Carlo McCormick on David Wojnarowicz’s
Fuck You Faggot Fucker

 

Carlo McCormick is a New-York based art critic and curator who has authored numerous catalogues and artist monographs. He was a friend and collaborator of David Wojnarowicz.

 

We leave it to the marketplace to assess the value of art, but regarding the evolution of this work by David Wojnarowicz, what it meant to be an artist in 1984, and the ways art would go forward in the increasingly contested cultural landscape that would follow, Fuck You Faggot Fucker is of immeasurable historical significance. A portrait of love and desire in a socio-political paradigm of hate and fear, here Wojnarowicz articulates his abiding artistic concerns for the survival and struggle of the socially marginalized as a narrative of liberation sung against the shackles of oppression. It is timeless as all great art can be, but that it is so timely still is a sad testimony that still rings with the artist’s clarion critique of the cultural and political conditions that allow for the dehumanization of “other.” 

"Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom."
—David Wojnarowicz

Acquired directly from a solo exhibition Wojnarowicz mounted in 1984 at Civilian Warfare, the first gallery to offer the artist sustained representation, Fuck You Faggot Fucker (hereafter abbreviated to FYFF) remains a landmark in the artist’s oeuvre. It was featured in his major posthumous 2018-2019 survey History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid). As disquieting and incendiary today as it was 38 years ago, in no small part for its confrontational title, this major painting counterpoises the utopian networks of community forged in the abiding abandonment that characterized New York City after the fiscal crisis a decade earlier against the prevailing forces of misunderstanding and violence that directly threatened the practical and idealistic dimensions of these alternate, ad hoc and temporal societies. Full of life, it presages a sense of doom, inherent if not immanent, an embrace and tenderness cast adrift from the body politic in a psychologically isolating miasma of inky waters. It proffers the homoerotic as limned by the homophobic. 

 

 

Taking its disturbing title from the inscription on a crude homophobic cartoon Wojnarowicz found, the unmistakable implication in this context is the constant threat that young homosexual men faced from the deranged predatory violence of fag-bashing, or what would only after a shamefully long time be properly called hate crime. Not merely adopting this abuse as a caption for this anonymous drama however, the artist actually includes the original cartoon into the collage composition of the work itself, allowing it as a found object within the fabric of his own imagistic tapestry. 

 

Collage, a visual strategy of incorporation and disruption that is frequently manifest in the art of Wojnarowicz, works here in a dual function; on the one hand as a kind of evidence, or witness, that his scavenging of the disused and derelict could uncover, and on the other as a mode of inversion through appropriation whereby disenfranchised communities sought to reposition the dominant language of their oppressors into a public vernacular of pride. Positioned at a crucial moment when the coded behaviors and expressions of homosexuality briefly gave way to a new queer identity that, in many ways inspired by the provocations of Punk, emerged from closeted innuendo into an aggressive style of defiance, it is as if the old school of West Village gay hegemonies were collapsing under the rage and rebellion of an East Village secession in which Wojnarowicz would become one of its most identifiable proponents.

 

Considering the wide array of different elements Wojnarowicz includes in his imagistic maelstrom— with painted passages of dreamlike expanse and erasure, photographs and varying found elements including maps—there is much in the way he structures his storytelling that remarks on the then first rising tendencies of Postmodernism. In this manner Wojnarowicz is not wholly dissimilar to many of his generation who chose to eschew the modernist imperative of radical invention, or novelty, in favor of assembling preexisting signs towards a more disjunctive and idiosyncratic reading. David however was no more interested in the critical distance and inquiries of Postmodernism than he was in the ironies and pictorial collisions of Pop Art, which his work was similarly (and wrongly) compared with at the time. He clearly understood history—philosophically as well as viscerally—to be a doubtful inheritance, a disorienting and ultimately afflictive cultural construct that undermined individuality and subjugated autonomy. The stories he chooses to tell then—and FYFF is contiguous in its explorations of the margins with the monologues that make up his seminal book The Waterfront Journals (written between 1978-1980 and published in 1996)—act as an intervention against the dominant narrative by articulating the voices and lives systematically silenced, untold, ignored or discounted by history writ large.

 

 

Essential to FYFF, as it is to all of Wojnarowicz’s creative output as a writer, filmmaker and visual artist, is the urgent imperative of the highly personal, a way of investing his own interiority into the bigger story, to make his deftly sociological perspective explicitly personal. The artist’s hand re-imagines the world through the power of magical thinking, assaulting the factuality of maps, which he would cut-up and collage in many of his most significant works, and inserting himself in ways both anecdotal and metaphorical into his depiction of the world at large. Fascinated by maps, the itinerant wanderer perpetually dreaming of distant lands and foreign encounters, Wojnarowicz was distrusting and resentful towards them—in particular the political maps he uses here which after all ignore the topography of the land or the many lives that inhabit it in favor of demarking governmental dominion—shredding their authority and subverting their semiotics as entirely devoid of representing or understanding the unruly presence of everyday experience, humanity or individuality contained therein. So too, the two photographs he suspends around the central motif of the kissing figures (one of which is serially reproduced in three corners of the painting) emphasize the personal stakes involved for him. 

 

 

Both of the photos included in this irrational landscape of the senses featured friends who he had collaborated with on his now legendary Rimbaud in New York series (1978-1979). One is replicated three times, picturing his old high school friend John Hall (also the subject of Wojnarowicz’s searing Genet Masturbating motif) along with Wojnarowicz himself, both nude and given to hostage-like abandon befitting the abjection of their surroundings—in this case, the abandoned Christodora settlement house on Avenue B in the East Village. The other, shot along the Hudson piers, features Brian Butterick, a former lover, longtime muse and fellow bandmate in the experimental rock group 3 Teens Kill 4, as a spear-skewered St. Sebastian. To merely note the strong personal content of these images belies the larger project of Wojnarowicz’s art, where the decaying ruins of a post-industrial city become the allegorical and physical spaces of self-exploration, and where the autobiographical and mythic are mutually enfolded in one another to relate a new anatomy within the social body where alienation and loneliness converge upon the possibilities of community. Created in the twilight of a soon vanished world where urban renewal would eradicate these lives on the edge just as AIDS (to which the artist would himself succumb in just eight years) metastasized from a worrisome anomaly into a full-fledged plague, Fuck You Faggot Fucker talks to us today as the testimony of a creative vitality and communal resistance in the face of a pathological indifference and neglect.