TEACHING FEVER: THE ART OF DAVID
WOJNAROWICZ, AND COMMENTS ON THE OCCASION OF MY FORTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY
PROFESSOR BOB NOWLAN
English 160, Section 002, Introduction to Texts
Spring 2002, UWEC, Professor Bob Nowlan
Introduction to Discussion, Fever: the Art of David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz’s art provides
a fitting culmination as well as a useful complication to the key concepts
we have addressed together this semester.
First, Wojnarowicz works across
a diverse range of textual media: painting, photography, literature, autobiography,
journalism, criticism, pen and ink drawing, sculpture, musical recording
and performance, video and film, theatre, and much more. He furthermore
extensively combines linguistic with non- (or extra-) linguistic phenomena
in complex, bold, and densely allusive collages and dramatic productions,
exploring the power and limits of human expression and communication, especially
at moments of heightened sensitivity and intensity.
Second, Wojnarowicz forcefully
defamiliarizes the familiar “pre-invented world” from the often shocking,
deliberately disturbing vantage point of the excluded, denigrated, and abject
“other” – who resides “inside” as well as “outside” the “world of the neatly
clipped lawn.” Wojnarowicz strives continually to make us see, hear,
and feel what we so often only dimly perceive yet do not extensively register,
reflect upon, or seek actually to understand and engage. In
particular, he forces us to contront the intrinsic, systematic, brutal violence
at the center of our contemporary late capitalist society, and its attendant
mass (pre-fabricated, pseudo-“popular”) culture. Wojnarowicz shows
us the consequences of this routine immersion in violence upon not only
those directly victimized – literally as well as figuratively beaten and
killed – by it, but also upon all the rest of us as well, as we live alienated
from and desensitized toward own own as well each others’ most passionately
felt needs, desires, hopes, and fears.
Third, Wojnarowicz critiques
the often extremely pernicious ways the metaphoricity of everyday life,
at least as mass manufactured and mass marketed by the mass culture industry,
pervades our contemporary social and cultural existence. Shaping our
thoughts, feelings, beliefs, actions, and behavior toward ourselves and
each other, especially toward others who are “different” from ourselves,
so that we lose our capacity to care, to empathize, to relate to each other
with genuine passion and enthusiasm, we neither project nor follow the freedom
of our imagination. We resign ourselves to accept the way things are
as the way they simply must be (even as the way they always have been and
always will be, as well as the best of all conceivable possible worlds).
We reject the possibility of fundamental transformation and substantial progress
that might allow for a profusion of richly individual diversity within a social
framework of substantial collective solidarity and deeply and sincerely loving
fellow feeling. Wojnarowicz challenges us to fight back against
ideological indoctrination into lives of at best “quiet desperation” –
isolated, insulated, complacent, jaded, passive, indifferent, callous, cynical,
frightened, and despairing. Beyond this, Wojnarowicz constantly
pushes the words and the images he employs beyond their customary, conventional,
comfortable denotative and connotative associations, creating a lyrical representation
of that which appears to exceed, even to transcend, the possibility
of adequate expression, as well as that which most of us so often cannot
or will not recognize, acknowledge, formulate, or communicate because
of how painfully vulnerable even the initial, fumbling attempt at this kind
of honesty tends to leave us. Wojnarowicz subjects the socialized
and acculturated defense mechanisms we use to protect ourselves from vulnerability
– before ourselves and each other – to a process of ruthless deconstruction.
In short, Wojnarowicz’s art engages the metaphoricity of signification head-on,
seeking quite overtly to intervene within, against, and beyond the ways our
dominant culture teaches us to make sense through implied comparisons, analogies,
transfers of association, parables, fables, and other tales of supposed moral
“truth” (especially “truth” proclaimed as absolutely, universally binding
upon all people, of all kinds, in all places and at all times).
Fourth, Wojnarowicz’s art embraces
an extensive array of intertextualities: it draws from discourses of mass
culture, of market exchange, of conservative as well as radical modes of
politics and morality, of a wide variety of religions and modes of spirituality,
of patriotic forms of official history as well as accounts from the most vigorous
opponents of this dominant line, of the euphemistically dehumanizing rhetoric
of war and domestic violence, of (post)modern avant-garde visual and performance
art, of classical and neo-classical styles of portrait and nature photography,
of zoosemiosis, of (post)-punk music and culture, of Euro-American gay “outlaw”
urban sexual subcultures as well as other marginalized populations living
on the edge of the late 20th century transnational megalopolis, and of (post)modern
experimental stream-of-consciousness as well as picaresque forms of anti-epical
(and anti-epochal) “travel literature” – to name just a few of the raw ingredients
that enter into Wojnarowicz’s art. Wojnarowicz never absorbs
these diverse sources like a simple sponge, merely capturing, combining,
and then conveying (draining back) what he is thereby able (temporarily)
to bring together: Wojnarowicz always acts upon these sources to transform
– that is to “rewrite” – them, usually quite extensively, and always in the
interest of advancing his own sharply articulated critical artistic and political
agenda. Wojnarowicz’s art cannot be reduced to the sheer sum
of the constituents that feed into its formation. He hardly just
“displays” (or even simply “makes visible”) the intertextuality of his art
but rather comments sharply upon this intertexuality (and this is a commentary
that always extends considerably beyond merely “problematizing” his juxtapositions).
Wojnarowicz takes a position in relation to the intertextuality of his compositions,
working to advance a quite precise argument in relation to the confrontations
these inscribe.
Finally, David Wojnarowicz lived
the life of an artist who strove consistently to make a difference through
his art, to fuse radical art and radical politics in a way that could not
easily be ignored and that compelled (even hostile) attention and response.
Wojnarowicz’s work undoubtedly remains (for many) quite disturbing, and likely
a number of you will find it, at least initially, even more unsettling than
you did Wisconsin Death Trip or
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You
. However, I believe this represents one of the reasons why it is important
for us to study Fever
. This book contributes toward the enrichment of our experience
of a genuine multicultural diversity – where we look beyond the trivial
commonalities and commoditized superficial appearances that render it all
too easy today to “celebrate diversity” without really knowing or caring
all that much about anything, or anyone, who does come from a substantially
different background, experience, or outlook. What’s more,
Fever represents lived experience from a margin
of our contemporary society and culture in a way that deliberately presses
the limits of what is, at present, readily intelligible – let alone readily
acceptable – as artistic expression, communication, and representation.
This work thereby continues what many leading theorists, coming from a wide
array of different theoretical perspectives, have long claimed (in fact
have done so throughout the recorded history of artistic theory and criticism)
to be one of the most significant dimensions of art’s contribution to human
knowledge and understanding, indeed to human culture and civilization, especially
when art achieves the status of the truly “great,” when art exercises its
greatest power. This contribution involves the provocation of thought
and the stimulation of feeling by means of the representation of the unrepresentable,
the defamiliarization of the familiar, and the shocking, disturbing, challenging
and transgressing of normative assumptions and expectations.
David Wojnarowicz’s art continues
to grow in influence, and resonance, ten years past his death despite the
fact his art maintains a passionately explicit connection with the specific
time(s) and place(s) in which he created it. Wojnarowicz represents
a rare artist who addresses both the most urgently crucial concerns of his
immediate time and place as well as those that continue to extend far beyond,
and to do so with an equivalent force and rigor. As we discuss
his work, we should therefore discuss both what it speaks to about the time
and place within which it initially emerged as well as what it speaks to
about our time and place. The latter necessitates inquiring into the
extent to which where we are at, here and now, remains continuous with, develops
out of, as well as spirals both away from and back toward the kind of individual
lived experience, and the kind of felt representation of the conditions of
his social and cultural existence, that Wojnarowicz so fiercely transcribes
and transmits to us.
I will conclude this introduction
by quoting from the obituary statement I wrote about David Wojnarowicz for
publication in the October 1992 edition of The Alternative
Orange, the alternative campus publication at
Syracuse University for which I served as a member of the editorial collective
from 1991-1994. My comrades asked me to write this piece; I felt
honored, yet humbled, to do so. By the time he died Wojnarowicz
exercised considerable notoriety and extraordinary appeal throughout many
of the circles (political, artistic, intellectual, subcultural) within which
I experienced and expressed my own sense of personal identity; he represented
a sensational, passionate force that we all greatly respected (even if we
did not always entirely agree with him). Here’s what I wrote, and what
we printed:
David Wojnarowicz,
radical artist, writer, and activist, died of complications from Aquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome this past July. Wojnarowicz was one of the
most powerfully insightful and influentially challenging artistic commentators
upon the cultural politics of the AIDS epidemic in the United States.
Wojnarowicz refused to be silent; he spoke out and acted up militantly, defiantly,
and eloquently – both in and beyond his art – against the indifference,
greed, hypocrisy, and brutality of U.S. government sanctioned repression
of gay men, lesbians, and people living with HIV and AIDS. Wojnarowicz
refused to give way to the genocidal thrust of New Right moralization about
‘abormal’, ‘improper’, and ‘unnatural’ ‘lifestyles’ and ‘values’. Wojnarowicz
fought Jesse Helms and Donald Wildmon and all others who tried to turn the
epidemic of AIDS into an excuse to justify increased persecution of those
already marginalized by racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism and homophobia.
His example encourages us to fight on without compromise – with rage, defiance,
passion, and commitment – against the New Right, the New Right state, and
the capitalist interests the New Right ideologists legitimate and the New
Right state protects and defends. The cover of this issue reproduces
Wojnarowicz’s A Formal Portrait of Culture.
The caption Wojnarowicz appended beneath this work reads as follows:
“I kill people in my head endlessly, certain politicians, religious leaders
or people I feel are killing me on a daily basis. I believe in violence
as self-protection; I have fantasies of violence as revenge and I don’t
feel uncomfortable with those fantasies.” Nor should we feel uncomfortable
fighting back, by any means necessary, against those who use their control
of the power of legal violence every day to maintain oppression and exploitation,
and dehumanization and destruction.
By natural inclination a peaceful
person who sought to love, protect, and appreciate life in all of its diverse
beauty (as well as one who certainly knew the ravages of physical and emotional
violence quite intimately), Wojnarowicz still reached the point where he
was willing, publicly, here as well as elsewhere, to make it clear there comes
a point when the violence of oppression becomes so overwhelmingly devastating,
and every other means of appeal, grievance, and redress have been exhausted,
that the oppressed maintain the moral right to fight back against their oppression
in order to secure their emancipation. This epitomizes the kind of
challenge Wojnarowicz continues to represent to us today, and I believe it
is likely one reason why diverse groups of past students of mine have repeatedly
told me that the one text, or set of texts, they would most recommend that
I use again, among those we engaged with in class over the course of their
semester working with me, come from David Wojnarowicz. Even when these
students found themselves deeply troubled by – and at times, certainly, strenuously
opposed to – much of what Wojnarowicz proposes in his work, they still felt,
and I am glad of it, that the opportunity to engage with this challenge
proved vitally important. I hope you will find this likewise to be
the case.
English 160, Section 001, Introduction to Texts
Spring 2002, UWEC, Professor Bob Nowlan
Comments, May 6, 2002
Today is my forty-first birthday.
As I reflect on this fact it seems to me that for most of my adult life –
for close to twenty years now – I have been engaged in dealing, virtually
continuously, with what it means to live as an openly gay man in our contemporary
American society.
In retrospect, I can certainly
confidently assert that my gayness represents not only one of the most fundamental
but also one of the most fundamentally positive dimensions of my identity
and my experience, of whom I am and of whom I strive to be. As
I indicated in my speech last October at the National Coming Out Day rally
here on the UWEC campus mall,
For me, declaring
myself to be gay means declaring that I actively identify with the fight
to overcome oppressively unequal forms of intimate and affectional relations,
and to create a new mode of human social organization founded upon genuinely
mutually enabling, and substantially equal forms of intimate and affectional
relations. For me, following the inspirational path of revolutionary
gay liberation, the word "gay" continues to represent, most importantly,
a social and political identity, a vantage point, that is, from which I seek
to intervene against the anti-democratic, unfree, unequal, and unjust configuration
of existing power relations in our society. Gayness, as I have
come to conceive of it, represents a commitment, furthermore, to feel who
I am through my interdeterminate interconnection with others, and to transcend
the solipsistic limits of an insular, alienated individuality.
For me, gayness is not a single, fixed, static thing; my declaration that
I am gay does not therefore mean I simply announce that I have found, rock-solid
deep within me, some innately essential, "true homosexual self."
I am gay: this means, instead, that I am committed to a practice and a process
of becoming in relation to others, toward making myself vulnerable to and
trusting of others, toward reaching out and connecting with others, toward
tangibly grasping and passionately feeling the inescapable otherness of who
I am and that makes up what I call "myself."
At the same time, I still find that reading
and discussing Fever: the Art of David Wojnarowicz
can be quite difficult (as well as inspirational), conjuring intense,
vivid memories that cause me to reexperience considerable physical as well
as emotional pain. Ultimately, however, this resurgent pain only reinforces
my conviction that it remains necessary publicly to speak, and to write,
about what I have experienced, as well as to continue to occupy the lonely
position as one of the relatively few people in the time and at the place
where I am at to address these kinds of experiences openly, frankly, and forthrightly.
From as early as I can remember
I conceived it to be my responsibility as a human being to contribute as
best I can (in whatever little way I could) toward making the world a better
place and, in particular, toward helping fight to reduce the suffering of
the oppressed and toward transforming the conditions that give rise to the
persistence of oppression. By the time I completed high school I maintained
extensive activist experience and already directly affiliated myself with
a democratic socialist politics. Yet I have never felt readily comfortable
working on my own behalf, organizing to act in relation to my own oppression:
given the particular conflux of factors structuring my temperament, I would
much rather not focus on my own situation. But the circumstances of
my life repeatedly necessitate that I struggle past this discomfort.
And so I will now do so here once again because I, like David Wojnarowicz,
agree that silence can mean death – literal as well as figurative – and that
breaking the silence requires testifying, and bearing witness, to injustice.
Growing up as I did, as a
progressive, and in fact radical, leftist, I arrived at the conclusion, relatively
unusually early in my life, that I could not, and would not, lend even tacit
support to the ferocity routinely directed at homosexuality, and at gay
and lesbian people, or at people even simply perceived to be “gay-like”
or “lesbian-like.” This conclusion resulted from considerable soul-searching
on my part. Still, peer pressure rendered anything other than
open hostility highly suspect, and I certainly suffered the consequences
of refusing to go along with hatred. Yet I did not conceive of myself
as gay at the time, not at all. In fact, my girlfriend and I both felt
like we, as straight people, needed to stand up for gays and lesbians, even
if we only personally knew a quite limited few who were out to us.
One might regard this as courageous behavior, and perhaps it was, but it
did not prepare me for how I responded when I fell in love with my best friend,
a man, while gradually coming to recognize that my feelings for him meant
that I was gay.
Despite my progressive convictions,
and despite my willingness actively to press past “tolerance” or “acceptance”
toward engaging in active public support for gays and lesbians, I felt terrible
when I began to recognize that I myself was gay. This recognition traumatized
me for months; I feared and hated myself, and I feared and hated the fear
and hatred I felt. I kept thinking ‘why did this happen to me’?
‘what did I do to deserve this’? It took me quite awhile, along with
the loving support of a few great friends, including the straight man with
whom I had fallen in love, to help me through this initial torturous period.
From that point, however, I decided I must be open about my gayness everywhere,
as far as I possibly can, because the cultural forces that made even someone
as progressive and supportive as I was experience such intense self-loathing
in fact need to be directly combated. I recognized that the self-loathing
I experienced represented the internalization of a horrific extent, as well
as intensity, of fear and hatred generated by forces outside of me.
I recognized that living in our world could, and often did, feel this way
for many, if not most, gay and lesbian people – and that nothing justifies
subjecting us to this kind of assault, not to mention the more concretely
material forms of assault we routinely confront in the form of harassment,
discrimination, and violence.
Living openly as a gay man
proved hard to do. I already have told you a few tales of some of
what I encountered in teaching as an openly gay man. Suffice it to
say that I could easily fill a lengthy book with descriptions of similar
– and in many cases far worse – instances of antagonism. Unfortunately,
moreover, I do not find that everything always steadily improves, and that
today’s educational institutional as well as larger cultural environment
proves simply far less homophobic, or heterosexist, than was the case in
the recent past. Much of today’s antagonism does, yes, seem subtler,
more indirect, and, perhaps, more passive-aggressive, yet not all: in particular,
cruel varieties of ignorance and callous forms of indifference often appear
just as widespread as ever. In the U.S. today, working-class and poor
glbt (gay-lesbian-bisexual-and-transgender) people suffer the brunt of the
harshest effects of continuing, as well as new, forms of homophobia and heterosexism,
while middle, and especially upper, class glbt people find greater shelter
to protect ourselves. I am fortunate to work a job that few openly
gay people could possibly have hoped to acquire and maintain just a few short
years ago, and to do this at a university and in a state that officially
proscribe discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. What’s
more, I find in this environment that straight along with glbt people
are willing, and able, at least to some small degree, to talk about glbt
issues relatively freely and easily, as well as to accept glbt people as
human beings of equal worth.
Still, much more yet needs
to be done. Last fall, in discussing a film that centered around the
subsequent ramifications of a brutal anti-gay hate crime, my English 110
students' responses appalled me. They treated the victims as if
they were sick and strange, even so “beyond the pale” of the “normal”
that what happened to these victims didn’t matter, or represented simply
what “people like that” should expect, even deserve. Some students
ventured as far as to laugh at this representation of brutal, vicious murder
as bizarrely amusing, comparing it to what some of them had encountered in
minor tussles with friends or acquaintances back in high school – i.e., "so
what if your lover is executed on the street right in front of you while
you are forced to watch, just pick up your life and move on, stop whining
about things that don’t really matter." I talked with these students
about the “reality” of anti-gay hate crimes that this fictional film quite
accurately, and perceptively, represented, but this did not seem to make
much impact with a disturbingly significant number of them. I then
talked with my friend, Joel Pace, after class for quite a long time about
this reaction, because it shook me up, even more than much of the direct
and more personally hateful antagonism I had previously faced over the years
from homophobic and heterosexist students, and because I despaired that here
we were, in the fall of 2001, still seeming yet to make a dent in this kind
of mindset. Joel reminded me that the response these students manifested
might, however, very well indicate just how struck these students were by
what we screened and discussed, as well as how newly challenging and disturbing
facing up to this was for many of them. In short, he assured me that
what I was doing most likely did make a difference – i.e., a necessary, positive
difference – and that, ironically enough, the way these students responded,
as well as the way they made me feel, proved this.
Our conversation reminded
me of one I conducted by phone with one of my long-time closest friends,
living in Los Angeles, late in my first semester teaching here at UWEC.
At that time I burst into tears as I tried to share with my friend how overwhelmed
I felt at yet again carrying out my day–to-day interactions on the job and
in the community as virtually the only openly gay person immediately around.
Rob replied by retracing for me what I had managed to struggle through previous
to that fall in living as an openly gay man, as well as through working actively,
publicly on behalf of gay issues as well as in the service of many other
unpopular interests and causes. And it was worth retracing simply to
show me what I could do, and what I had done, when it proved necessary, and
when it seemed, as often has been the case, that if I didn’t do it no one
else would. So I regathered my strength and I persisted.
But let me tell you, I want
the day to come when no one will need any more to have to do this.
I do believe that day will come. I aim to contribute what I can toward
the realization of this goal. I hope you too will agree with me that
this represents a worthwhile goal, and that even in some small way you might
contribute as well (as small, for instance, as telling others that you find
using “gay” as a synonym for “stupid,” which seems unfortunately quite common
around this campus, to be offensive).
Yes, I have known people
who died, and horribly so, from AIDS. Yes, I have known people who
have faced violent harassment and discrimination – on the job, in school,
and at a host of other private as well as public places – entirely on account
of their (minority) sexual orientation or gender identification. I have
known people who have been physically attacked, as well as scarred or maimed
for life, even killed, because they were gay. I have known people who
have been severely psychologically traumatized to the point that they could
not carry out everyday functions sufficient to insure their survival – all
as a result of the harassment, discrimination, prejudice, and violence they
faced on the account of the fact that they were gay. I have known people
who have lived in virtually constant fear of anyone finding out about their
homosexuality, and who have expended vast amounts of energy to hide this
from the world – even, frequently enough, from themselves as well. I
have known people who have been fired, as well as not hired or rehired, because
they were gay. I have known people who have been kicked out of their
family homes, or disowned by their families, because they were gay.
I have known people who became alcoholics, drug addicts, and criminals to
compensate for the extreme alienation they felt as a result of the fact that
they were gay. I have known people who have been kicked out of apartments
and houses, as well as denied rental leases and mortgage contracts, simply
because they were gay. I have known people who were frequently dogged
and even arrested by the cops because they were gay, and not because they
had done anything that broke the law. I have known people who went
without medical treatment because the doctors, and nurses, who had previously
treated them made them feel extremely uncomfortable with their gayness.
I have known people not invited to family get-togethers or other pivotally
important social events (among the most familiar and central rites of passage
in “ordinary” American lives), to which they otherwise would routinely have
been invited, simply because they were gay. I have known people who
lost all right of contact with their lovers once their lovers grew sick (and
required hospitalization or hospice care), and who lost all the property they
had shared with their lovers once their lovers died, simply because they
were gay.
I could go on and on and
on with the above list. But I will just conclude by indicating that,
yes, some of this has happened to me. People ask me, and I am willing
to tell them – and you – that, yes, I have been fired for being gay, I have
not been hired and also not rehired because I was gay, I have been physically
attacked because I was gay, and I received regular, weekly threats of death
and dismemberment for six straight months because I was gay.
I can’t easily forget any of these things, or the far worse things that have
happened to many others I have known and, in many cases, with whom I have
been close. I hope therefore you will appreciate the serious reasons
why I have written these comments for you, as well as why I firmly believe
we should not hide from confronting gay issues in higher education, and why
I continue to believe in being open about who I am and where I am coming
from as a gay man, both in dealing with these (gay) issues and all other issues
(my gayness permeates my being; I cannot compartmentalize it) that we address
in the course of our work together.
Bob Nowlan
May 6, 2002
This material is copyrighted (©)
Professor Bob Nowlan
Last Update: June 22, 2002