Review: Hard-charging documentary 'Wojnarowicz' is a portrait of an artist at war with AIDS, his political enemies, and his personal demons.
The artist David Wojnarowicz once painted a self-portrait in which he is shown with flames emanating from one side of his body — which is a perfect symbol for the brief, combustible life chronicled in Chris McKim’s documentary “Wojnarowicz.”
Wojnarowicz (pronounced “VOY-nah-ROH-vitch”) was one of the leading voices of the East Village art scene in the early 1980s. He was a multimedia artist, best known for creating giant canvas collages of confrontational images. He also made avant-garde art films, sometimes re-enacting the abuse his alcoholic father in Ohio used to heap on him. He also documented his life on film and in audio diaries, and McKim digs through both to find the nuggets he runs here.
He also took part in a punk band, called 3 Teens Kill 4, made up of friends who hung out at the Danceteria. The place became known as a refuge for future stars; the graffiti artist Keith Haring was a busboy, and a young dancer who went by one name — Madonna — would hang out there. When the place was raided one night, Wojnarowicz and his bandmates gave their first performance at a benefit for a legal defense fund — unnecessary, as one person in the film points out, because Mob-connected lawyers had bailed them all out.
McKim explores Wojnarowicz’ long and intense friendship with the photographer Peter Hujar, 20 years his senior, who became mentor and confidant. One art critic interviewed in the film calls it the most intense relationship between two artists since Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin started hanging out. When Hujar, 53, died of complications from HIV, on Thanksgiving Day of 1987, Wojnarowicz was devastated. Within a year, Wojnarowicz, too, was diagnosed with HIV.
The AIDS epidemic fueled Wojnarowicz’ rage, his art and his activism. He wrote an essay for “Witnesses,” an exhibition curated by Nan Goldin, whose political content (he called out Sen. Jesse Helms and New York’s Cardinal O’Connor for their anti-gay rhetoric) cause the National Endowment for the Arts to pull and then restore funding of the show. He marched with ACT UP, famously showing up at a protest of the Food & Drug Administration wearing a leather jacket with this message on his back: “If I die of AIDS, forget burial — just drop my body on the steps of the FDA.”
McKim hits the viewer with a barrage of images, most of them created by Wojnarowicz — including self-made videos, his art films, and pictures of his multimedia canvases. The artist’s own voice is heard through his audio journals, and the score is all taken from recordings of his band, 3 Teens Kill 4.
Friends and acquaintances (the best known name is writer and unofficial New York historian Fran Leibowitz) are heard in interview snippets, but McKim smartly avoids the talking-heads documentary cliches, keeping our eyes locked on Wojnarowicz’ hard-hitting visuals.
McKim makes sure we connect the dots between Wojnarowicz’s time and ours. Seeing Donald Trump both as a real estate hustler then or an incompetent, hate-fueled president is one thing. So is hearing Ronald Reagan on the stump in the ‘80s, promising to “make America great again.” What’s most powerful, though, is seeing a virus wreak havoc on a population, and seeing fearsome political activism and thought-provoking art result from it.
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‘Wojnarowicz’
★★★1/2
Available starting Friday, March 19, to stream on virtual cinemas, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably NC-17 for explicit sexual content. Running time: 105 minutes.