Marion Scemama. Relax Be Cruel. 1983/2023. Item Duration: 40 min.

“I always did it for myself and my friends.”

Marion Scemama

The way the photographer and filmmaker Marion Scemama tells it, she arrived in New York City planning to stay for three months, and instead stayed for five years. Scemama moved there in 1981, following a decade of work as a photojournalist at leftist newspapers in Paris. In the summer of 1983 she began frequenting Pier 34—an abandoned shipping terminal on the Hudson River battered by years of water and wind. It was a popular gay cruising spot by the time artists David Wojnorowicz and Mike Bidlo began inviting artists from the East Village scene to create art freely (if illegally) in the cavernous space. They transformed the building into an anti-commercial, makeshift gallery filled with anonymously painted murals and installations by artists like Kiki Smith, Rob Jones, and Wojnorowicz himself, who dubbed it “the real MoMA.”1

Enthralled by the decay, sex, and anonymous art she encountered there, Scemama began work on a narrative film set on the pier, casting nonactors she met throughout many nights spent at East Village spots like the Pyramid Club. Working with French cinematographer Maryse Alberti (who filmed Dottie Gets Spanked and Poison), they filmed Relax Be Cruel on gritty 16mm, black-and-white film to capture the stark shadows and light of the space she had studied for months. The film centers on a punk girl who spends the summer squatting at the pier, caught in its mysterious allure of creation and destruction. The city demolished Pier 34 in 1984, and it wasn’t until 2020 that Scemama returned to the footage, at last crafting a narrative about the long-gone site.

Six months after filming Relax Be Cruel, Marion met David Wojnarowicz while on assignment for the French magazine ICI New York. The brief meeting led to daily breakfasts that stretched for hours, during which they talked about politics and their dreams. Wojnarowicz saw Scemama before she could see herself: “David was the first person who said to me, ‘but you’re an artist.’ This guy…changed everything about how I considered myself.”2 Soon they were collaborating. Working behind the camera lens, Scemama helped bring Wojnarowicz’s photographic projects to light. They created a show poster for an exhibition at the East Village gallery Civilian Warfare, and created a lithograph for Between C & D literary magazine. He incorporated her photographs into mixed-media paintings for gallery shows at Gracie Mansion and Tim Greathouse Gallery.

But by the end of 1985 the two had fallen out. Scemama returned to Paris, where she resumed life in leftist circles and began curating photography exhibitions. They reconnected when Scemama returned to New York three years later, beginning a new chapter of their relationship. They spent a summer in upstate New York, experimenting daily with a video camera and watching the rushes each night. By then, Wojnarowicz had been diagnosed with HIV. Reflecting on their video collaborations, Scemama recalled: “I had this camera that wasn’t just an object but an extension of David’s mind through my eyes and my arm…a way of pushing away the growing feeling of death surrounding us.”3 Many of these intimate video pieces went unseen until the mid-2010s, when Scemama returned to a sprawling four-hour interview she filmed between Wojnarowicz and cultural theorist Sylvere Lotringer. From this and other video recordings, she crafted the feature-length documentary Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: a Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1989–1991, released in 2018.

In the summer of 1991 Wojnarowicz and Scemama embarked on what would be his last road trip. They drove west across the United States, stopping in New Mexico to create a photograph Wojnarowicz had sketched in his mind: Untitled (Face in Dirt). In the close-up image Scemama captured Wojnarowicz’s face nearly covered in coarse desert dirt, as if he’s being swallowed by the earth. She recalled: “I realized he was giving me what he wouldn’t be able to give me later: he had made me a witness to his death.”4 He died one year later from AIDS-related illness. The image they created was their final collaboration, and Wojnarowicz’s last photograph.

In 1994 Scemama curated the first exhibition in France about the AIDS crisis, La Vie, l’Amour, la Mort, at the Galeries Photo Fnac. It would take a few more decades for Scemama’s own work from this period to take center stage: exhibitions at New Galerie in Paris have showcased her vast body of photography and video work from this time, revealing a portrait of a lost time, a profound friendship, and the artist herself.

Brittany Shaw, independent scholar, 2024

Note: Opening quote is from the full MoMA Audio transcript for the interview held with Scemama on January 10, 2024.

  1. Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (New York, Bloomsbury, 2012), 225

  2. ibid., 270

  3. Sylvère Lotringer, David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side. Interviews by Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), 133

  4. ibid., 140

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