Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz

Author:David Wojnarowicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480489615
Publisher: Open Road Media

Are photographs just tiny windows looking onto the world, frozen moments of it that lie flat and quiet without sound or smell or movement? Susan Whatsername said something about photographs being like small deaths which is maybe true. Maybe not. Maybe such a statement reflects that person’s fear of being photographed. Certain people in certain places for ages have felt that a photograph steals a part of your soul, so when someone aimed a camera at them they were likely to throw a spear or cut the photographers throat or shoot them, or slug the photographer on the chin and demand a fifteen percent cut of the royalties. To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.

Not long ago, I had a retrospective of my paintings, photographs and sculptures in the midwest. A university professor who teaches a class on “pornography” brought his students to view my work and ask me questions. A student raised his hand and stated that he had learned from his teacher the difference between pornography and erotica but wanted to know what I considered some of my work which contained explicit sexual images. I told him that I don’t think there is a separation in images of sexuality such as pornography and erotica. Some images are capable of being insulting to me because they underscore the acceptance and maintenance of straight white male fantasies, of which our museums contain many examples, while excluding the diversity of sexual possibilities. Also, what may be considered erotica by me because of its familiarity and reflection of my desire may be considered pornography by someone who still considers the human body a taboo subject. Consider this: as a society we had to endure the media spectacle surrounding the polyps in Ronald Reagan’s asshole found during a routine examination and subsequently removed, and yet for the eight years during his presidency, he was completely silent about the AIDS epidemic. In those eight years we were denied access to any real information concerning our own bodies in the midst of this crisis. We still are. The Health and Human Services Department in 1990 finally has gotten around to printing a pamphlet explaining how to use a condom but will only release it to people who call an AIDS hotline and to some health professionals. James Brown, a department spokesperson defended this murderous decision by saying, “Obviously the federal government does not tell local communities what to teach their children. We’re telling them it’s available. It’s up to them to decide to use it.” But if you were to substitute any other disease for AIDS in this situation, do you think it would be so socially acceptable for government to just leave it up to a handful of individuals to decide whether they educate anyone about a deadly epidemic or not.

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