Impulse to Action

Saturday, July 27, 2024

Two Bad Boy Artists (Enfants Terribles)

I wear a button on my shoulder bag strap with the face of a man that was used as a mask. People ask: "Who is that?"

It's Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), a French poet and all around bad boy. He's been much loved by artists including David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992). In 1979, David created a mask from a photograph of Arthur and photographed friends wearing that mask at various New York landmarks and in personal spaces (at Coney Island, on the subway, at the piers, jerking off, shooting up, ...).

In 2018, David, then dead 26 years, was celebrated with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night), now welcomed into the art canon, a radical accepted in the mainstream. As a souvenir of the exhibition, they created a pin of the Rimbaud mask. There were additional exhibitions at PPOW Gallery and NYU Fales Library.

Larry Wolf,
Enfants Terribles
(2024)

Both men have a place in my heart and many books on the shelves in my home. Both defined themselves as artists early in their lives, raised hell in their youth and made a different kind of trouble later (Arthur as coffee merchant and arms dealer in Aden, David as an AIDS activist). Both had older artists as lovers (Paul Verlaine and Peter Hujar, respectively). Both died young.

After years of questions and months of thinking about what I wanted to say, I made this accordion-fold zine.

Enfantes Terribles

Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - 1891)

David Wojnarowicz (1954 - 1992)

Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles - a side (2024)

Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles - b side (2024)

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz at ACT UP FDA demonstration
Rockville, Maryland, October 11, 1988.
Photo by Bill Dobbs

I don't know when I first learned of David Wojnarowicz; it seems he's always been a part of my life.

Certainly by the 1990s, when he was one of the artists attacked for their upfront homosexuality. He aggressively, and successfully, fought back. Sometimes the reward was symbolic - a favorable court decision and a $1 payment (Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association, 745 F. Supp. 130 (S.D.N.Y. 1990)

Or perhaps in 1988, his jacket emblazoned with "IF I DIE OF AIDS - FORGET BURIAL - JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE FDA"?

It could have been earlier, in the 1970s or 80s, when I, as a twenty-something, was finding photographers who inspired me (Duane Michals, Arthur Tress, Peter Hujar). I might have come across David and his work then. The earliest books I have weren't published until the 1990s; I already knew about him when they were acquired.

There's so much more I could (and will eventually say) about David. The David Wojnarowicz Foundation website is rich with information and images.

Arthur Rimbaud

Photo: Etienne Carjat,
Arthur Rimbaud (1871)

Arthur's arrival in Paris in 1871 at 17 was a big deal among some of the established poets who paid for his train ticket to Paris. He was taken under the wing of Paul Verlaine (or perhaps Arthur took the lead in that relationship). During that first year, Arthur was photographed by Etienne Carjat.

My zine includes the beginning and ending of one of Arthur's many poems. This translation is by Wyatt Mason (2002).

STOLEN HEART

My sad heart drools on deck,
A heart splattered with chaw:
A target for bowls of soup,
My sad heart drools on deck:
Soldiers jeer and guffaw.
My sad heart drools on deck,
A heart splattered with chaw!

Ithyphallic and soldierly,

Their jeers have soiled me!
Painted on the tiller
Ithyphallic and soldierly.
Abracadabric seas,
Cleanse my heart of this disease.
Ithyphallic and soldierly,
Their jeers have soiled me!

When they've shot their wads,
How will my stolen heart react?
Bacchic fits and bacchic starts
When they've shot their wads:
I'll retch to see my heart
Trampled by these clods.
What will my stolen heart do
When they've shot their wads?

May 1871

[The Modern Library

Arthur Rimbaud - Rimbaud Complete

Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Wyatt Mason, 2002

page 55]

Ernest Pignon-Ernest

In 1978, Paris was covered with wheatpasted images of Arthur Rimbaud by the artist Ernest Pignon-Ernest, based on the Carjat photograph. David Wojnarowicz arrived in Paris that fall. David's journals from 1979 include sketches of Arthur, labeled as studies. It is certainly possible that David's Rimbaud in New York series was inspired by Pignon-Ernest's work.

I only recently learned of Pignon-Ernest's work from Benjamin Ivry's very gay positive biography of Arthur Rimbaud in a wonderfully named chapter, Hauntings: From 1892 to Today. I'm definitely haunted by Arthur.

Rimbaud in New York

"Returning to New York in 1979 after an extended stay with his sister in Paris, Wojnarowicz decided to visualize Rimbaud's autobiographical writings in terms of his own biography in the American metropolis. With access to copying equipment, he enlarged the cover image of the New Directions paperback edition of Rimbaud's Illuminations to create a life-size mask of the poet. The photo is used in 1979 to make the mask David Wojnarowicz would use in his Rimbaud in New York series.

... Wojnarowicz staged photographs of several friends--Brian Butterick, Jean-Pierre Delage, and John Hall--wearing the mask in places important to his own story: the subway, Times Square and the x-rated theaters around Forty-Second Street, Coney Island, all-night diners, the Hudson River piers, and the loading docks in the Meatpacking District. Several of these enigmatic images appeared in alternative publications at the time ..."

[David Breslin and David W. Kiehl
David Wojnarowicz - History Keeps Me Awake at Night
(Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018)]

The project was featured in the Soho Weekly News in June of 1980.

David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud in New York
(Soho Weekly News, Vol 7, No 38, June 18-24, 1980)
in Dear Jean Pierre, Primary Information (2023)

ACT UP Protest Font

Larry Wolf, Enfants Terribles -
front and back cover (2024)

The title page of the zine uses the ACT UP Protest Font created by Be Oakley of GenderFail. They make fonts from protest signs, re-animating the original protest in a form that can be used in new work, as here with this zine.

GenderFail, ACT UP Protest Font - Upper Case

GenderFail, ACT UP Protest Font - lower case

Some Books

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz, Rimbaud in New York 1978-1979 (PPP Editions, 2004) Worldcat

David Wojnarowicz, In the Shadow of the American Dream, The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (Grove Press, 1999) Worldcat

Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly, the life and times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsberry, 2012/2013) Worldcat

David Breslin and David W. Kiehl, David Wojnarowicz - History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018) Worldcat

Arthur Rimbaud

Benjamin Ivry, Arthur Rimbaud (Absolute Press, 1998) Worldcat

Wyatt Mason, Arthur Rimbaud - Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library/Penguin Random House, 2002) Worldcat

Dates for Rimbaud in New York

The book, Rimbaud in New York, published in 2004, uses the dates 1978-1979 for this project. However. David was in France in those years, returning to the US in 1979. The catalog for History Keeps Me Awake at Night, describes the mask as being created in New York after David's return, so I use 1979 as the date for the mask. The photos were first printed in the Soho Weekly News in 1980. In the 2004 book, there's a description of creating the photographs for that book, which included creating images from the original negatives and from the contact sheets, some of those photographs were printed by David and others were printed for the first time. I'm using the dates 1979/1980/2004 for this project.

Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Two Men in Rome (in Love)

Robert Rauschenberg, Cy and the Roman Steps (1952)
A set of five gelatin silver photographs

Robert Rauschenberg [1925-2008] met Cy Twombly (1928–2011) in 1951, when both artists were enrolled at the Art Students League of New York. They went on to study at Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina, where they began a rich (and briefly romantic) lifelong relationship. Anchoring their bond was an eight-month journey to Europe and North Africa—a trip that catalyzed some of their earliest experiments in photography, painting, drawing, and sculpture and served as Twombly’s introduction to Italy, a country he would claim as his home from 1957 until his death in 2011.

... Twombly and Rauschenberg had become intimately involved just before leaving New York. The unmistakably erotic charge of the progression—centered, after all, on Twombly’s groin—offers us a window on photographer and subject coming to terms with their new relationship against the backdrop of Rome.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art - Overview

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

Containing Multitudes

Larry Wolf, Still Point (Eric) (2024)

You look at me across the two-top, across a quarter century, unguarded moments in the bubble of our relationship, your presence an anchor in the swirl of activity. We hold each other in our gaze, two men, our lives entwined.
Something fresh emerges in the layering of memories—mundane moments, shared meals, waiting for trains or traveling on planes, a pause of connection.
This image contains multitudes: 37,260,000 pixels from 79 portraits. Light and shadow from times once present, now recalled, photons through a lens, electrons crafted with software, eyes on a screen, hands on a keyboard, ink on paper.