Art from the AIDS Era Inspires Controversy, Curiosity, and Public Discourse

Observed on a recent visit to the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture": A mother with a small child in a stroller watching the video of James Bidgood's 1971 drama "Pink Narcissus."

Years of museum visits have given me lots of memories of finely curated exhibitions. But one of the other things I have often admired on these visits are the parents who go to the trouble to bring small children into the museum galleries and how often those children have been rapt by what they see. Last Tuesday I visited the National Portrait Gallery and was surprised and happy to see a young parent paused in front of a video playing James Bidgood's "Pink Narcissus." As the mother started to move to the next artwork on display, the child protested. She wanted to keep watching the film although clearly what caught her eye was the beautiful palette of the film, the fanciful scenery serving as backdrop to the story. Considering the controversy surrounding David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire in My Belly," which was pulled from the galleries on December 1, I was encouraged to see a parent unafraid of allowing a child to see a film that might elicit the same controversy.

Here is New York Times art critic Holland Cotter's thoughtful analysis of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition and the Wojnarowicz controversy, "As Ants Crawl Over Crucifix, Dead Artist Assailed Again."

In 1989, Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association, mailed a pamphlet reproducing details from collages by the New York artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) to every member of Congress, to various news media outlets and to religious leaders across the country.

Mr. Wildmon, a Methodist minister, had prepared the pamphlet himself; he considered the images pornographic or blasphemous. He had copied them from the catalog for an exhibition partly supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the real object of his protest. Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch), furious at having his work selectively edited, sued Mr. Wildmon for misrepresenting his art and won the case.

Twenty years later, history is repeating itself, with variations. Wojnarowicz’s work is under similar attack, this time by Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, and several members of Congress. The offending material is again a detail of a larger work, an image of ants crawling over a crucifix, excerpted from a Wojnarowicz video that was included in a large group show called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

On Dec. 1 the gallery, part of the Smithsonian Institution, took the video off view. One big change from 1990, however, is the nearly universal presence of the Internet. Word of the self-censorship instantly spread, and the video itself, titled “A Fire in My Belly,” went viral, turning up on a number of Web sites, including YouTube. Untold numbers of people could now see something that, without the publicity generated by the dispute, they never would have known existed.

And what are they seeing? A raw, moving, disturbing piece of art that comes in two sections: one is 13 minutes; the other is 7 minutes, video of the same title found on a separate reel after Wojnarowicz’s death from AIDS. In an added complication, the two tapes were edited down to one that is roughly 4 minutes for the National Portrait Gallery show.

The one thing they all share is a source, the artist’s childhood. Even given that Wojnarowicz was not above self-mythologizing, that childhood was rough. His parents divorced and then disappeared when he was 2, leaving him to a succession of temporary homes and often abusive relationships. On the positive side, many of these homes were in semi-rural settings, and the natural world became a sustaining resource for him. In the lives of animals, birds and insects he found clarified versions of human behavior, and alternatives to it.

By his early teenage years, he knew he was gay and was supporting himself as a street hustler in New York City. Somehow — he was elusive about aspects of his biography — he also made it through Roman Catholic grade school. Religious imagery and emotions, as well as a consciousness of fleeting time, were deeply ingrained in him.

He studied art for his one year of high school, then more or less taught himself painting, collage, photography and video. He traveled, frequently to Mexico, but New York was home. And his art, including his extraordinary diaristic writing, reflected the atmosphere of the sexual underground he was part of, one that fed into the new art scene on the Lower East Side in the 1980s, and that was eventually wasted by AIDS.

Wojnarowicz made “A Fire in My Belly,” dated 1986-87, at a turning point. In 1987 his longtime mentor and lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, died of AIDS, and Wojnarowicz himself learned that he was H.I.V.-positive. Although his career was by then well established, he was backing off from involvement in the art world and on his way to becoming immersed in AIDS politics.

Both parts of “A Fire in My Belly” are made from video shot in Mexico, a country that Wojnarowicz found mesmerizing for its combination of vital popular culture and daily life lived shockingly close to the bone. The 13-minute video opens with a panning shot, taken from a moving car, of the streets of a Mexican town, interrupted by quick shots of newspaper headlines reporting violent crimes. These sequences are punctuated, very briefly, with a few other images: a suspended world globe; a cartoonish dancing puppet wearing a sombrero; a disembodied hand dropping coins.

Then three scenes of combat alternate repeatedly: a bullfight and a cockfight — each gruesome — and a masked and acrobatic wrestling match. Travelogue-ish sequences that follow — of a circus with performing animals and a visit to a Mesoamerican archaeological site with demonic-looking sculptures — go on too long (as does the wrestling), and the video ends abruptly when the dancing puppet is shot at with what looks like a pistol full of paint. If there is any overriding idea delivered in the video, it has to do with how violence-addicted people, and specifically men, are.

The seven-minute “excerpt” feels more packed and purposeful, and quite complete. The opening image, which will recur again and again, is of metal wheels turning, like some machine of fate. Then, interwoven and rapidly repeated, we see pairs, not necessarily juxtaposed, of related images: street beggars and armed police; Day of the Dead candy skulls and a painting of an Aztec human sacrifice; mummified bodies displaced from graves in a cemetery and an undisturbed tombstone being gently washed.

Certain images were evidently filmed in a studio: coins falling into a bandaged hand, and a hand held under splashing water; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, and a man’s lips being sewn shut. A short sequence of a man masturbating alternates with images of sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. The image of the crucifix with ants comes almost in the middle of all of this, between shots of bread being sewn and blood dripping into a bowl. At the end, images from the first video reappear — the puppet and the globe — both burning.

That “A Fire in My Belly” is about spirituality, and about AIDS, is beyond doubt. To those caught up in the crisis, the worst years of the epidemic were like an extended Day of the Dead, a time of skulls and candles, corruption with promise of resurrection. Wojnarowicz was profoundly angry at a government that barely acknowledged the epidemic and at political forces that he believed used AIDS, and the art created in response, to demonize homosexuals.

He felt, with reason, mortally embattled, and the video is filled with symbols of vulnerability under attack: beggars, slaughtered animals, displaced bodies and the crucified Jesus. In Wojnarowicz’s nature symbolism — and this is confirmed in other works — ants were symbols of a human life mechanically driven by its own needs, heedless of anything else. Here they blindly swarm over an emblem of suffering and self-sacrifice.

Am I giving the image too benign a reading? Possibly, but I’m basing it on what Wojnarowicz had to say about another image of Jesus that he used in his art, one that Mr. Wildmon and the American Family Association called blasphemous. Part of a detail of a 1979 collage called “Untitled (Genet),” it is an altered version of the familiar 17th-century painting “Christ Crowned With Thorns,” by Guido Reni. Reni’s Jesus, who looks both agonized and ecstatic, is here shown with a heroin syringe in his arm.

But the changed image is part of a larger picture. Wojnarowicz has placed it atop an altar inside what looks like a bombed-out church swarming with antlike figures of soldiers as a flock of large angels descends into the church from the sky. In the center of everything stands a haloed figure, the French homosexual writer Jean Genet, dubbed “St. Genet” by Jean-Paul Sartre.

In response to questions during his courtroom testimony against the American Family Association, Wojnarowicz explained that he made the piece after returning to New York from a stay in France, where he had been reading Genet. Back in New York, he was struck by the rampant and rising use of hard drugs among people he knew and the self-destruction that resulted. He said that in his own upbringing as a Roman Catholic he’d been taught that Jesus took on the sufferings of all people in the world.

“I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the streets,” Wojnarowicz testified. “And I did this because I saw very little treatment available for people who had this illness.”

I don’t believe Wojnarowicz was being disingenuous. He was speaking under oath and, in any case, he was nothing if not passionate about his belief in the moral purpose of art, as passionate as his religious accusers have been in questioning his morality. It’s an interesting thing about passion, how coming from ostensibly opposite beliefs and directions, it can sometimes end up meeting in the same place.