Film Review: Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker

Wojnarowicz: F--K You F-ggot F--cker 

Artist David Wojnarowicz’s works were chaotic, like his life. So it seems fitting that Director Chris McKim’s head-spinning documentary about him isn’t a flowing piece, but rather filmed in jumps and starts.

Wojnarowicz became a force in the New York City art scene of the 1980s despite (or perhaps partly because of) the battering he took from his father in New Jersey.

His mother moved with David and his siblings to Hell’s Kitchen when David was 11. The boy showed early interest in art and graduated from the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan.

David was gay and not into pretty pictures; his works were unapologetically personal, often shocking, sometimes militaristic and, frankly, thought strange.

“I tried hard to be normal and accepted,” he says. “It was largely a waste of time.”

David met photographer Peter Hujar in the ’60s, and they became best friends.

Filmmaker McKim tells the story from the artist’s perspective, assisted by photographs, paintings and journals that Wojnarowicz wrote and recorded over the years. The result is a documentary that fascinates even as it shocks with its title: “Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker.”

“All my paintings are diaries,” he says. Not surprisingly, he didn’t have much use for convention or rules. 

Wojnarowicz had some trouble selling his art to galleries, and consequently spent some time looking for places to display it. Most of the art at the time was located in SoHo, but the “anti-establishment” art was centered in the East Village, where Wojnarowicz lived. 

Gallery space was rare. One day he walked past a huge abandoned warehouse on the Hudson River, near the piers he knew as a gay cruising ground. Inside he found what he and his fellow artists had been seeking: space, the size of two football fields. He passed the word. They moved in on the sly and set up gallery and workshop spaces. That lasted until the cops came and tore the place down, but meanwhile Wojnarowicz had sold some art. He was even shown in a Whitney biennial exhibition.

This is a big thing to most artists, but Wojnarowicz was by then angry about the business of art. “The gallery system is one of the big obstacles to art,” he says. “Who owns it and where it’s shown, what’s that got to do with art? People are doing art that looks like art. It’s a product.”

Speaking of product, Robert Mnuchin (father of Trump’s Treasury appointee) and his wife Adriana commissioned a basement piece which turned out to be made of bug-infested trash.

Then the Reagan ’80s and the AIDS crisis arrived. Meanwhile Wojnarowicz and Hujar started taking illegal drugs – first ecstasy, then heroin – and David got a new boyfriend in Tom Rauffenbart. Life turns out badly for all of them, and in 1992 David is the last of the three AIDS victims to die. 

In a last salute he might have loved and hated in equal proportions, the Whitney did a retrospective of David’s work in 2018. The title of the show: “History Keeps Me Awake At Night.”

Thanks to Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's World of Wonder stable (whose documentary division has been a major source of queer culture commentary), who produced this film. 

 

"Wojnarowicz: F--k You F-ggot F—ker" opens March 19 at the Digital Gym.