Art, AIDS, and New York in the 80's

April 8, 2023 9:48 AM

As part of their monthly documentary series, Vice YouTube brings us the 2020 film Wojnarowicz: F**k You F*ggot F**ker [1h43m, with introduction and director interview 2h20m]. Told through Wojnarowicz's own works and recordings and other material from the time, this is a look at a fierce, angry, brilliant artist burning with rage against the heteronormative world and the unfolding AIDS crisis.

If you only know Wojnarowicz from his buffalo images that were used by U2 for a music video for their song One, then this will be eye-opening for you.

posted by hippybear (6 comments total)

thanks for sharing that, it was wonderful
posted by burr1545 at 2:28 PM on April 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Timely. I just got back from a day trip to Brattleboro, VT where the museum was displaying Keith Haring's subway sketches and a few other items.
posted by terrapin at 4:34 PM on April 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really enjoyed watching this and would never have found it or known to look for it. Thanks for posting.
posted by happyfrog at 5:21 PM on April 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

One day this kid...

I can't read it without crying a lot of tears. His work was and still is incandescent
posted by treepour at 10:09 AM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I wanted to come back and comment again, mostly because my use of the word 'enjoyed' in my comment above has been haunting me. Perhaps a better word would be 'transfixed'. I was transfixed throughout. I loved the use of messages from Wojnarowicz's answering machine - the check-ins, the in-jokes, the pauses, the concern. They were cute, funny, heartbreaking insights into the people in Wojnarowicz's life and his relationship with each of them. It's easy to valorise old technologies at the moment but those messages, boy, they're worth so much more than texts. I also hadn't realised Wojnarowicz had kept so much of ephemera of his life or that a lot of his art was really about recording his life, proving that he existed when so many people would have preferred him not to. The dedication to personal archive struck me as an odd parallel with Andy Warhol, when they seem to have had almost nothing else in common, except the obvious.
posted by happyfrog at 11:08 PM on April 11, 2023

I think "incandescent" and "transfixing" are two very good words for this film. I hope a bunch of people see it, because it feels so entirely NOW with its fury. And getting the full context about the queer art panic that was going on at the time was good -- I tend to forget details and lump a lot of people in together when there was a lot of separate attacks going on.
posted by hippybear at 10:15 AM on April 13, 2023 [1 favorite]