In June 1981, David went to an event called Noisefest to hear Y Pants or maybe Sonic Youth, and there he met Kiki Smith. They instantly became best friends, often meeting for breakfast, and talking on the phone two or three times a day. David did not live long enough to see the international acclaim ultimately accorded to Kiki Smith. When they met, she’d had work in groundbreaking exhibitions like the “Times Square Show” and “New York/New Wave,” but she didn’t yet have a gallery. She was working as an electrician’s assistant.
David told Kiki that he was painting in an abandoned pier off Spring Street and offered to take her to see it. They didn’t go that night, but soon after. She remembered seeing a large painting of a boomerang and a large bird. This was a full two years before the Ward Line Pier Project “opened,” only to be instantly shut down by the police. Brian Butterick remembered, however, that back when he and David were still working at Danceteria, David told him he’d just discovered a new pier. Susan Gauthier recalled that David invited her to see it while he was living with her, but she declined.
Chuck Nanney visited the pier early on. He hadn’t seen David since the Danceteria bust, but one day they ran into each other at the sex pier. David brought Nanney down to the Ward Line Pier. There wasn’t much work there at the time. He remembered seeing some Krazy Kats that David had done. And he saw Kiki’s piece. She’d chosen a small room with holes in the ceiling where the plaster had all fallen down, “so it was like walking on icebergs,” as she put it. Light coming through the holes made “perfect circles on the floor” that she outlined with paint. Once a day, the light and the paint would align. So—a conceptual piece.
David had picked the Ward Line Pier (a.k.a. Pier 34) because it wasn’t a cruising ground. At least, not during the day. And he could be alone. One day he’d watched a huge dog run the football-field length of the main room, toward New Jersey, and he’d followed the animal but never found it, so he began to think the place magical. He’d also investigated Pier 28, just a bit farther south,k and discovered thousands of cardboard cartons filled with files from—he thought—the city prison system. “Psychological profiles of prisoners, documentation from murder scenes, surveillance photographs, court transcripts,” he told me. “It was all from the fifties, and that material was so heavy visually that my reaction was not to touch it.” But he went through some of the material with Kiki. She remembered this trove as “a one-and-half-story mountain of people’s information.” It included psychological tests administered by the Psychiatric Clinic of the Court of General Sessions, in which offenders had been compelled to draw both a man and a woman. David and Kiki took many of these drawings.
They planned to silk-screen them onto fine paper and poster them in the streets. They even got a grant to pay for the materials. “I think we sort of lost interest in it halfway through,” she said. They never did paste them up in the streets, but did make some prints. And Kiki taught David how to silk-screen.
Years later, many who were part of the scene would recall the day they read a one-column article in the New York Times headlined “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” It appeared on July 3, 1981. Photographer Nan Goldin’s recollection has always seemed especially poignant. Still a couple of years away from meeting David, Nan was on Fire Island with a gaggle of friends, including Cookie Mueller, a “queen” of downtown—writer, wild woman, and actress in early John Waters films. Cookie read the article out loud, and, said Nan, “We all kind of laughed.”
“Gay” cancer? The second paragraph carried the reassuring news that “there is as yet no evidence of contagion.”
This news story was pegged to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on July 4: “Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Pneumonia Among Homosexual Men—New York City and California.” News reports were focusing on KS, the rare cancer that manifested in purple lesions. Most of these patients had severe defects in their immune systems. But how could that cause cancer? Doctors didn’t know, but a CDC spokesman said there was no apparent danger to nonhomosexuals. One theory already floating was that the illness had been caused by poppers—amyl nitrite, a drug used to enhance sexual pleasure.
At the time the “gay cancer” article appeared, David was again between homes. He’d moved out of 159 Second Avenue at the end of June ’81 with no place to go, though Susan Gauthier insists she wouldn’t have let him leave had she known that.
He was in the midst of recording songs with the band. He was bursting with ideas. But now he spent a lot of time just walking around, dropping dimes in phone booths trying to find a place to stay for a night. As he wrote to Jean Pierre, “I wish I could find the way to stop feeling that time is running away.”
JP sent more francs. And David considered selling his camera. All this as Foto Gallery let him know, mid-June, that not only would his photograph be exhibited but that he was also one of its ten prize winners. By mid-July, however, he still hadn’t gone to the gallery to see what he’d won. He was afraid the dealer would make him pay for framing the picture.
He had the camera with him the July day that he broke into the abandoned sixteen-story Christodora building, a former settlement house on Avenue B. His old buddy, John Hall, had already been in there a couple of times. He showed David how you could get out onto the roof at the Charas/El Bohio building on Ninth Street and then crawl through a window into the Christodora. They explored. Walls were crumbling and sand had accumulated on some of the steps. Downstairs they found a big swimming pool full of black water, with stuff floating in it. In the vandalized library, books and papers covered the floor. In the theater space, they took their clothes off and posed in a decrepit corner—David seated, John standing. David would later embed three copies of this photo in a painting called Fuck You Faggot Fucker (along with one of Brian posing as St. Sebastian). David also photographed Hall wielding a club in a broken-down bathroom (clothed) and standing on what seems to be a balcony (naked).
They were in the library, clothed and looking out a window onto Avenue B, when a truck pulled up and someone proceeded to unweld the front door. A man Hall described as a “power yuppie” came upstairs and found them. “We said something like, ‘Ah, we’re just looking. We’ll be out of here soon,’ “ he remembered. The yuppie remained calm. He didn’t ask how they’d gotten in, or how they’d get out. When he left, he welded the front door shut again.
That July the East Village gallery scene very quietly began.
Patti Astor, still months away from filming Wild Style, had a day job working for her friend Bill Stelling at his roommate-referral service. One day Stelling asked Astor if she knew of any artists who might want to show at the tiny storefront (eight feet by twenty-five feet) he was using as a textile studio. She did. Astor had already met some of the graffiti artists she’d be working with on Wild Style. That summer she threw an “Art Opening Barbeque” at her apartment on East Third Street across from the men’s shelter, and Futura 2000 spray-painted a mural on her wall. “The entire art world showed up!” she would later declare. If not exactly “entire,” the party did include future big names like Jeffrey Deitch, Keith Haring, Fab 5 Freddy, and Kenny Scharf—who customized her kitchen appliances during the party by gluing little figures to them.
For the first show in Stelling’s space at 229 East Eleventh Street, however, Astor recommended her ex-husband Steven Kramer. She did not plan to involve herself; she knew nothing about selling art. So Stelling ran the gallery for the first month with another friend. They put up twenty Kramer drawings at fifty dollars each, and sold them all. Astor decided to participate in the second show, in September, which went to Scharf, then a recent School of Visual Arts graduate.
Astor may have known little about the business of art, but like some of the others running the first East Village galleries, she was an artist at heart—and she knew how to get a party started, how to create a sense of permission and play. She decided that each artist should get a chance to choose a new name for the tiny space and to completely change the decor. So it was Scharf who dubbed the space Fun Gallery that September. There he introduced his mutant Hanna-Barbera characters to a world that wasn’t quite ready for them. He sold just one, for fifty dollars.
When Fab 5 Freddy Brathwaite got the next show, he thought about renaming the place Serious Gallery. That’s when Astor realized she’d have to change her stationery every month. So the name remained Fun, but Astor stuck with her idea of letting each artist do whatever he or she wanted with the space—a policy that continued when they moved a year later into more square footage at 254 East Tenth Street. Jean-Michel Basquiat, for example, chopped the space up with half-constructed walls. Scharf did a black light installation for his second (rapturously received) show. Haring and his partner LA2 painted their trademark squiggles over everything in the gallery, including Astor’s outfit, and even the snow outside.
After bouncing around for six weeks, going home with tricks or crashing with friends, David moved in with Tom Cochran, “the manager of our band,” as he described him in a letter to Jean Pierre. Cochran had broken up with Julie Hair and moved to an apartment upstairs in her building at 36 East Fourth, near the Bowery. It had the same floor plan as Hair’s tiny railroad flat, a classic tub-in-the-kitchen arrangement. In rooms on either side of the kitchen, Cochran and David each had a loft bed. The whole thing was about 325 roach-infested square feet. They shared a toilet in the hall with the occupants of another apartment. David would live in this bolthole for nearly four years.
He let JP know that he did not have enough money to come to France. He also told him, by way of reassurance, that he had a private part of himself that few would understand—but that was the part he could share with JP. Jean Pierre sent a rather anguished letter in September, one of the few from him that David kept, confessing his disappointment and his nervousness about the state of their relationship. David still felt that he loved JP. “To be honest with you,” he wrote, “I sometimes meet people that I like very much, but I never meet any person with your qualities.” He hoped to come to Paris that winter. But the eight days they’d spent together in New York that March would be the extent of their contact for 1981. JP had met Hujar during that March visit. ‘I felt something between them,” he recalled. He’d worried then that his relationship with David was in danger because of Hujar—though he did not express this to David.
In the last substantial piece of journal writing he would do for years, David wrote on September 1 about meeting a fella at Stuyvesant Park. There he’d run into Hujar, who was also cruising. “I sat next to him and we talked for a few minutes. One night when he was feeling down, we’d gone into the west park and built a little fire like scouts on one of the walkways feeding it twigs and leaves for about half an hour, laughing while other guys in the park stared at us like we were nuts. After awhile we parted.… I hadn’t planned on meeting anyone but then I saw this young guy.”
Whatever distance had grown between David and Jean Pierre at this point was only about … distance. And the fact that David’s life was changing so quickly he could not articulate it even to himself. In the middle of September 1981, David decided to quit the band. He needed time for his writing, his painting, his photography. Besides, “Brian, Jesse and Julie … have a way of seeing the world that is very different from me. Too much cynicism,” he wrote to JP. (Doug Bressler had not yet joined.) David informed the band of his decision and reported “some anger.” But then he changed his mind. He did not leave the band. Yet.
That October, he got a chance to create a gallery-friendly version of the Castelli “cow bone” action for a group show called “Hunger” at Gallery 345, a space on Lafayette Street near SoHo that specialized in political art. He asked Hair to collaborate.
On the street, they found a wooden chair and a wooden crate the size of a smallish refrigerator. They painted the crate black and set it on end so it would open fridge-style. In homage to Robert Indiana’s EAT/DIE diptych, they painted “EAT” on one side of its door and “DIE” on the other—adding stencils of planes, burning houses, and a large falling man. Inside they placed a large transparent bag of cow bones and a stereo.
They intended this to be an interactive installation, with a visitor wearing headphones while seated on the wooden chair they’d painted and stenciled. Hair couldn’t remember what the visitor was supposed to hear on the headphones. Most likely it was one of David’s tape collages, with bits recorded on the street or from the radio, but 3 Teens did have a song called “Hunger.” We are all essential laborers …
David did not meet as many kindred souls at Peppermint Lounge, “the Pep,” as he had at Danceteria. But a bartender he bussed for, Sophie Breer, became a friend. He worked two nights a week for minimum wage, so he was dependent on the bartenders for tips. She gave him hundreds a night. When punk icon Johnny Rotten hassled Breer one night, standing on her shoe and not letting her move, David came up and threw a drink in his face. Other nights he’d do things to amuse her. He would make mice out of napkins and lemons. Once he brought in a cock-a-bunny and let the costumed roach out of its jar at three in the morning. “This little ‘rabbit’ running down the bar,” he recalled. “The ears make them top-heavy, so they learn to obey the edges of the table.” His cock-a-bunnies were creepy-cute, a riveting combination. Breer decided she wanted to film David making them.
One weekend in November 1981, she rented a Betamax, which she didn’t exactly know how to use. “I did cocaine and drank and shot skits all weekend long. I have forty-eight hours of mostly crap, but it was fun. Remember, I was twenty-one years old.” She’d asked David to come over Sunday morning with “supplies.” She had decided on a Romper Room approach. David—with his rounded scissors, Q-tips, rubber cement, and a jar with six or eight cockroaches—obliged her with a kindergarten-style presentation, cutting tiny ears from a piece of paper, pulling the cotton end off a Q-tip for a tail, and applying these accoutrements to a reluctant roach he named “Benny.” The roach spent some time running around on David’s arm before acquiring his ears and tail. David remained deadpan throughout. “Oops, I glued his back legs together.”
“Are you trying to take the ‘s’ out of ‘pest’?” Breer asked him. She filmed it with “the camera flying all over … trails of light.… I didn’t know how to zoom.” But she ended up with a thirteen-minute video piece, Waje’s Cocka-bunnies. At the end, David got out the piece of pie he’d brought along, to show that you could easily pick a roach off your slice if you’d given it rabbit ears. He then induced Benny to check into a roach motel.
Back at the Pep, Breer secured a bartending job for her then-boyfriend, Tommy Turner—later one of the directors in the Cinema of Transgression. He and David bonded. Turner was a physically beautiful guy with an affinity for the dark side, obsessed with black magic, medical deformities, murder, and taxidermy. He wasn’t a freak, Breer said, just someone who was truly curious. He’d trained as a geneticist. David called him “one of the sweetest heterosexual guys I’ve ever come in contact with.” David had taken Tommy Turner and Sophie Breer (“in my eighties spandex”) to the meat-packing district after work one night to scout for cow bones. She didn’t recall them finding any. But usually David and Turner went off on adventures by themselves.
They’d leave the club at four or five in the morning and head into Alphabet City to climb the fire escapes of burnt-out tenements. That was the only way into abandoned buildings whose doors had been sealed with cinder blocks or bolted shut with steel. He and Turner explored the hastily abandoned half-melted slum apartments where there’d been arson fires. Sometimes they’d find people sleeping in there. “We’d try to find a stick before we went inside,” Turner remembered. Just in case. They witnessed the drug trafficking—one cinder block being pulled back from a door, a hand reaching out for money, then the hand coming back with a small glassine envelope. Turner had not yet become a junkie. Some nights he went along as lookout while David stenciled. One weekend, he and David decided to go to “the country,” by which they meant Roosevelt Island and the weeds and trees surrounding the abandoned insane asylum. They entered the broken buildings there to photograph what David called “weird discards of civilization.”
David also met two friends of Turner’s when they came to hang out at the Pep. One was Richard Kern, who hadn’t yet begun to make the violent exploitative films that would bring him a kind of underground fame. David thought Kern a “sexy apparition … a dark-haired guy with a corruptible face.” Was he straight? David asked Turner, who snickered, “Why don’t you find out?” The other friend was Montana Hewson. (Or “Montanna,” as David consistently misspelled his name.) The night Montana first came to the club, wrote David, he was wearing a white T-shirt “awash with perspiration and floor grime.” He was skinny, with a turkey neck, a hawk head, a jutting chin, and “a las vegas card shark’s smile.” Montana was an artist David thought multitalented. He was a gay man who fell for straight men like Kern. He was self-conscious about being unattractive. And he was committed to self-destruction. Montana would prove to be the ultimate outcast in David’s whole history of interest in outcasts. But that story comes later.
In January 1982, “gay cancer” was renamed GRID, for “gay-related immune deficiency.” On the 12th of that month, writer Larry Kramer met with five other men at his apartment to form Gay Men’s Health Crisis.
David knew one person who would be diagnosed that year with GRID—Iolo Carew from Danceteria. Years later, David couldn’t remember ever hearing much about GRID, this “vague thing that was affecting twenty-some people.” And he really liked Iolo, who he felt was being shunned. So he went home with Iolo one night and had sex with him. Telling me all this in 1990, David added that what they did “could only be described as safe sex.” But that was all intuitive, he said. “There were no guidelines. So I did that that one night, and then I went back to having unsafe sex.”
No one was using the term “safe sex” in 1982. And “no guidelines” hardly describes it—but by 1990 who could remember how ignorant we’d all been just a few years earlier. During the seven months that this disease was called GRID, scientists at the CDC were telling reporters that there was no evidence that this was an infectious disease, and that its sexual transmission was mere hypothesis.
David and his roommate Tom Cochran lived in the rear of their Fourth Street building, and David had the room with the window, ten or fifteen feet from the back of the fire house on Great Jones Street. Cochran would sometimes come home to find all the lights out and David standing at the window with friends. Maybe Hujar. Maybe Brian or Jesse. They’d be watching the firemen take showers. Cochran seemed to find that amusing. He was straight, of course, but sexuality didn’t become an issue. They’d made a “no sex in the apartment” rule. The only tension that came up was over fumes from the spray paint David was using to make his stencil pieces. It would drive Cochran out for a walk with his dog.
In January 1982, David answered an open call at Public Illumination Gallery for artwork that measured ten by ten inches. He submitted a stencil piece with a burning house at the center for “100 Works, 100 Artists, 100 Sq. In,” which the gallery accepted and then sold for one hundred dollars.
David knew he had to find studio space. He often went to the White Wave coffee shop on Second Avenue for breakfast, and there he became friends with the woman who would wait on him, Jan Mohlman. When she found a storefront studio on Houston near Eldridge, she asked David to share it. “I had a kind of fluke brief art career,” said Mohlman. Meaning, she did an album cover for the Bush Tetras and it ended up in Art-forum, which led to her inclusion in a few shows. She painted, then started working with mosaics, and she did backdrops for Bush Tetras gigs. But she did not take her art making very seriously. Even so, she liked hanging out at the studio and offered to pay two-thirds of the three-hundred-dollar rent.
Mohlman, who went on to teach psychology at the university level, observed that David had intense one-on-one relationships, and many people felt close to him, including her. “We were in some ways like a couple. We could spend such amazing time together. I really felt like he was one of the people in my life who loved me unconditionally.” Some years later, David reminisced in a journal entry about his friendship with her: “I was working as a busboy in clubs and felt like the alien among a species of people I couldn’t understand—it was also a time of intense relationship with Peter. Jan gave me my first bike in years, an old sturdy delivery bike from the 40s or 50s—15 dollars from some thief she ran into and we took late night rides to Staten Island among the darkened hills and homes and Wall Street plazas Dubuffets mushrooms circling til dizzy around the fountains at World Trade Center til the crabby guards came screaming at us to stop we rode around anyways.”
Sometimes Hujar would drop by the studio. He and David were so intensely bonded, Mohlman said, “they rarely had to use spoken language. They just seemed to communicate so much with silence and proximity. Peter would come down and look at the artwork in the storefront and he would just stand there in silence and study it.”
She remembered David working with stencils. “I started to see the soldier motif. The camouflage motif. The science-project paintings with the antigravity theme.” (All three appear, for example, in Science Lesson, with its large and small floating bodies.) And he’d begun to paint on found objects like maps and trash can lids. Mohlman also remembered him talking about work he was doing in some abandoned pier, but she never went to see it.
Marisela La Grave was a student at the International Center for Photography in 1982. Assigned to document a site of her choosing for her class on color, she was halfway through the semester and still hadn’t found a place. She kept going back to the Hudson and walking the waterfront. One day, probably in March, near Canal Street, she noticed something through a broken window on Pier 34. “There was a figure painted on the wall. A big-scale figure that touched wall and ceiling, and then there was more than one, and then as I started getting close and breaking into the fence and breaking into the pier, I realized that I had found paradise.”
No one else was there. La Grave had no idea who’d put the art on the walls, but she’d found her site. She came back with photo equipment and began documenting the work. She was in one of the smaller rooms when she heard voices and picked up her tripod to use as a weapon. In walked David Wojnarowicz and the painter Luis Frangella, going, “Hey. What’s up?” La Grave may have been the first of the many photographers who would eventually document Pier 34 (the Ward Line Pier). David and Luis squired her around through the other crumbling rooms to show her everything they were working on.
They also took her farther south to Pier 28. “That was a very difficult pier to trespass because the floor was collapsing,” La Grave said. Pier 28 was also the location of the documents David and Kiki had plundered. La Grave called it “very officelike. Mostly just paper and boxes.” David would continue to work there alone after the art world discovered Pier 34.
Jane Bauman, one of the artists who’d gone stenciling with David, remembered visiting the pier during this phase with David and Luis. “The three of us would go down to the pier and sometimes we’d work on each other’s pieces, but in a playful way. That was the most playful I ever, ever saw David. He was so comfortable in that milieu, so relaxed. Serious but childlike. Not ‘childish’ but ‘childlike.’ It was his Disneyland. Going into all the different rooms—it’s like, This is Frontierland. There’s Tomorrowland. Something really innocent came out when he was working there with Luis. That was some of the prettiest, most alive work that he ever did. It was when he seemed the happiest.”
David leaping in front of an early piece at Pier 28, south of the Ward Line Pier and never as public. (Photograph by Marion Scemama)
One piece David did was a wall-size color version of the Rimbaud Masturbating studies he’d drawn while living in Paris. Next to that was a large face, another early David work. He was learning how to be a painter here. He and Luis did not really collaborate; their styles were too different. But Luis taught him something about how to paint. Luis was an expressionist with a line that was both fluid and confident, and he often worked big, painting with a brush or a roller on the end of a stick. “Luis really understood the scale aspect of working in a public space,” said La Grave, who grew close to him. They were both from South America and would go out for drinks and Spanish conversation. She remembered David’s admiration for Luis—“for the control that he had of the line and how he managed the proportions and perspective.” When David eventually covered a whole wall at the pier with a gagging cow head, “that came out of their relationship,” she said. “He was saying, ‘OK, watch me do a bigger scale.’ “
For a while, the gagging cow was a Wojnarowicz trademark. He explained it as a cow “exploding with fear.” It was a cow going to slaughter. Back in the East Village very late one night, Tommy Turner watched as David spray-painted one big enough to cover the entire intersection of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street. So Hujar could see it from his window. Another night, possibly in a different year, Chuck Nanney watched as David spray-painted not a gagging cow, but “a friendly cow,” as Nanney put it, in that same intersection. This cow had a thought bubble, and in that bubble, a hamburger. David cracked up as he drew it, as he thought about Hujar looking out his window in the morning and spotting the joke. He painted at least one more “friendly cow” there, this one thinking of a television. That one he wrote about in a short piece “for Sophie,” where he first talked about cruising Stuyvesant Park and then about coming down Second Avenue to see “the telly cow head seven feet tall and some boy outside La Bamba”—the bar on the corner—“screaming at me to grow up and get some crayons … and don’t fuck up the street … I walked at him like I was gonna spray-paint a cow on his forehead and he split.”
Gracie Mansion’s “Loo Division” opened on March 30, 1982. This became the scene’s best-known origin story—an exhibit put up around a toilet, a party that turned into a gallery.
Gracie was then Joanne Mayhew-Young, an artist with a job in a commercial SoHo gallery selling prints and posters, but she’d already done other projects that functioned as wry commentary on the way art is presented and sold. One Saturday afternoon, for example, she and her friend Buster Cleveland rented a limo for a few hours, parked it at the corner of West Broadway and Spring, and sold Buster’s collages out of the back seat. At the SoHo gallery where she worked, she and her co-worker Sur Rodney Sur took over the space behind the windows—space where they stood to change the displays—and hung a friend’s art there, clipped to coat hangers. Spectators had to open a door and walk in sideways. It was not visible from the street.
Gracie was then living at 432 East Ninth in a fifth-floor walk-up with a tub in the kitchen, though she had the luxury of a loo actually inside her apartment. There she decided to exhibit “photographic work prints” by her friend Timothy Greathouse. She invented her moniker,l made up letterhead for a nonexistent Gracie Mansion Gallery, and wrote a tongue-in-cheek press release stating that in an age when a single painting could cover “the entire interior of a normal apartment”—and who could afford it anyway—“Gracie’s ‘less is more’ gallery offers private seating … allowing the viewer to relate ‘head’ on with the work.” It was a real show but it was also the parody of a show.
But in March 1982, there wasn’t an East Village scene to provide context. Fun Gallery hadn’t attracted much attention in its first seven months. Gallery 51X opened the same month as the “Loo Division,” in Rich Colicchio’s apartment on St. Mark’s Place, but flew under the radar. Colicchio worried about zoning, the legalities—and what would happen if he got too much attention.
One of the “friendly cows” David drew for Peter Hujar on the intersection of Second Avenue and Twelfth Street, photographed from Hujar’s loft. (Courtesy of P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)
Gracie avoided such issues by opening the Loo Division for just the one day—and after that, by appointment only. She did not intend, at that point, to ever run a gallery. The “Loo Division,” though, posed all the questions that would later be brought up by the East Village scene: Did art have to be so pretentious? So intimidating? So expensive? So huge?
Gracie liked to say that she was created by the media. Her press release caught the eye of Howard Smith at the Village Voice, who covered the “Loo” opening and asked her, what’s your next show? That’s when she decided she’d do another.
Filmmaker Ivan Galietti was another who found himself entranced by the poetic ruin of the sex pier. He’d been born on the island of Capri, near Pompeii, and in the pier’s labyrinths and caves, its decay, and its sexually explicit “frescoes,” Galietti saw the phallic cults of pagan times. In 1982, the city scheduled the crumbling structure for demolition. (The warehouse finally came down in September 1983.) Keen to preserve it, at least on celluloid, he began filming Pompeii New York in early April. The Pyramid Club held a “Save the Pier” benefit to help Galietti raise money.
He didn’t want to “shoot voyeuristically from a corner” for a surreptitious documentary. Instead he recruited players from the Bar on Fourth Street and asked them to re-create what they’d done at the pier. David was one who immediately agreed to participate, though he appears only briefly: He’d brought an unidentified friend along; he walked over to this friend and started rubbing his chest. Galietti ended up with about half an hour of edited footage from Pier 46. He had even found a “cruising” passage in Dante’s Inferno to add to the voice-over.m He kept filming the waterfront over the years, but dceades later, Pompeii New York was still unfinished, more talked about than seen and thus another legend.
David’s moment in the film struck me as purposeful, brisk. But then, he was busy. Galietti filmed him on April 4—the same date that’s marked on the master tapes for the first and only 3 Teens Kill 4 album. So he was also working in the recording studio that day. And Jean Pierre was about to arrive for his first visit in more than a year.
JP stayed for two weeks. A few days after he left, David recorded himself, talking into his Walkman. He’d just done some heroin. Because Brian and Jesse were doing it. Because he’d been able to get some at work. Because he’d been told it was weak stuff, and he wanted to experiment. He seemed to be after “disordering the senses” in the spirit of Rimbaud, though he concluded by the end that it hadn’t worked. “I don’t think this tape really achieved anything in terms of speech or ideas or logic or thought.” However, after a slurred and rather incoherent beginning, interrupted by bouts of nausea, he reflected on his life the way he once did in his journal writing. It was a catalog of woe. He felt he’d lost the ability to be happy, to be romantic, to be energized, to dream. He wondered if it had all started when he’d fallen in love with Jean Pierre, then couldn’t live with him. And then realized that he was afraid of that—afraid “that loving someone and living with him will ruin me.”
He wanted to start writing again, but felt he needed to be “fully alone” to do that, not living with a roommate in a tiny space. He was in turmoil. As he explained on the tape, sometimes he wanted to be by himself and sometimes he loved people so much. Sometimes he wanted to walk out the door, just disappear and start a new life somewhere else. Sometimes he thought he was struggling in a way that would keep him struggling for the rest of his life. Sometimes he talked to the winos in the neighborhood and he could tell that they’d once had abilities to create things that might even exceed his, yet there they were—homeless. Sometimes he thought of his own death but always projected it as way in the future. And then there were times when he thought it could be soon. But he didn’t think about death much. “It won’t let itself be thought of.”
“I didn’t really enjoy doing this,” he concluded, “taking the junk.” He preferred speed. But he continued to experiment with heroin, a drug he romanticized. In Paris in 1978, he’d asked his sister to photograph him “shooting up” in front of the Eiffel Tower. He had tied off an arm with his neck scarf and posed with a BIC pen as the supposed needle.
That spring, the artist Ed Baynard set about curating a show for the SoHo gallery, Alexander Milliken. He wanted painters who were both figurative and expressionistic, like David Salle and Francesco Clemente, mixed with artists then considered graffitists, like Basquiat and Haring. And he kept wondering who’d done the burning house stencil he’d seen all over SoHo and the East Village.
One day he was walking down St. Mark’s Place when he saw Peter Hujar seated at an outdoor table at Dojo, a cheap vegetarian restaurant. Baynard and Hujar had known each other for at least twenty years. Baynard explained what he was doing. The group show. The burning house. The artist he couldn’t identify.
“I know who it is,” Hujar said. He gave Baynard the unfamiliar name.
Baynard asked, “Does he paint?”
“No, not yet,” Hujar told him. “But he’s thinking about painting.”
Baynard then called David, who invited him to the storefront studio on Houston. He said yes to participating—something like, this would give him the impetus to do a painting. He bought a Masonite board and created a diptych around an image of Hujar.
David had photographed Hujar on a couple of occasions—specifically, Hujar lying on his back. These pictures were eerily similar to the very last photos David would ever take of him, moments after Hujar’s death. But in 1981, he photographed Hujar lying on the floor of his loft and then, another day, Hujar lying on a boardwalk in a dark shirt, eyes closed. It was this image that David began to incorporate into his first paintings. He made it into a stencil. For this first diptych, Untitled (Green Head), he made two red squares, one made from red brick. In each, Hujar is lying on his back in a blue shirt. In one, he has a green head. In the other, he has a yellow head that’s exploded into fragments. Around him David stenciled his military images—running soldiers, planes, a burning house.
David used this photo of Peter Hujar to create a stencil he then used for Hujar Dreaming, for installations, and for more than a dozen other early paintings. (David Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library, NYU)
“I bought the painting,” Baynard said. “But it never occurred to me till much later how full and resolved this was for a first painting. Totally resolved.”
Baynard called his show “Fast.” It was one of those group exhibitions that galleries like to mount in the summer before everyone heads to a Hampton, but it was more distinguished than most. The eighteen artists included Anselm Kiefer and David Hockney, along with those named above. Each showed just one piece. Milliken printed a small catalog with an essay by Susan Putterman, who offered the first critical assessment of David’s art: “Using images of urban terrorism and violence, he constructs a universe devoid of moral reason. Although flatly and uniformly painted, the fore-shortened figure [Hujar] creates a sense of anxiety.… Wojnarowicz spotlights society’s inability to adhere to its own structures and confronts the viewer with a vision of anarchy and insanity.”
David created at least fourteen other pieces using this same image of Hujar, most notably Peter Hujar Dreaming/Yukio Mishima: St. Sebastian, one of his signature early works.
Alexander Milliken was intrigued enough to offer David his first solo show. He began working on it that summer.
The same day the “Fast” show opened at Milliken, David had another opening to attend on nearby Lafayette Street.
Public Illumination Gallery had set up its own summer extravaganza, called “411,” with four one-week, one-person shows. David was one of the four. “They were all elaborate installations, deliberately over the top,” said gallery director Jeffery Isaacs, who was then using the name Zagreus Bowery. (“Bowery” also edited the pocket-size Public Illumination magazine.) “The idea was that since people mainly go to openings, we’d do an opening every Friday for a month,” he said.
David’s show was all stencil work, applied directly to the walls of the tiny storefront. “I lived with my wife in the windowless room behind the gallery,” Isaacs said, “and I distinctly remember being not too wild about the spray-paint fumes. He only had a couple of days to do the installation, because of the ‘411’ schedule. I remember him working alone and me having to explain to him that no, he couldn’t work overnight, as we had to go to bed. The installation included a cassette player with an audio track playing. I don’t remember what.”
David’s imagery was all aggression and vulnerability. He used running soldiers in three sizes, a small burning house, many small bombers, a figure who holds one bent arm over his head, a large falling man, a rampaging wolf, the prone Hujar. Isaacs said that since it was the last of the four installations, he couldn’t resist leaving a small section up in a corner until he vacated the space in autumn 1983.
This was a period when David was taking photos of blindfolded men, and he used one of those images on the flyer he made for this show. Were they facing a firing squad? He never spoke or wrote about what these images meant to him.
(Courtesy of Jeffrey Isaacs)
That July, the Centers for Disease Control decided that, with GRID diagnoses coming in at the rate of 2.5 a day, it better start calling the disease an epidemic. Its scientists also had evidence now that GRID could be transmitted by blood. However, the Food and Drug Administration did not want the CDC meddling with the blood industry, which was the FDA’s turf. As Randy Shilts explained, “Many at the FDA did not believe that this so-called epidemic of immune suppression even existed.” Indeed, the FDA would not license a test allowing blood banks to screen their products until 1985.
In the summer of ’82, the CDC was at least able to jettison the GRID acronym—which many there refused to use—when someone came up with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS.
David bought his art supplies at the venerable New York Central and got to know one of the clerks there, Dean Savard. “I realized this guy knew just about everything there was to know about paper,” David told me. Like how different papers would react to spray paint. And then, David added a bit hesitantly—because Savard was still alive when we spoke—“he was giving art supplies away to anybody he thought was OK. He’d pack up a hundred sheets of paper, tons of paint brushes, and write up a bill for two dollars.”
One day when David came to the store, Savard told him he was opening a gallery. So David went over to 526 East Eleventh and had a look. “I just loved that it was in this little storefront. I liked the energy of him and the guy he was working with.” That was Alan Barrows. Savard was then a painter, using the storefront as a studio and living in the tiny back room, where he’d installed a loft bed over the meager kitchen utilities.
Barrows and Savard had met in Philadelphia while Savard was attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and working in an ice cream store. Barrows was a customer at that store until he decided that working there, with Savard, would be more fun than waiting tables somewhere else. They were never lovers. But two months after Savard moved to New York late in 1980, Barrows and his partner followed.
One night Barrows and Savard went to an opening at Fun, where they talked to the gallery’s co-director, Bill Stelling. This was the first Fun, a small basement room on Eleventh Street. Barrows thought it “kooky” that someone had decided “let’s just hang things on the wall and have a show.” But Stelling suggested that Barrows and Savard do it too. Why not start a gallery? Savard had certainly met lots of artists at New York Central. So they decided, why not. They opened their gallery in May 1982, publicizing the early shows with flyers made from press type and wheat-pasted onto buildings or distributed at the Pyramid Club.
Savard came up with the name. He told Barrows that on the way to work one day, he passed a woman standing on a milk crate, absolutely crazy and yelling out to no one in particular: “The Russians are coming! They’re going to invade! It’s going to be fucking civilian warfare in the streets of New York!” So, Savard told Barrows, they could call it “fucking civilian warfare.” Barrows laughed at this recollection. They ended up calling it Civilian Warfare Studio, at least while Savard was still living there. “It was a very amateur beginning,” Barrows said. But that too appealed to David, who said the gallery at first was sort of a goof, but “it felt very comfortable.” At that point, David recalled, Savard didn’t have any big illusions about where this would go. It would be many months before Civilian sold so much as a poster. Barrows and Savard both kept their day jobs and opened the place nights and weekends. Once the scene got rolling, however, the gallery quickly acquired a reputation for showing, as one critic put it, “the rawest, harshest work of quality in the East Village.”
On September 15, 1982, Civilian Warfare Studio opened “Hit and Run Art,” its “third group show,” featuring Bronson Eden, Dean Savard, and David Wojnarowicz. This may have been the last time Savard showed his own work. He quickly figured out that he was better at dealing. Eden designed a computer game called “Suzi Head Goes to War,” which ran on a monitor in the window. The game got such a reaction, Eden said, “That convinced Dean to make me a regular.” David told me that he showed Science Lesson, specifically because it was so large—almost fourteen feet long and eight feet tall. He’d had to “work on it in sections and flop it” at the Houston Street studio. Once they installed the piece in Savard’s storefront, David said, “Your face was almost in the painting, so it was kind of hilarious. It was like a joke for us.”
Eden worked with Savard at New York Central. He’d dropped out of sight while going through a divorce and thought his art career was over. Then he met Savard. “Within two years I was showing in Europe. Dean changed my life. But—he was also a heroin addict, a real pirate. It was a lifestyle. He used to wear these big, bulky overcoats so he could carry stuff out [of the store]. That’s how he paid for his heroin addiction, and he also used it to grease his way through the art world in the early days. Gave away a lot of free art supplies to people.
“For me,” Eden said, “the East Village—a lot of it was about Dean Savard. I remember an opening in maybe ’84 when the scene was really hot, and he just looked like an angel. Like something from another planet. He was wearing mascara, a jacket with no shirt, and he had this white hair that stuck out in all directions. He was just so charismatic and so smart. He was like a nova. He was incandescent. But he was much more influential in the early years. Later on he made some pretty bad mistakes. He screwed up. And then he died.”
The September 1982 issue of Arts magazine carried the first art world acknowledgment that something was stirring in the East Village: an article by Nicolas Moufarrege titled “Another Wave, Still More Savagely than the First.”
His thesis: What rock musicians had been to the sixties, artists would be to the eighties. In the East Village, Moufarrege saw signs of art with “mass appeal,” more entertaining, more understandable, more relevant. We were done now with seventies “severity,” all that minimalism and conceptualism. “Everything is moving so much faster: waves, volcanic eruptions, high voltage currents. Boomtown, a pulsing heart within the metropolis, the East Village, Manhattan, where different drummers unite in a Zeitgeist despite their varying and very personal rhythms. The need to communicate is overwhelming; in more important ways than literally, the boundaries of art have gone beyond the stretcher and the canvas.” By now there were six spaces to cite: Nature Morte, East Seventh Street Gallery, and Life (which would soon become Life Café), along with Fun, 51X, and Gracie’s “Loo.” (Civilian Warfare was still off the grid, a “studio” and not yet a gallery.)
Moufarrege came from Beirut by way of Paris, stopping at Harvard for a master’s degree in chemistry before moving to the East Village. He was the scene’s excited first champion—and an idiosyncratic artist in his own right. He painted on needlepoint canvas and did large embroideries that recycled and recombined imagery, from Picasso to Spider-Man, in thread. His “Another Wave” article contains what could be his manifesto. Or it could be David’s. Or it could belong to many of the other artists from this scene, at least in the early days:
I want to draw. I want to paint. I have something to say, to everyone and as many as I possibly can. I am doing it on the streets, I am doing it in my room, I am doing it underground. I am doing it on the trains, on the billboards, in the mail. The palaces are full. But new ones are being built: in the nightclubs and in the bathrooms. I will work with and on whatever I can lay my hands on. I will carve on a tree or on a rock. I will use paint, chalk, or any stick that leaves a mark. I will draw pictures and color them. I will write words, in my language and in yours. I will build toys. I will make sounds and instruments that make sounds. I will rap and I will sing and I will dance to it all. I want you to know my name. I want you to know my sign.
