Oberlin College
Allen Memorial Art Museum
87 North Main Street
Oberlin, Ohio 44074-1161
440/775-8665
440/775-8799 & 775-6841

JANUARY 29, 1999

CONTACT: Leslie Miller
AT THE ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM - OBERLIN COLLEGE

www.oberlin.edu/~allenart
Hours: Tues.-Sat. 10-5; Sun. 1-5
phone (440) 775-8665; FAX (440) 775-6841

The oeuvre of the painter, photographer, and filmmaker David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, is now recognized as one of the most powerful and complex to have emerged and developed in the East Village in the course of the 1980s. Though his work is not autobiographical in the strict sense of the term, it is a distinctly personal response to the brute tensions and conflicts of contemporary urban life.

The outlines of Wojnarowicz's traumatic life (1954-1992) are well known from the artist's numerous writings and interviews. Raised in New Jersey by a severely abusive father, he became aware of his homosexuality at an early age, He left home in his early teens and lived on the streets for several years in circumstances which continued to subject him to physical and emotional violence. He began to write and take photographs around 1973 and slowly developed an underground reputation among young or marginalized artists in the Lower East Side. Like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz first became famous through word of mouth rather than the art press, and for work on the street or in warehouses rather than gallery productions. By the early 1980s he was known mainly for his performances in the post-punk noise band "3 Teens Kill 4. No Motive" and for his stenciled posters for the band and which he pasted throughout the Lower East Side area. He began to focus exclusively on the visual arts during this period, producing paintings, films, and immensely ambitious installations and performances. He became associated with the East Village gallery Civilian Warfare in 1982, which became a focal point for some of the most aggressive installations, performances and paintings being shown at the time.

It was also around 1980 that Wojnarowicz's painting -- mixed media works that combine acrylic with posters, photogrqaphs, or maps -- already contained the distinctive symbols that would reappear throughout his oeuvre, such as objects on fire, most often a burning house; a whole or fragmented map; a suburban or industrial landscape; a cow's head or cut meat; a sleeping; homosexual activity; and, from around the time his lover (the photographer Peter Hujar) became ill with AIDS, spermatozoa. Either stenciled or drawn in simple outlines, the images have a deliberately cartoonish and crude effect, like much East Village artwork. Yet Wojnarowicz's arrangements of his symbols of power, violence, anxiety, and need are compositional strategies -- odd spatial juxtapositions, layering effects, alterations of scale, hieratic divisions of the picture field, or bizarre reworkings of normal landscape composition -- the artist created a rather sophisticated framework for his "primal gestures" (the descriptive shorhand for agressive East Village art in those days), and gave his works a strangeness and depth that far exceeded the slick images of Haring or the overwrought surfaces of Basquiat.

Burning Man distills the most characteristic features of Wojnarowicz's early-mid 1980s paintings into a work of unusual clarity and concentration. The entire field is covered with torn and collaged maps (in a 1989 interview, Wojnarowicz said that he associated maps with the power of national boundaries). Crude outlines of cubes, sliced by the painted black frame, denote urban or suburban buildings, which recede towards a wall of outlined mountains. the thin slice of sky is hot yellow with a sinking red dot of sun at dead center. Placed directly below the sun is a stenciled figure of man in flames, poised as if running, though he is not going anywhere. "All of Wojnarowicz's work from this period," wrote John Carlin in 1989, " appears to be about representing a correspondence between self and society that is distorted and hidden in ,ass media. Wojnarowicz tries to show the relationship between the apparently incongruous aspect of our culture on both a thematic and formal level. He is reaching for and articulating a deeper chord, a finer thread, that holds things together just at the moment they appear inextricably torn apart."

Though there is Wojnarowicz print in the museum's rental collection ,there is no work by this artist in the permanent collection. Wojnarowicz is recognized by many as the most interesting and powerful of those artists who aimed to develop a counter-cultural art practice in the East Village in the 1980s. The visceral force of his imagery, his interest in sign systems, and his direct mode of address exemplify important aspects of 1980s figural painting, a class of work that is not well represented in the collection, due to prohibitive costs. In the context of the existing contemporary collection, Burning man prompts illuminating comparisons and contrasts with various pop works,, while its dystopic view of the modern landscape and man's place within it would thematically link it to a broad range of modern and contemporary works in the many different media. Burning Man will be on loan to the New Museum for Contemporary Art for a retrospective exhibition in the spring of 1999.