with with this guy. I remember when I had crushes on people in the past and the idea of it exhausts me. I’m dealing with all this illness around me and the illness I go through for periods of time so that things like love or stuff like that are issues that I don’t have the energy or desire to go through. Like I said, the guy I’m involved with to an extent is where I would put that energy if I wanted an intense relationship. Right now I actually prefer to be on my own for long periods so I can think and deal with issues like my past and my mortality.

  Also, he couldn’t see going behind Cooper’s back. “I just don’t move that way.” He urged the young writer to work things out with Cooper.

  He’d been selected again for the Whitney Biennial, this time with The Sex Series, He Kept Following Me, and When I Put My Hands on Your Body—the skeleton piece.

  He sketched out an idea for a new painting. It would be like Something from Sleep II, with the figure drawn on maps dreaming at the bottom, but this time there would be even more things dangling over the bed—all David’s signature images, like the burning man, the worker carrying a deer, the burning house, the dung beetles, the locomotive, gears, nude men washing. He labeled it Dictionary of Good-Byes.

  David would never make another painting, but wanted to finish what he could. In March, he and Ben Neill spent a few days in a Brooklyn studio recording ITSOFOMO with a fifteen-hundred-dollar grant from Art Matters. The cover would use a detail from Fear of Evolution, the monkey pulling a globe in a wheelbarrow.

  His activity gets harder to track here. Most of the journal entries from the beginning of 1991 are undated. One says: “ ‘Like a marble rolling down a hill’—something heard on TV.” David had this fatalism about him. His doctor thought that part of him wanted to keep fighting but part of him was resigned to dying. In another journal passage, David wrote down one of the politically correct tropes of that time: “AIDS is not about death. It is about people living with AIDS.” His pronouncement on that: “Bullshit.… I demand that we don’t slip into denial about Death as an aspect of AIDS.”

  Seven Miles a Second, 1993. Ink on paper. Title page (p. 39) of the third section of the graphic novel by David Wojnarowicz, James Romberger, and Marguerite Van Cook. This drawing is an accurate representation of David at home.

  He visited his friend Phil Zwickler in the hospital. Since Zwickler was asleep much of the time, David drew a picture of him hooked up to an IV with a caption: “He had dementia. One time he woke up laughing. What’s funny, I asked. He mumbled: the story in the paper. I picked up a newspaper from the floor. On page 2 the headline said: WOMAN TRIES TO STOP FIGHT BETWEEN TWO 5000 POUND ELEPHANTS. No that’s not it, he said, and fell asleep.”

  David was like a turtle pulled into his shell. He observed but mostly kept people at bay. Even as he wrote and drew to bear witness to the epidemic, he faced, once again, the core issue in his life: How much could he reveal about himself? He found it difficult to communicate what he was feeling even to those closest to him, like Tom. Someone had arranged for David to see a doctor in Boston for some experimental treatment, and Tom kept asking, “Do you want me to go with you?” Tom was more than willing to do that, but David always said no and wouldn’t even say when he was going. Then on April 8, he called Tom at work. Tom took his call, as he always did, though he was in the middle of a meeting with several state officials. David said to him, “I’m leaving for Boston in an hour.” Tom was shocked—and angry—and he couldn’t stop his meeting to have a conversation, so he said, “Good luck.”

  David then wrote in his journal that he’d called “a friend”—Tom—who’d responded as if David was going “for an overnight vacation.” He added, “I’m speechless.” David stayed in Boston just the one night. The drug reaction lasted forty-eight hours. It made him nauseated and wobbly. He had a new pain beneath his rib cage, right hand side. But there was more than physical discomfort now. His fear of rejection and his refusal to let anyone comfort him was making him very miserable. “My eyes hurt when I cry so I can’t even fucking let it out,” he wrote in the journal.

  He decided against continuing with the experimental treatment. He began to have unexplained fevers, night sweats, profound weakness. He was getting to that point where he could give all his T-cells names. But then he would rouse himself. He was very determined to finish a couple of projects, like the artists book he titled Memories That Smell like Gasoline.

  The book would be one last act of transgression. He was thinking about sex, the mystery and power of it, the adventures he’d had. The visual element in Memories That Smell like Gasoline would be his black and gray watercolors of sexual encounters set in porn theaters—delicate renditions of hard-core scenes—along with ink drawings that illustrated moments from his own sexual history. He included the drawing made at Zwickler’s bedside. The four stories were all about anonymous sex—the sweet pleasures of cruising but also the dangers. There’s a constant sense in these texts of at least latent violence, which sometimes turns real and potentially deadly.

  The title story is about the night he was in the lobby of a movie theater and suddenly saw a man who’d raped him when he was a teenager. David had been on one of those jaunts out of the city that he used to take from Port Authority, riding a bus into New Jersey to some body of water where he’d walk in fully clothed and float, then hitch a ride back. A man in a pickup truck stopped for him, drove to a remote location, overpowered him, fucked him. David remembered that to endure the rape he had tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine that the guy was sexy or gentle. David thought he might die that night,
and when he saw the man at the theater, he shrank in his own mind to boyhood-size and went and hid in a bathroom stall.

  He had been a victim of sexual violence and now he was facing death from a sexually transmitted disease—yet for David, holding on to sex was a way of holding on to life, and he was trying to understand the contradictions.

  He wrote about sex in the pre-AIDS world—like the time he hooked up with a truck driver while he was on the road. He also included the story, from the 1980 journal, about the night he met a deaf and mute man who followed him into the West Fourth Street subway station and, on the empty mezzanine between the Eighth Avenue and Sixth Avenue lines, began to simultaneously blow him and rob him. David escaped and ran to the lower platform, where he just managed to leap into an F train as the doors closed, and then found himself surrounded by sleeping winos.

  He wanted to analyze what he’d seen in this guy and in the other violent, unpredictable men he sometimes found himself attracted to. “It’s something about violence as a distancing tool to break down the organized world. It’s the weird freedom in his failure to recognize the manufactured code of rules. The violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security; I’m attracted to living like that,” he wrote in this piece, titled “Doing Time in a Disposable Body.” David had never been violent with anyone, yet he radiated that impulse in his frightening rages. He knew so much now about how he used his anger in order to survive. Increasingly he had found aesthetic solutions to his early experiences with violence. That was a way to be set free.

  The concluding story here, “Spiral,” is the last piece David ever wrote. Much of it is about AIDS, hospital visits to the latest dying friend, his reaction to some porn palace where no one’s using a condom, and, at the end, a poetic evocation of fading away: “I am growing tired. I am waving to you from here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out like pieces of clear ice. I am signaling that the volume of all this is too high. I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.”