“My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.” – from David Wojnarowicz, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” (in Close to the Knives, 1991: p. 114).
In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) withdrew funding from a show (“Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing”) at Artists Space in New York City, because of a controversial accompanying essay by photographer, painter, writer, musician, filmmaker, and East Village luminary David Wojnarowicz. The piece, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” was a searing j’accuse directed at among other people, Jesse Helms, Ed Koch, and Cardinal O’Connor for poisoning the discourse of AIDS with fear, bigotry, and callous indifference. Soon after, Reverand Donald Wildmon of the right-wing American Family Association (AFA) excerpted images of David’s work in a sensationalist pamphlet designed to further smear Wojnarowicz and decrease public funding for the arts. Wojnarowicz successfully sued the AFA for violation of the New York State Artists’ Authorship Act. He was awarded damages of one dollar.
From the trial:
Mr. Wojnarowicz, apart from the harm that you believe the AFA pamphlet has cause to your reputation as a fine artist, has it affected you personally?
Yes, it has. I live an isolated life. I rarely see people. I spend a great deal of time at home, whether for reasons of health or work, and I have come to depend very seriously on my work as the communication that I engage in with other people; and I feel this work, this mailing that Wildmon created along with the AFA, seriously distorted that communication and caused me a great deal of anxiety and outrage and, when I saw the pamphlet around May 2nd, I went through a period of very intense depression and outrage at feeling unable to combat this representation of my work or what my work was reduced to and the communication that I perceive and believe is inside the work that I make being so severely distorted. (excerpted from A definitive history of five or six years on the lower east side, Semiotext(e) 2006: p. 225)
Twenty years later, Wojnarowicz’s work has been subject to censorship once again, though this time he is not able to sue his censors (he died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1992). The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, in response to pressure from the religious right, the Republican Party, and the media, has removed the film “Fire in My Belly” from its exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.”
The footage for the film was made in 1987 in Mexico, and exists in several versions. One of them features a visceral montage of sometimes shocking images, backed by the genuinely disturbing music of Diamanda Galas, who recites lines from the Book of Leviticus. (The piece is from her long work Plague Mass, a challenging and often frightening meditation on mortality, sickness, and AIDS, in which she makes her voice resound like the last opera on Earth, performed by a banshee who can play her throat like Anthony Braxton plays saxophone.) It is the most powerful of David’s films that I’ve had the privilege of seeing, next to his death-bed film of the late photographer Peter Hujar, his partner, who also succumbed to AIDS.
Though the Smithsonian is ultimately to blame for the decision, we should be alarmed and repelled by yet another instance of the American Right attacking the arts community — often in flagrantly homophobic language — in order to cynically bolster support among the ignorant for their regressive social agenda. The charge this time has been led by Bill Donahue, shameless bigot and President of the Catholic League. The outrage has focused on a brief, Dalí-echoing segment, in which ants crawl along a crucifix which lies on the ground, which is indeed a provocative image, but one which is part of a larger argument that has been lost in the media noise. The film takes the stigma of pollution and contamination associated with the AIDS crisis and displaces it onto, implicitly, the Catholic Church, which was, and continues to be, complicit in the spread of the disease, especially in the developing world, by way its insistent campaigns of misinformation and homophobia. The film is not anti-Christian, but it is unsparing in its contempt for misguided and dangerous Church positions that even the Pope has become equivocal about. Rather than engage the piece with any sort of argument, Donahue et al. have taken a segment out of context and used it made baseless, slanderous accusations against the artist.
Donahue, moreover, apparently did not see the irony in claiming outrage on behalf of an offended minority while trying to silence an AIDS victim on World AIDS Day. This is unsurprising, given that the man has said things like: “We’re not going to allow gay people to adopt children, that’s against nature, it’s against nature’s god.” Republicans in Congress, who alarmingly have a good deal of control over the budget, have repeated this charlatan’s views on the exhibit, and have threatened the Smithsonian and the NEA with funding cuts.
The NEA’s annual budget is tens of millions of dollars smaller than the daily cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan, that Sisyphean spectacle of pointless and unending violence which seems to “offend” no one in the American political establishment, least of all the Democrats who were elected on an anti-war mandate. It is also about one-tenth of one percent of the sum the Republicans want to give away in tax cuts to the richest people in America over the next ten years. By contrast, the Wojnarowicz piece, and indeed the entire exhibit in question, was funded with exactly zero taxpayer dollars. To put it in even bleaker relief: the artist died so miserably partially because he had no health insurance. To frame this as a question of budgetary priorities, then, is dishonest and perverse in the extreme. This is a cynical game, a game playing on cultural anxieties and homophobia, and one which reveals the House Republicans as the vacuous, reactionary philistines that they are.
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If you are in Washington, D.C., and you would like to see the film, the Transformer Gallery is screening it. They are also marching to the National Portrait Gallery to stage a protest tonight, December 2nd, at 5:30pm.
UPDATE: The New Museum on the Bowery in New York City is also screening the entire work in their lobby until late January, as is PPOW (which represents David’s work), and a rogue demonstrator inside the National Portrait Gallery. I also encourage everyone to boycott the NPG until the work is reinstated and a sincere apology is offered.
…..”This work of art should not be banned. The banning of this films violates our constitutiona…l rights since it was pulled out of an ART MUSUEM IN NEW YORK, USA..WHERE ART IS SUPPOSED TO BE FOUND! Equal rights of freedom of speech and expression has always been a joke in this country and in the world and in these times, these issues NEED to be addressed and changed. I get upset when I see the only rights protected are those of Christian radicals who want to kill off “undesirables”.. For example, saying using condoms is an evil deed (ie..telling africans in africa not to use condoms when AIDS is a major issue in their countries), and/or by saying sodomy will send you straight to ‘hell’ (ie..hate crimes and prejudices on many levels against homosexuals)..thats just to name a few. I think the fact that this video was pulled by the efforts of specific groups is more disturbing than this, or ANY work or art could EVER be. We see religious war televised every day. To me, THAT is offensive. We see human rights violated while people cheer and back it up. To me, THAT is offensive. We see radicials outside the funerals of gay people who have died from AIDS with picket signs that say “GOD HATES FAGS.” To me, THAT is offensive. HOWEVER..all these images are protected while “Fire in My Belly” is not.. Lets address these issues and get some results. Let the hypocrisy of censorship be seen.