In the history of modern homosexuality, 1873 was a foundational year. The aestheticist thinker Walter Pater published Studies in the History of the Renaissance, read for its latent sexual program almost as much as for its explicit aesthetic one. Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon was arrested on charges of attempted sodomy and charged with gross indecency over twenty years before Oscar Wilde would face similar charges. And the multivalently queer, eighteen-year old French poet Arthur Rimbaud published A Season in Hell, in which the speaker declaims in the first poem, “I laid myself down in the mud. I dried myself in the air of crime. I played sly tricks on madness.” So speaks the gleefully damned, the poet who would inspire a series of photographs by gay artist David Wojnarowicz beginning a century later in 1978.
David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York at the Leslie-Lohman Museum includes a small drawn profile, likely a self-portrait (ca. 1979–83). A hatched halo encircles the figure’s head and a cigarette dangles from his lips; the drawing is labelled “Thug Saint” in the artist’s scrawl. On the whole, Arthur Rimbaud in New York seems like an effort to bring a “thug saint” into being, if not in the autobiographical personage of Wojnarowicz, then by his assuming the alter ego of the nineteenth-century deviant poet. Perhaps neither Rimbaud nor Wojnarowicz is the thug saint himself but, if the latter artist’s work is effective in the merge of the two, the saint might make an apparition.
Wojnarowicz’s series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” (1978–79), began as a single photographic illustration published in The Soho Weekly News alongside an article about burgeoning heroin use, then exhibited at P·P·O·W in 1990, before a portfolio of forty-four pictures was finalized in 2004, plus thirty-two test prints. In all of these, we see a man in a range of settings wearing a mask of Arthur Rimbaud over his face. Other photographs external to the portfolio, such as Untitled (James Dean Tattoo, Beauburg, France) (1980) are also on view and further demonstrate Wojnarowicz’s general interest in the displacement and replacement of faces. Here, the anonymous back of a face-down figure is inked with the well-known and well-worn face of James Dean, as if everything that is worth knowing about the man can be conveyed by an image of celebrity tattooed on his back, a replacement for his face.
The effacement that the mask of Rimbaud effects raises a host of questions: What does it mean to masquerade? Is it an act of cowardice, or a product of the closet? Does it enable a kind of truthfulness otherwise unavailable? One might recall Oscar Wilde’s aphorism, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”
Wojnarowicz gives us no easy answer to these questions, but generally speaking, the photographs thwart revelation as the Rimbaud mask is combined with other means of self-annihilation. In one, the masked man stands with faceless graffiti depicting a person shooting up what is presumably heroin. This graffitied body has a question mark for a face, and as I photographed this image for my own study, my own face, reflected in the glass of the frame, replaced the vacancy. In another image, the masked man sits in a diner, a dessert case of pies beside him. One can’t help but imagine the pie in his face, thrown by a disgusted viewer, adding a creamy, sweet layer to his obliteration. Several photographs demonstrate magisterial use of chiaroscuro, another means by which revelation and concealment are held in tension. One can see the exchange between Wojnarowicz and his contemporary, Peter Hujar. Wojnarowicz first met the artist in 1980, and Hujar’s portraits of Wojnarowicz, his friend and sometime lover, have been called Caravaggio-esque. Notably, other persons occasionally populate the pictures, rendered faceless not by masking but by the anonymity that their identity confers. I was particularly struck by one photograph of a worker in the meatpacking plant, next to the hanging cow, a figure from a different kind of underworld than that occupied by Rimbaud or Solomon or Wojnarowicz.
One series of images characterized by exposure is the “Danceteria Polaroids” from 1980, thirty-six polaroid prints taken in the style of mug shots. Various queer luminaries, including Keith Haring and Wojnarowicz himself are among the subjects. The mug shot as a genre on one hand seems so straightforward; here are the criminals, clearly identified and identifiable. But early criminal photography, led by, among others, the eugenicist Francis Galton in the 1870s, famously created composites of criminal types by layering photographic images, allowing generic faces to emerge, indicating certain forms of criminality writ large. The criminal (the prostitute, the petty thief, etc.) becomes more than the contents of a single face, and the single face becomes more than an index of an individual.
The tenor and meaning of Wojnarowicz’s work changed over time, particularly in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, as it took on a moral seriousness. Rimbaud writes, “What an old maid, I am getting to be, lacking the courage to be in love with death!” While mourning the cause, we can be grateful that Wojnarowicz, too, lacked this nihilistic courage, notably in a work such as Untitled (One Day this Kid…) from 1990, in which a childhood portrait of the artist was layered on text narrating the child’s increasing pathologization, torture, and eventual abandonment by the state “when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.” The stakes shifted: the mask can no longer reveal but only efface, and it must be left in the closet from which it emerged. In the era of AIDS, the thug saint becomes the gay prophet or, woefully, the gay martyr.