David Wojnarowicz, The Death of American Spirituality, 1987. Mixed media on plywood. Collection of John Carlin and Renée Dossick.
David Wojnarowicz’s life experiences—his early history of abuse, hustling, and drugs; his euphoric queerness; and his and his friends’ fatal struggles with AIDS—furnish the conditions of his artistic production. Identifying with the communities from the decrepit piers and underground East Village sites that he frequented, Wojnarowicz found in the personal and the social weapons to attack the dominant paradigms of a nation in the throes of the culture wars. Like much of his oeuvre, both of the works included here merge imagery from pop culture, history, and dreams to assemble distinctive narratives and historical allegories. The resulting surreal compositions point to and demand accountability from cultural conventions and egregious political actors—like American notions of “progress” and the participants in the Iran-Contra affair—in a chronicle of the wreckage of contemporary American society.
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