Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 83

Blank Spot in a Hectic Civilization:
The Narrative Resistance Strategies
in the Writings of David Wojnarowicz
Radical artist David Wojnarowicz achieved fame in the 1980s as an avantgarde painter whose work challenged the boundaries of art and made him the focal
point of a conservative backlash against controversial, risk-taking, and unorthodox
artistic expression. By the time of his death in 1992, Wojnarowicz had established
himself as a groundbreaking artist, an outspoken AIDS activist, and a vocal anti
censorship advocate. Evoking intense, brooding, and graphic images in his paint
ings, Wojnarowicz’s politicized, sexually-charged, and often angry art sought to
expose the hypocrisy and soullessness of what he perceived to be an intolerant,
homophobic, and militaristic nation. Wojnarowicz viewed himself as a social pariah
and outlaw—an aesthetic terrorist whose art waged war against a nation that had
long since marginalized its socially, sexually, and economically outcast denizens.
An aspect of Wojnarowicz’s work not as widely known involves his use
of autobiographical fiction and memoiristic narrative to expand his political and
humanistic message. Calling upon a raw, unflinching, stream-of-consciousness
writing style, Wojnarowicz’s words captured the rage, loneliness, and desperation
of the disenfranchised in America. His writings were inhabited by people living in
the shadow world of America: drug addicts, prostitutes, street hustlers, the home
less, the emotionally and physically abused, AIDS victims, and disaffected homo
sexuals. Wojnarowicz’s narratives targeted a “one-tribe nation” predicated on pro
mulgating the ideology of and protecting the interests of a heterosexual, Christian,
and capitalistic America, to the exclusion of cultures and subcultures that chal
lenge the status quo. As a gay man who had been ostracized by his family and his
society throughout his brief and savage life, Wojnarowicz painstakingly chronicled
in words the repression of gay America. Still, his narrative extended far beyond
the limitations of a one-issue perspective by challenging the moral legitimacy of
bigotry, militarism, environmental destruction, corporate greed, and religious hy
pocrisy.
In both his writings and paintings Wojnarowicz pulled no punches in his
assessment that his family and his society perceived him as a rule breaker, a taboo
violator, a nonconformist, a fringe dweller, a deviant. Wojnarowicz characterized
himself as a “blank spot in a hectic civilization” (1992, 61), sadly coming to the
conclusion that he had become so marginalized as to be metaphorically invisible.
A disillusioned Wojnarowicz wrote: