Poignant Art in Times of Panic

Today with all the news headlines are of crashing stock markets and shutting markets, uncertainty (and insensitivity) in political leadership and a contagious, possibly terminal, epidemic on the loose, we can look to the arts for humor, brevity, distraction or focus. Artists ideate and imagine. Ideation is the process of pulling forth solutions to a question. The role of the artist is to imagine- and that means to give form to an image, movement, or sound as a solution.

I am reminded of an artist who was able to alter a simple iconic image and make it resonate as the voice of the disenfranchised. In his best images he combined rage and tenderness. David Wojnarowicz, (1954-1992), was an American artist at the peak of his career in the 1980’s. Working under the slashing (and insensitive) government of President Reagan and amidst the scorched-earth Aids body count. He turned personal confessional expressions into powerful political activism. Wojnarowicz suffered a life of childhood abuse, homelessness, teenage prostitution, and by the time he was a young adult he was losing his friends to the Aids crisis. His art famously clashed with forces of censorship and repression. He called out, with his art serving as a social critique, the political mythmakers such as Jesse Helms and the conservative Christian’s who would insist that condoms and safe sex not be talked about in schools. Wojnarowicz most famous work, Untitled, 1988-89 is a platinum print photograph taken as a section of a natural history diorama. It is of the American buffalo jumping, one after the other, over a cliff. The image is beautifully developed and hauntingly cropped. It symbolized the hopelessness people felt within the medical crisis looking at government policies. His image brilliantly spoke to the marginalized, from the Native Americans (the diorama story) to the Aids victims.This was seen not only as the swan song of the poor, sick and politically invisible, but as the prediction for our society as a whole if we continued without a change of heart.

Untitled by Wojnarowicz

When a friend apologized for making art that was less than political, that focused on beauty, Wojnarowicz replied, “…these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”

self portrait by Peter Wojnarowicz

 I'm thankful for Wojnarowicz and artists like him that do the dirty work, remind us of death, and of what is valuable (and worth fighting for) about life.