This outdoor screening program launches a citywide celebration, initiated by the David Wojnarowicz Foundation, commemorating what would have been the visionary artist’s 70th birthday. The screening interweaves significant film works by David Wojnarowicz—including A Fire in My Belly, Work in Progress, which has continued to ignite critical debates in the four decades since its making—with a selection of his memorable screen roles, archival rarities, and contemporary works that engage with the artist’s legacy. These films tap into the Downtown scene and the streets that served as a crucial backdrop to art-making, activism, friendship, desire, and community alike in 1980s New York—a milieu that is currently the focus of the MoMA collection gallery In the Shadow of the American Dream.
The program also celebrates Wojnarowicz’s incisive approach to lens-based art, which is distinguished by the inspired re-editing and citation that spans the artist’s filmography and echoes with his alternately playful, militant, and tender photographic practice. Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud in New York series, in which the artist photographed himself and friends wearing a mask of the 19th-century French poet in sites across the city, will be shown as a projected slideshow. This presentation of Wojnarowicz’s photographic series formatted as a slideshow was first conceived and screened by the artist, curator, and writer Ian White (1971–2013) as part of a pair of experimental Wojnarowicz screenings White organized for the 2002 London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival at the British Film Institute. White wrote at the time, “This seminal photographic series, first published in SoHo News, 1980, is plotted like a storyboard for an absent film (D.W.’s journals contain drafts of of shot-lists) and shows a man wearing a crude mask of the nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet Rimbaud’s face at various locations across the city in a complicated and astonishing collapse of romantic and reality, fantasy and biography.”
David Wojnarowicz. Arthur Rimbaud in New York. 1978–79. Slideshow, approx. 7 min. Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
Stray Dogs (from Manhattan Love Suicides). 1985. USA. Directed by Richard Kern. With David Wojnarowicz, Montana Hewson, Bill Rice. 10 min.
A Fire in My Belly, Work in Progress. 1986–87. USA. Directed by David Wojnarowicz. In two parts; 13 min. and 7 min.
Listen to This. 1992. USA. Directed by Tom Rubnitz. With David Wojnarowicz. 15 min.
Magic Box Slideshow. 2005–15. USA. Directed by Matt Wolf. 4 min. Courtesy the artist
ITSOFOMO [monoband version]. 1989. USA. Directed by David Wojnarowicz, Ben Neill. 23 min. Courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
Program approx. 77 min.