ITS THE BURNING EARTH
ALL THIS STUFF LIFE IS MADE OF - Arthur K
While rehearsing my lines to ask for access to his archive, I learned that David Wojnarowicz’s journals are all itemized and digitized. Anyone can view them on the open-access website. Within the vault are audio recordings, phone logs, biographical materials, videos and films, photography, paintings, objects and artifacts, an alphabetized list of his personal library. Everything is described, though not everything is accompanied by a scan or photograph. Objects and artifacts are divided into three subseries: general, personal items, and the most compelling - subseries B: The “Magic Box.”
The Magic Box is a pine-wood fruit carton with the words Indian River Citrus Groves adorned by a painted orange grove and a white piece of masking tape with the words MAGIC BOX written in sharpie in his hand. The box holds fifty-nine small objects. Among them are plastic bugs, a cloth snake, a small painted animal skull. A toy dog head attached to a horn, a toy watch with a velvet strap and wooden face. Two tiny globes, one that is also a pencil sharpener. Crosses and figurines of saints. Materials that outlast flesh: plastic, ceramic, cloth and bone. He kept it under his bed. His partner said that he never spoke of its function or significance.1
David is dead, his apartment is someone else’s, but his magic box is preserved, all objects in the exact position that they were left. Experts have affixed call-numbers and itemized descriptions to each potent thing.
How do you begin to catalog the inner magic of a mind?
Who is empowered to search within it?
I am reading David’s scanned journals, looking at his sketches of ideas for memorial works for his friend, lover and mentor, Peter Hujar. Wondering if I will ever have the focus and capacity for this level of love, respect and commemoration. Friends die and time passes too quickly. More friends die and it feels impossible to carve out the space to make what their memory deserves.
I feel affinity with David’s style of journal-keeping, his barrage of ideas and notes, taken every day.
Since the economy of the 1980s, not much has changed. The rich are richer. Life is cheaper, living is more expensive. Christians still say we are coming for their children. Glitching discharged soldiers kill homeless men on crowded subways.
David Wojnarowicz Papers, MSS.092. New York University, New York, U.S.A.
Between feelings of futility and rage, we ride a bike over a bridge, eat at a diner with a lover, lurk by the train tracks, work in nightlife, go to the museum, eat fruit in bed.
David was preoccupied, David was distraught, but he still had time to make his work. He did not make everything he sketched out, but he made a lot of it. David loved his people. David had lovers and mentors. Older men who cared about his mind and his work and his world. Men he met in the dark. Not at school, not online.
I feel there is something intrinsically dislodged in our generation.
How corrupted are we by our thirst for acknowledgment, for the consumption of others? What true connection lies beyond those surface mechanisms? David writes of his distaste then - for the social-climbers, the art dealers, the subtly-masked phobias of curators, the people who could not understand what he was trying to say. Always an element of this city, center of capital. But I feel that even those of us who attempt to live outside it, on our own logic, are becoming more contrived. More subsumed by the constant gaze of our peers, the marketing of our inner worlds, the totalizing conquest of media.
a constant hum in the background.
I feel close to his work and his words. The feeling that they speak directly to me is a feeling shared with countless other queer millenials, hyper-aware of the void left by the AIDS epidemic, grasping for affinity with the remains of those who stayed our age forever. Until we run head-long into the glass that protects their memory - saves it for collectors, keeps it out of our hands. $500 zines in locked displays, skied above eye level at the world’s leading non-profit organization dedicated to the dissemination, understanding and appreciation of artists’ books. Glancing at the hired security. Separated by the mechanisms of value, severed and multiplied by time.
I search for a copy of YOUR HOUSE IS MINE, 1993 artist book of street propaganda against the gentrification of the Lower East Side. A battle waged valiantly and lost. David is in it, though he died the year before. We need this now – more than ever - but the objects’ value has outgrown its use. Preserved in university libraries and special collections, for sale to institutions and the independently wealthy (inquire for price), but not there to easily reference in a space of our own. The one place I can think of has been a hole in the ground for the last 6 years. 2 I curse the fragmenting of generations, the manipulations of the city.
I envy my friends who came of age in the early 2000s, who didn’t have to move every year, who certainly lost friends to overdoses and suicides, but few enough to have time to paint murals for them, plan festivals, plant trees. A time between plagues. Something began to unravel when the towers fell. When the smartphone emerged, when the rents tripled, when synthetic opiates replaced Afghan poppy fields. 3 The sharpest rise in drug-related deaths spiking fifteen years after the “war on terror” began. The graph maps the loss of dozens of acquaintances and friends.
The 1980s and 1990s people probably felt this way about the 1960s and 1970s people. (Reading Diane DiPrima’s memoirs, she barely trusted anyone who got to New York after the 50s.) That theirs was a time of abundance and experimentation, before AIDS. When the Revolution really seemed like it could happen, the threats of the courts hollow. The prison walls permeable. Before planned shrinkage, before the fires, before mass incarceration. Before the punishment for the momentum of the people.
New York was getting unlivably expensive even in the 80s and 90s; a gulf felt between rent-stabilized holdouts of the earlier undergrounds and those squatting and fighting for the park. But there has been brutality in every era. Betrayal, confusion, self-interested collaborations with enemies. Those who lived it then warn us not to idolize the failures of their youth, yet looking back, I still feel envy. We are always too late for something; we are always struggling for the recognition of those who came before us.
each era separated by glass.
I try and remember that the impossible never is – we must be the ones who do what the old guard said it was too late for. One day, when we are them, I will try and remember how I feel now. That the crafting of History moves slower than life. We are living the life now that will become the precious document of a later age.
(may some of us live well and long enough to set the record straight, preserve our archives, recognize our descendants)
They say you can’t live this way in New York City anymore, there’s no more space/time for artists. There are still empty floors of city-owned buildings with trees growing through their elevator shafts, but who has the time to hang out in there all day, painting dragons and portraits of Rimbaud?
We are always working – even those of us who tried to find a way out find ourselves drawn into other all- consuming grinds, spurred on by the sleeplessness of our surroundings, the normalization of our burnt-out nerves.
One way I see artists try to recover this space/time is by moving to bombed-out cities, where time moves slowly and space is cheap. To once-Black cities, to cities shaped by the northern and western pull of southern labor, by deindustrialization. Or defined by catastrophe. When I was a teen, it was New Orleans after Katrina, it was Oakland after the 2008 recession. It was blocks of warehouses in Baltimore. Then it was Detroit. Now I hear the same people say they look for this space/time in Mexico City. I’ve heard it feels like Oakland in 2010, like New Orleans in limbo. It’s not just “digital nomads,” those who need a fast internet connection and a simple, open space, who are coming to these cities and shaping them to their demands. It’s also those searching in vain for “the real” – the magic – the grime – the space/time. Th exchange rate that winds you back to a different decades’ cost of living. It’s the romanticization of New York in the eighties. It’s the surrealists digging at the flea-market in Paris in the 1920s, recasting a site of lower-class exchange into a site of novelty and discovery. It’s a mixed-up pile, part fortune-telling, part search for self, part rejection of privilege, part its oblivious embrace.
David spoke into a tape recorder as he drove alone across Aztlán, the desert of the so-called American Southwest. David saw a Native man at a rest-stop and thought he looked like a museum diorama. David was self-conscious of his ignorance. Driving across the desert, listening to Fast Car by Tracy Chapman in its aching perfection. How Peter wil never hear this song. Talking about riding a bicycle on the fringes of Mexico City, in the late 1980s, just after the earthquake. Feeling that this level of abject poverty was the future of New York. The micro-center of the rich and the endless suburban terrain of the poor, with no one in-between. As he
is having this thought, a child playing in the street speaks to him. Where is he from? What is he doing? Calling David a rich man, because he can afford to travel around. The child is right, of course regardless of how he manages to live in New York. Despite what comes from his hands, his mind, his hatred for the divide, his anguish at America, his precarity, he cannot escape the first mark of his presence here.
is having this thought, a child playing in the street speaks to him. Where is he from? What is he doing? Calling David a rich man, because he can afford to travel around. The child is right, of course regardless of how he manages to live in New York. Despite what comes from his hands, his mind, his hatred for the divide, his anguish at America, his precarity, he cannot escape the first mark of his presence here.
We are sunburnt and returning from the tianguis that we have dubbed “the trash market,” where orderly booths of bootleg sportswear and household tools fray into dusty mountains of single shoes and decay-proof objects, a clogged filter of over-consumption. Kate bought a Tracy Chapman cassette tape there and we have been listening to it in the kitchen in the mornings. Anjelica, who can’t stop listening to punk even when she tries, tells me its too sad. For once, I’m alone in the living room of Omar’s house in Agricola Oriental, an eastern neighborhood as implied in its name, south of the airport, far from tourist ideas of the center, but well within the city’s border with the state. I have been riding Corona’s feather-light track bike alone around the city, occasionally past its border. Aware of myself as a stranger. I cue the tape journal, ripped to limited-edition vinyl and then to Youtube. (did he ever expect this to be consumed?) Not realizing he would tell me about Mexico, riding bikes, or listening to Tracy Chapman, but it is not the first time I have experienced a coincidence like this.
for a moment, my line with the dead is strong.
for a moment, my line with the dead is strong.
David went to Mexico in 1986, during the season of the dead. He started to make a film from things he saw, in Mexico, a little in Puerto Rico, mixed with things he made in his apartment in New York based on feelings he had in those places. David flirted with the threshold of voyeurism. Tipping into it more than once. I try and imagine an impossibly tall white man with a super8 camera leaning out an upper-story window, towards two men with legs amputated at the thigh crossing the street. Architecture amplifying their distance.
Zooming in on two chickens destroying each other. Children breathing fire for a penny. David’s obsession with violence. Gasoline, locomotives, and death. White tourists filming Aztec pyramids. David is them but he is also something else.
He doesn’t finish the film, because he dies. It’s preserved, endlessly discussed, presented, censored, defended. Most commonly interpreted as a symbol of AIDS - AIDS in (U.S.) America, in New York City, not as a work about Mexico.
Is Mexico merely material harvested and spun into the value of Northern concerns?
What does it mean to be from the U.S.A. (only one of many Americas), examining your own mortality
through images of Mexico?
Fire ants.
Coatlique, mother-god of moon and stars, with fangs and skirt of snakes, jewelry of human hearts, severed hands and skulls. Her discovery so alarming that the archeologists buried her again, for a time.
Nota roja. 4
Amputation. 5
Is this self-examination even what he is trying to do? Or what he is perpetually boiled down to, filtered through U.S. projections of single issues, individual concerns? The assumption that a Person With Aids can only make art about AIDS, that everything is a metaphor for their personal fears.
Here was a person who hated America, who saw his disease and its horrific wasting of worlds as the latest weapon in centuries of organized genocide. Inextricable from the violent absurdity of the carved-up Earth.
His anger is personal because its courses through his atomized body, but his anger is collective, disrespecting the boundaries imposed on the body:
the family, the nation
property, life reduced to someone else’s time.
It is the anger of the too-soon dead.
It is the pressure of all these lives pulsing at the
fragile barrier membrane of one man’s wasting body,
the pressure about to burst.
An element like the air; it stirs in us too –
us who were born too late, in the age of the last pandemía
as David and countless others were preparing to leave.
Raised in the shadow of absent towers, of euphemistic wars,
of ever-newer strategies of the same pre-invented death.
Both of us with the luxury to leave one anthill for another
flying above them, sensing their limits
searching for a momentary wealth of time
digging for a sign.
Mexico City/New York City, Spring 2023
1 I carry around magic boxes, too. My own and those of other people, who lose their housing more often. Will our treasures scatter, or will they be examined in some careful future? Will our lives be given meaning, our work assigned value? Will the examiners get it right, or attach significance in the wrong places? With this concern in mind, I burn my expired papers on New Years and birthdays. I promised a friend I would help her type her journals, we would make it into a book, and I would draw the cover. She died while I was in Mexico, victim of Eric Adams’ involuntary psych incarceration. HIV+, discharged from the public hospital that had already postponed a life-extending surgery months earlier with no explanation. The same hospital where Sha-Asia Wilson died in childbirth in 2020, prompting protests of medical apartheid. The landlords change the locks before the court approves the eviction, throw out everything inside. I asked in vain for friends and neighbors to look for orange composition notebooks in the trash. We fail in our promises. Precarity trumps the archive, another life and its singular story rots.
2 http://www.abcnorio.org/newbuilding.php
On a recent trip to the abc no rio zine library (infact not a hole in the ground, but available to visit by appointment in its exiled location at the Clemente Center) I learned that they once had a copy of YOUR HOUSE IS MINE but auctioned it for thousands of dollars as part of a fundraiser. My next stop is the 42nd Street Public Library.
3 Pardo, Bryce, Jirka Taylor, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Beau Kilmer, Peter Reuter, and Bradley D. Stein, The Future of Fentanyl and Other Synthetic Opioids. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3117.html.
Rowlat, Justin. How the US military's opium war in Afghanistan was lost. April 25, 2019. BBC News.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47861444/
4 Iconic and inescapable tabloids of crime and gore.
5 Even in the 2020s, I am shocked by how many more people have amputated limbs
in Mexico compared to the U.S.
References
“Admitting me to an almost forbidden world of sudden parallels, petrifying coincidences, and reflexes particular to each individuals of harmonies struck as though on the piano, flashes of lights that would
make you see, really see.” - André Breton on fleamarket shopping as barometer of the subconscious in Nadja, 1928.
David Wojnarowicz Papers, MSS.092. New York University, New York, U.S.A.
http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/fales/mss_092/# https://artistarchives.hosting.nyu.edu/DavidWojnarowicz/KnowledgeBase/index.php/
Tyburczy, Jennifer. Queer Acts of Recovery and Uncovering: Deciphering Mexico through Archival Ephemera in David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly. Text and Performance Quarterly. Vol. 35, No. 1 January 2015, pp. 4-23. Routledge.
Various Artists, YOUR HOUSE IS MINE. 1993. Bullet Space, New York, USA.
https://booklyn.org/catalog/your-house-is-mine/
http://bulletspace.org/site/projects/your-house-is-mine/
Wojnarowicz, David. In the Shadow of Forward Motion. New York, 1989. P.P.O.W.
Wojnarowicz, David. Tape Journals, Cross Country 1, February – March 1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWG2jUWUMBY&;t=9s
Arthur K lives in New York City and tends to currents of autonomy, collectivity and experimentation in an increasingly hostile environment. They make a personal zine called ROT. rotradio.tumblr.com