5
Turning Heads
In his 1963 review of Rechy’s City of Night, O’Hara writes that some of the novel’s “best parts (especially the Mardi Gras section) seem to show an original interpretation of what Rimbaud, no less, was doing in the ‘parade’ poems and in A Season in Hell, without getting into that boring avant-garde version of the French prose poem which is so ubiquitous, or was until two years ago.”1 O’Hara could perhaps not have predicted that, in the years following his own untimely death in 1966, the influence of Rimbaud’s poetry and his infamously deranging celebration of “that atrocious fanfare” would extend far beyond “boring” prose poem imitations and the carnival section of Rechy’s novel, which he suggests is perhaps one of “the finest and most compelling prose realization of derangement through social confrontation in American letters.”2 Rimbaud’s influence could be felt among New York artists and writers throughout the 1960s and ’70s in the work of poets like O’Hara and John Ashbery, but also musicians and writers like Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Richard Hell, and Dennis Cooper, to name only a few.3 Louise Varese’s translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, first published in 1946 and revised in 1957 with New Directions, brought this collection, and with it what O’Hara calls the “parade” poems, to a wider American readership.
David Wojnarowicz was one such avid reader, and in 1977, at the age of twenty-two, he published a prose poem called “Reading a little Rimbaud in a Second Avenue coffee shop” in the first and only issue of Red M, a small magazine he coedited with the writer John Ensslin.4 Its title makes several readings available. On the one hand, the poem captures the speaker’s reading of one particular poem, “Parade” (which is translated by Varese as “Side Show”); thus, a little bit of Rimbaud. On the other, the title speaks to the physical book itself, a compact New Directions Paperbook—or a little Rimbaud—which represents the poet’s oeuvre through synecdoche, or allows the poet’s vital presence to be carried in miniature. Wojnarowicz’s poem, like his larger 1978–79 photographic project Arthur Rimbaud in New York, which will be one of the main focuses of this chapter, corroborates this sense of temporal interpenetration. It features a speaker experiencing a “lull in the body” while his “mind [is] working on” Rimbaud’s poem in a Second Avenue coffee shop, such that he “can’t breathe as well as before” and the air “turns thick.”5 Experiencing his body anew, the speaker sits as the world goes
on outside the shop just rushing by in waves of sound
& i cant do anything about it it could be nineteen twenty or eighteen
sixty or now & it wouldnt make a difference except maybe I wouldnt
be
reading what i’m reading where i am what i am
This moment catches itself in the act of effacing historical “difference,” experienced by a reader for whom the act of reading brings to light a foreign projected past, a “spectral past encountered in the material present as active and perceptibly current,” Anderson suggests.6 Perhaps, the poem suggests, this “I” would not be “reading” Rimbaud back in Rimbaud’s time but writing him, or writing like him. In this regard “Parade” is a telling intertext as an object for imitation, for it too observes the pageantry of everyday life made infernal, like a hellish accompaniment to Whitman’s “City of Orgies” in which the “hommes murs” [“ripe men”] are “droles tres solides” [“Very sturdy rogues”] and the speaker assumes the role of sensory ringleader, for “J’ai seul le clef de cette parade sauvage” [“I alone have the key to this savage side show”].7 Wojnarowicz, too, is on the precipice of possessing the “clef” [key] to this moment of perception, ending the poem with the realization that “all of this must mean something.” This poem both approximates in a curt American English something of Rimbaud’s style in “Parade,” zooming in upon the ominous and surreal potential of minutiae, and suggests that the act of personation can arise from reading as well as writing. Reading a “little Rimbaud” collapses the temporal gap between the “now” and the time of the poet’s boyhood in the 1860s, while checking in with the roaring “twent[ies]” on the way.
Wojnarowicz’s own little edition of Rimbaud, the one featured in this poem, brings (if only anecdotally) a literal dimension to this sense of a handed-down relation. A secondhand copy, the inside cover bears a stamp denoting that the book belonged to a Peter Kemeny, residing in Adams House, Harvard University.8 That Wojnarowicz, who received no formal qualification beyond a high school diploma and was largely self-taught as an artist and writer, came to possess this edition speaks to a multiplicity in Rimbaud’s fate as an icon both in and out of the academy, as a poet whose work was being read by Harvard undergraduates and East Village punks alike. Wojnarowicz’s relation to Rimbaud situates and reperforms the poet’s work in sketchy and contingent urban contexts. “For Wojnarowicz,” Anderson writes, “Rimbaud’s poetry permitted a reconfiguration, a mythologizing of autobiography that appealed to the young writer, who continually rewrote and reinvented the events of his own past.”9 He finds in Rimbaud a cipher for his own uninstitutional youth as a teenage hustler on the streets of New York, and reconstitutes his life in Rimbaud’s image.
The first publication of the Arthur Rimbaud in New York images, in a June 1980 edition of the SoHo Weekly News, was accompanied by text that begins: “When I was younger and living among the city streets I assumed the smoking exterior of the convict. I entered the shadows of mythologies and thieves and passion.”10 This text is echoed by Wojnarowicz’s later notion of the camera as an instrument which “in some hands can preserve an alternate history” (“Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-Inch Tall Politician,” CK, 144).11 and this notion of photography as a medium of the marginal also reveals how these portraits of the artist as a young man depend upon the “smoking exterior” of Rimbaud as an archetype, one that gives shape and an “alternate” glamour to traumatic experience.
In the fall of 1975 Wojnarowicz did attend one class, Bill Zatavksy’s free poetry workshop at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village. Biographer Cynthia Carr describes this class as constituting “the whole of David’s higher education.”12 Little if any attention has been paid to Wojnarowicz’s unpublished poetic work from this period, perhaps because it is often perceived, Carr suggests here, as “dense if not overwritten and purplish.”13 Eileen Myles, a fellow attendee of Zatavsky’s workshop, tells Carr that Wojnarowicz “used poetry as a launching pad,” and “poetry is very often a plan. Like a list. At the beginning of a career, it can be a list of the directions you’d like to go.”14 Carr has noted more recently that perhaps the most “surprising thing” about Wojnarowicz’s checkered and intricate life story is that “he had erased the roughly four years of his life devoted to poetry,” and “certain of his poetry friends felt that this was about more than creating a persona—that he had willed himself into becoming someone else” and did away with his own rough-draft years.15 Arthur Rimbaud in New York, which Wojnarowicz began working on after returning from Paris, marks his first major work as an artist and thus the end of his immersion in poetry. The curator David Breslin notes that this is not accidental, and that the “more consequential conjuring trick” of this work “was in selecting” at its center “a poet who famously had stopped writing poetry.”16 This chapter contends, in the face of Wojnarowicz’s seeming disavowal of his poetic work and scholarship’s following suit, that the “launching pad” of his early poems can better illuminate the implications of the Rimbaud in New York project as an excavation not only of Wojnarowicz’s youth, but his lifelong interest in looking and cruising. While they can at times feel rough or “overwritten,” Wojnarowicz’s texts from this period constitute a rich “list” of images and concerns that are variously manifest in his later visual practices and written style.
Wojnarowicz’s relationship to Rimbaud as an icon and surrogate for his own practice can also be illuminated by some of the material details of this edition of Illuminations. Most immediately apparent is the collection’s cover, which was designed by collagist and mail artist Ray Johnson, a contemporary of O’Hara’s. Johnson reproduced Étienne Carjat’s famous 1871 portrait of the young French poète maudit using the Ben-Day dots screen printing process, a technique popular among artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. This adaptation put Rimbaud’s image into circulation by deploying the Pop form’s self-conscious iconicity and constructed a blueprint symbol of the poet’s precocious and renegade sensibility, which was widely disseminated in the artistic production of New York in this era. Johnson himself returned to this image for his 1971 Rimbaud project, reproducing it in Arts Magazine with instructions written on the back for readers and prospective mail artists to “Detach Along Dotted Line” and “Participate by adding words, letters, colors or whatever to face.”17 This mail art project—which Johnson also replicated with an image of Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud’s older lover—marks the point at which artists begin taking Rimbaud’s image, quite literally, into their own hands.
Wojnarowicz’s own “early adoption of collage as a way of giving visual form to his literary aspirations” can be found “on postcards sent to friends,” writes David Kiehl, and along with the Rimbaud works Wojnarowicz also created “collages as homages” to Jean Genet.18 Genet was another important French forebear whose image, like Rimbaud’s, also proliferated in American artistic circles at this time, and was made ubiquitous by the presence of Brassaï’s famous portrait on the cover of the 1969 Grove Press edition of Funeral Rites. It was Carjat’s portrait of Rimbaud that Wojnarowicz, after Johnson, cut out for the famous mask at the center of his photographic project. Using a borrowed 35 mm camera, Wojnarowicz photographed his friends John Hall, Brian Butterick, and lover Jean-Pierre Delage, whom he met during an extended trip to Paris in 1978–79. They each wore the mask in numerous locales throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn, forming a narrative journey that travels between the crowded and the desolate, the built-up and the derelict. In this sense the project foregrounds the turning head as a visual effect and turns upon the nexus of meanings and associations Rimbaud’s famous head calls to mind. Which is to say that this imported head also refers back to the body of writing that it famously illustrates, not least Rimbaud’s short prose poem “À une raison,” where the poet renders a moment of repetition as a gestural reflex, the dual motion in which “Ta tête se détourne: le nouvel amour! Ta tête se retourne: le nouvel amour!” [Your head turns away: the new love! Your head turns back: the new love!].19 This substitution, in which Rimbaud’s head appears as a shorthand for his poems themselves and illuminates their resonance in a new historical and geographical present, has further metonymic potential as a relation not only to the poet’s corpus but to the body itself.
This “turn” of the “head” performed in the Rimbaud project, then, a simultaneous turn toward a cultural past and one’s own artistic future, pertains equally to the more immediate turn toward strangers in the street, those possible “new love[s]” or hustling clients. The sexual fantasies of Wojnarowicz’s early poems cast light upon the Rimbaud project’s particular resonance as a portrait of cruising. The “conceptual economy and brilliance of the [Rimbaud] mask,” Breslin writes, is its suggestion that “separation and mediation can be addressed only through the experience of the encounter.”20 The “face-to-face meeting with another [ . . . ] that precedes every other form of exchange or communication” is vital to “the act of cruising,” in which the very “armature of society” is stripped “down to the immediacy of the encounter with another.” Conceiving of Rimbaud in New York in dialogue with his earlier poems reveals an intersection between word and image that animates much of Wojnarowicz’s artistic activity, and signals an “early desire to have both pictures and words (or at least a symbol like Rimbaud to evoke them) equally at his disposal and frequently copresent.”21 And this copresence, I will suggest, has a particular pertinence for representing the encounter between multiple present bodies; the temporally various “look” of cruising.
Juvenilia and Jerking Off
Wojnarowicz’s encounter with Rimbaud in the Second Avenue coffee shop, a spatiotemporal blur intervening in an otherwise quotidian scene, locates the sensation of perceptual foreignness in the interstices between the earthly and the mental, the street and the window on to it. The interior setting speaks to the distinction between the world “going on outside the shop” and the one inside, in the coffee shop and the mind. To be on the inside looking out is to apprehend the urban scene as in a frame, as a moving tableau delimited by a window. It allows one to inhabit the position, or fantasy, even, of nonparticipation that has long attended accounts of urban experience, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 story “The Man of the Crowd.” The protagonist sits at the “large bow window” of a London “Coffee House,” and observes “the world of light” that “flitted before the window.”22 Whether for the purposes of the flaneur’s observation or a Rimbaudian reverie, such a vantage claims to offer both access to and protection from the urban spectacle. It allows recollection in relative tranquility, however ominous it may be in its own right, as signaled by the poem’s suggestion of a “constant evil eye / look around the joint on the watch for gangster types.”23 The contingency of “outside” is different; the exposure of daylight may offer protection from dangerous “types,” but the street has unique capacities for deviancy and alienation. Arthur Rimbaud in New York takes place predominantly in this exterior terrain, one where “eighteen sixty” and “now” are not interchangeable alternates in an interior reverie but are in clear visual juxtaposition, thus making the Rimbaud figure a “type” who sticks out, by turns vulnerable, desirous, and dangerous.
The Rimbaud in New York series contains windows of a literal kind, like the glass panes through which the Rimbaud figure is seen sitting in a diner and a late-night pizza restaurant, and another image shows Rimbaud looking into an unknown window at nighttime. The windows Wojnarowicz is chiefly drawn to in this work, however, are mental in nature, like the sensation of “something like a tiny window being opened up somewhere to the back of the head [ . . . ] a small distinct memory falling into place back there.”24 This account of memory, appended to the Rimbaud images in the 1980 SoHo Weekly News centerfold without further explanation, suggests something other than the “urban shock” of memoire involontaire, and instead a slow drift of approximations—“something like” and “somewhere”—that make up a “small and distinct” sensation in process at the instant of apprehension. These images stage the simultaneous turn of the head toward new objects of apprehension, as well as the past embodied by Rimbaud and the lyric past of their author illuminated somewhere in the “back,” behind the scenes of its construction. This multiple temporality, in dialogue with the poems he was writing in the lead-up to the Rimbaud in New York project, suggests for Wojnarowicz an intricate erotics of photographic memory where preservation is also linked with masturbation. The passage that frames the Rimbaud centerfold, with its description of the “smoking exterior” Wojnarowicz assumed while “living on the city streets,” can first be found in an earlier prose poem entitled “masturbation photo.” It begins:
In the intoxication of laying my hands to myself, I sometimes see
my childhood in the company of old pederasts; elegant strangers
entering the dried gardens of their homes low lit rooms, those of
their homes. They disrobe and revealing the future of the flesh,
that which moves acrossalong landscapes across years I have not
slept.25
The framing of this recollection as a “masturbation photo” is wrong-footing if only because it suggests in the first instance an image chosen for self-pleasure, perhaps pornographic fodder, before recasting this photo as an object of involuntary memory that is “see[n]” in the sexual act, a traumatic relation that may nonetheless still be a site of pleasure.
These embodiments of an abject bodily future are recalled in the present moment of masturbation through the past lens of a child’s vantage point. Wojnarowicz here offers an account of desire as it is bred and distorted by the past. He spins from these traumatic memories a pronounced visual scheme—of sordid hotel rooms cast as “dried gardens”—and in turn a certain expressive excess. The poem’s images are positioned between candor and confection, and assume that slippage where remembered experiences take on the air of imagined ones. These may seem dreamed or invented, like “shadows and mythologies of thieves and passion” imported by the Rimbaud figure, and riff upon the poet’s associations with dissidence and homosexuality. There is another important French forebear here, too. Genet, who appears throughout Wojnarowicz’s work and in several of his photographic collages, is a poster child for erotic fantasy as a form of composition. Jean-Paul Sartre described Genet’s 1943 novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs as the “epic of masturbation”; a low-life fantasy of pimps and drag queens conceived for the imprisoned narrator’s own self-pleasure and animated by “reveries” and “dream words,” but which begins to take on the appearance of the empirically remembered.26 This interrelation between a fantasy conjured in the masturbatory present and the palpable sense of a past that makes up that conjuring marks the mediation involved in the act of remembering itself, where recorded material is given its fuller, later iteration with a new dimension. Wojnarowicz is often concerned, in this vein, with the visuality of memory, and in his writing itself phrases—like that of the convict’s “smoking exterior”—are rehearsed in numerous guises in the form of journal entries or attempts at poems. The “shadows” one enters are after all interior spaces that are ever in dialogue with the “city streets.” The lived environment of the city gives shape to the constructed “mythologies” of erotic self-realization and is thus similarly full of fodder for later pleasures; a cruising diary might read just like a dream diary.
This Genet-inspired temporality of masturbation is conceived of by Wojnarowicz as photographic—and in fact in 1983 he produced a collage work titled Jean Genet Masturbating in Metteray Prison in which, Anderson argues, both “Wojnarowicz and the viewer are implicated in the position of the masturbating figure.”27 This masturbatory temporality frames cruising as an apprehension that is the germ cell of fantasy. You turn your head, the new love; this phrase has a hidden future perfect, announcing a moment that will have been momentous, to be seen subsequently in a memory erotically developed. “I am to see to it that I do not lose you,” in Whitman’s words. Strangers seen in passing provide raw sensory material for fantasies that might be fleshed out simultaneously, which is to say at the moment of apprehension, or subsequently in tranquility, behind closed doors. As with Whitman’s “faint indirections,” a gesture of drawing in, cruising functions according to a certain negotiation between the known and unknown and draws energy from inference rather than information. Wojnarowicz’s work is alive to the importance of this distance and conceives of interpersonal inscrutability as being companionable with the mysteries of photography. It claims, in this regard, the Rimbaud figure as the cruiser par excellence.
Another poem reaching back to Wojnarowicz’s childhood, “Distance,” ponders both the candor (or lack thereof) in photographic form alongside the masturbatory act, which is described as “the hand that one can put to themselves / while the eyes close on men miles and miles / away and the distances not measured by the map or clock.”28 It is one such distance, measurable by the “clock” but nonetheless ineffable, too, that is described at the start of this poem:
I have in my wallet a photograph of myself at age three or four. It is
not
a very good photo because you can hardly see what I am thinking . . .
Here Wojnarowicz betrays a conception of photography, as a document of what the subject “is thinking,” which echoes the form’s historic relation to revelation and the unadulterated. And yet in its value judgment of the “good” photo, Wojnarowicz’s description seems “miles and miles” from his own work. These lines also refer to an implicit distinction being made between the photograph as artwork and the photograph as a personal memento. The latter kind, something kept in your “wallet,” is less an object of artistry than it is of bearing witness to a moment in a life trajectory. This category of images, whose “talismanic uses [ . . . ] express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical,” comprise an attempt to “contact or lay claim to another reality.”29 So writes Sontag, a critic Wojnarowicz once referred to irreverently as “Susan Whatsername” who said “something about photographs being like small deaths which is maybe true” (“Do Not Doubt,” CK, 143–44.) Wojnarowicz’s childhood photo is not “very good,” in this regard, because it fails to approximate the kind of proximity in which its viewer can get at what this toddler is “thinking.” This dynamic, of trying to get at the subject’s thoughts, is described later in the poem in relation to its temporal inverse, the “times back then when I wondered what I would be thinking now and it is now.” The poem’s compositional moment recasts this thought experiment back across time. This return to a premasturbatory childhood summons, through a retrospective future-tense, something both irrecoverable and inevitable. It makes these child and adult selves foreign to one another even while they are inexorably bound.
These respective phenomena—a photo of a child looked at by their adult self and that child’s mental projection of their future person—have something in common, for they both rely upon forms of affective conjecture. Even a photograph, the more concrete of these images, depends for its life upon an imaginative projection, or an incitement “to reverie” about its subject. To think of a photo which does not yield easily to reading as not “very good,” as Wojnarowicz does here, seems somewhat at odds with the nature of its potency. It is the act of wondering—rather than merely seeing, or knowing—that produces an intimate pull between image and viewer. Barthes’s punctum, after all, does not emanate from the immediately knowable. While “Distance” focuses on the strangeness of encountering yourself as a child, with the appearance of an uncanny distance, this strangeness also has an evident erotics pertaining to others, that “sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs [and which] feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.”30 This distance might be one measurable by the “map” or “clock,” or one which seems to exceed such an apparatus; an intimate distance even within closeness, to recall the terms of Benjamin’s “aura.” In cruising, these senses of the familiar and the faraway are yielded simultaneously in the figure of a person just yards away. Recalling his hustling days in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, Wojnarowicz describes “promiscuity” as a “vessel in which I could pour fantasy”:
The less I knew about the person I was having sex with, the more amazing it was to me. It wasn’t loaded down with too much detailed knowledge—their owl collection, or their disgusting habits—that would have made it absurd in the face of what living was for me then.31
The nature of this “detailed knowledge” ranges here between the bizarre and the cloyingly familiar, and such knowledge is a shorthand for the kind of domesticity that is “absurd” to the forms of “living” that both cruising and hustling constitute, in that these activities are resolutely outside of normative social belonging. But this sense of the unknown also restores a certain agency to the person facing it; the less known, the more that can be imagined, leaving more room for “fantasy” to be “pour[ed]” in. It follows that such elasticity then also prepares such encounters the better for memory, and a tryst not “loaded down” with information is riper for pleasurable rewriting.
In another interview with Nan Goldin, Wojnarowicz speaks more particularly to the indistinguishability of “fantasy and reality,” which are “just as important” as each other.32 Fantasies “were stored pieces of information that I create collages out of,” and “when I start thinking of an image to jerk off to—a guy, a situation, a place, whatever—it’s like ‘Have I ever seen that guy in my life?’” (202). Fantasies turn on such a question; they emerge in Wojnarowicz’s account as composite forms made from “fragments of memory” that prolong the life of a cruise by overlaying it with an extra, “made up” resonance. That such fantasies are intimately linked with visual culture is evident: “We carry,” Wojnarowicz continues, “a whole store of genetic information that pops up like a movie screen or slide screen or something” (202–3). This tentatively drawn metaphor casts memory as cinematic or photographic or “something” similar, and this vagary speaks to the connection’s own limitation, for this is not a direct and identical relation but rather an imaginative projection which brings them into dialogue. It also echoes Wojnarowicz’s earlier notion of photography as an act of “collecting evidence” to make “a collage of reality.”33 As a collection of images of the male form it also recalls the “loosely conceived and never completed photographic project” referred to as the Male Series, composed of portraits of the male body and featuring subjects that included Peter Hujar and Iolo Carew.34 The notion of this visual and erotically charged “store” echoes Sontag’s description of the way that photographs “can abet desire in the most direct, utilitarian way—as when someone collects photographs of anonymous examples of the desirable as an aid to masturbation.”35 But the images that linger from passing encounters or a transient glance are not so readily “utilitarian” because they require a certain creative capacity. Their erotic mystery is of course different from the concrete and material form that a photograph takes, but it is precisely the latter’s capacity to freeze the possibly transient that provides this conception of the mind’s eye as an instrument of preservation, and brings the evanescent everyday moment into the orbit of the visual archive.
This connection, too, is not just a citation of the visual per se, but of a mediatized visual culture providing erotic titillation, and the frisson that makes up the semiotic fodder of cruising can also be rewired into historical or more traditionally literary images, like the portrait of Rimbaud. Wojnarowicz links his account of masturbatory fantasy to his “first sense of desire” as a child, “looking at a TV Guide” and coming
across a soap advertisement of this guy under a stream of running water, lathering himself up. And there was something about the musculature in his chest, something about his face, his lips, his eyes, his arms, his bicep that I went into a trance.36
This trance of absorption accounts for that “something” which pricks, “the intoxication of laying my hands to myself” experienced as a child, prior to the advent of that act. It is also structured according to the particular mediation of the body by the advert and highlights the respective body parts of its “lathering” subject to construct a desirable image through which to sell soap. In this regard, the erotic trance that might be induced by an image arises from the coexistence between the punctum and the studium, to return to Barthes’s terms. It is an experience all at once of consciously intended or constructed dimensions alongside the potent “something” that is felt to emerge more contingently. Wojnarowicz’s fixation upon masturbation in these early poems and later accounts in interviews suggests an erotics that locates in the act of remembering a shared reliance upon fantasy and reality, and privileges strangeness or indirection as highly as the collage of “information” that can be inferred in a passing encounter. If this unfolds “like” a photograph or a movie, as a metaphorical conception rehearsed by these unpublished poems, then Arthur Rimbaud in New York constitutes the execution of such a work. Indeed Wojnarowicz’s tribute to the French poet, the next section of this chapter contends, can be conceived of as a cruising montage that gives visual expression to the “new love” of the streets and piers.
Going Rimbaud
The erotic ambiguity of a photograph’s address is exploited to the full in Arthur Rimbaud in New York. The poet’s face suggests little sense of what he is “thinking” and provides little space for “detailed knowledge.” Wojnarowicz’s partner Tom Rauffenbart writes that this “blank, unchanging face” seems “always to be watching and absorbing sights and experiences,” as if its sideways glance is caught at the moment just before the “détourne”/“retourne” that will bring to light the “new love.”37 This mysteriousness is also, Rauffenbart continues, a product of the figure’s solitude. In “the end,” whether on the thoroughfare of Forty-Second Street or on a deserted Coney Island beach, this figure “remains alone,” differentiated from any surrounding bodies in the frame by the mask’s blankness, as if this might speak to some essential solitude in Wojnarowicz himself as a “loner.”38 The image on Forty-Second Street, perhaps the series’ best known, features Rimbaud standing amongst the street’s bustle with his gaze fixed to the left of the frame. The figure’s “blank, unchanging face” and solid stance seem particularly uncanny here because they suggest an absence of feeling or sensation even amidst the sensorium of Midtown, and he is juxtaposed with the emphatic motion of the half-jumping figure who crosses the street behind him. The mask, a photograph within a photograph, introduces a lifelessness into the frame and this cutout face, yanked from another historical time and place, highlights the action of disembodiment that has taken place. The mask may provide “relief from exposure,” Olivia Laing writes regarding this work, but it is also “uncanny, sinister, unnerving.”39 It possesses what Leo Bersani, in an essay on haunting stares, describes as a “goneness”; a withdrawal that manifests as “the unfathomable sadness of an irremediable unconnectedness.”40 To return to the terms of O’Hara’s “Homosexuality,” being “pierced by a glance” here functions not through “taking” a mask “off” but putting one on. This glance is piercing because it suggests a subject for whom, Bersani writes, the “fully present, fully visible” world is “somehow not there”; one who is immune to the surrounding “environment’s soliciting and solicitous presence.”41
And yet could this “goneness” not itself be “solicitous,” this “unconnectedness” an invitation to connection? Wojnarowicz’s images figure solitude, but attending that solitude is the strange companionship that is formed between a portrait and its beholder. The images are shot through with the sense that Rimbaud knows we are looking, even if it is left unsettlingly unclear how well he himself can see through the mask’s slit-cut eyes. This involvement functions according to a suspension of historical time that is already playing out in the composition of the image, merging 1872 with 1979. This temporal layering provides a certain latitude for entering the image’s diegesis, as a process that reflectively casts the spectator as a character in, or just outside of, its frame. It is in this sense that the Rimbaud figure of Wojnarowicz’s project—which has the sheen of the “real” conferred by photography—is not, or does not imagine himself to be, entirely alone, even in abandoned or empty urban scenes.
His gaze might then be accounted for by another passing stranger, one of any number of possible urban types: the stalker, the detective, another cruiser on the hunt for the “new love.” In this regard these frozen, melancholic images court a futurity, as if they each stage the beginning of a potential erotic encounter to be multiplied or repeated across numerous New York locales. Wojnarowicz writes in his later prose piece “Losing the Form in Darkness” that these “streets were familiar more because of the faraway past than the recent past—streets that I walked in those odd times while living among them in my early teens when in the company of deaf mutes and times square pederasts [ . . . ] seen through the same eyes but each time with periods of time separating it” (CK, 13). This palimpsestic quality of place is something echoed by the Rimbaud images. The “faraway past” refers not only to Wojnarowicz’s teen hustling days, which are signaled by the Times Square movie theaters in the background of the Forty-Second Street image, but the historical past of the French poet. Rimbaud, Wojnarowicz writes in a catalog for the 1990 exhibition where these photos were first shown, was not necessarily a direct surrogate of the artist himself but “a device to confront my own desires, experiences, biography and [ . . . ] those places that suddenly and unexpectedly revive the smell and traces of former states of body and mind long ago left behind.”42 The dead poet is thus revived here to erotic ends. As Jonathan Weinberg points out, “one of the most interesting aspects of Wojnarowicz’s use of the photocopied mask” is “the way it shifts the emphasis away from Rimbaud as a poet to his representation,” such that the French poet’s “derangement of the senses becomes a different kind of derangement—the transformation and degrading of the image.”43 Rimbaud provides the occasion to explore one’s own contingent amorous past but also cuts an archetypal figure, as a shorthand for a sexual agent living outside of the confines of respectable social practice, who is reintegrated into the visual economy of gay cruising.
Above all, however, it is the deathly anachronism of this mask which conditions the photo’s gaze. This tension between the vital and the static, and between the New York settings and Rimbaud’s stony, staring face, plays out according to our experience of the work, and whether we encounter it in what Bersani calls the “culturally sanctioned site of staring: the museum.”44 Besides publishing several images from it in the SoHo Weekly News and other small publications, Wojnarowicz did not present Arthur Rimbaud in New York for reception until 1990, when he printed a portfolio of twenty-five images (from a much larger pool of negatives) to display in his In the Garden exhibition at P.P.O.W. It was exhibited as an example of his first significant work, thus turning a retrospective glance toward his youth, and the “pictures would have been seen free of any text other than a title and the artist’s statement, which viewers could read or ignore.”45 In that statement, Wojnarowicz writes that he was “attracted to the ‘youth’ in the series; the rock and roll do or die abandon of that period of time.”46 Imagining these photographs displayed in an exhibition space, with Rimbaud’s visage multiplied throughout the room, calls to mind Whitman’s description of the “phantom concourse” of the daguerreotype gallery, the sense of a “peopled word” as “mute as the grave,” and the time of their presentation, just two years before Wojnarowicz’s death from complications from AIDS, provides a morbid gloss on the “do or die abandon” they furtively celebrate.
Yet such a space also lends the work a new kind of vitality. In requiring its visitors to move through it, the embodied mobility of viewing these images spatially approximates something of the peripatetic experience Wojnarowicz seeks to capture in them, where the mean streets are replaced with the white cube. Your head turns away, your head turns back. The arrangement into twenty-five images also lends the project the linear force of a chronological narrative that can be walked through. It begins, according to Mysoon Rizk’s reading, with “Rimbaud’s imaginary arrival by sea at Coney Island” and ends with “his fatal, albeit fictive, overdose of heroin in an abandoned warehouse on a Hudson River pier.”47 This iteration was the closest Wojnarowicz got to executing the work as a cinematic montage, a possible form suggested by an unpublished 35 mm photo script that maps out Rimbaud’s movements from Brooklyn to Chinatown and Times Square.48 This script also mentions a shot of Rimbaud inside a movie theater eating popcorn and facing the screen intently. If present in the final series, this image would provide a self-reflexive gloss on the work as a whole, which depends upon that “mobilized virtual gaze,” an optical relationship where viewers feel themselves immersed or transported and which is described by Anne Friedberg as a hallmark of both the cinema and the exhibition space, with its roots in nineteenth-century flânerie.49 Similarly self-reflexive, if attending to Rimbaud in New York as a montage, is the narrative move to the dilapidated pier, where the Rimbaud figure retires from the streets and sits with a newspaper, and is then photographed masturbating in the next image. This plays out within the narrative what is implicit as a potentiality in each of the series’ images, which capture discrete instances of apprehension that are made ripe for recollection in tranquility, where they provide material for self-pleasure, perhaps overlaid or further stimulated by the fodder of a newspaper.
If erotic fantasy, as a site of vision that turns both to the past of occurrence and the futurity of the potential or the yearned for, “pops up like a movie screen or slide screen or something,” Arthur Rimbaud in New York gets close to an actualization of that “something.” A screenwork that exorcises and eroticizes through reperformance some of the artist’s own past demons, it spotlights in its frames the visual dimensions of memory. In this sense, the ends of this project have parallels with some of Wojnarowicz’s earliest ideas for an artwork in tribute to Rimbaud, namely a series of illustrations of the poems from Illuminations. The line from “À une raison” with which I began sits in epigraphic relation to Arthur Rimbaud in New York; it narrates the “new love” of the moment of encounter, a “new love” that is after all an old one too, made in the image of an old young poet with the power to turn heads. These images also constitute quasi-illustrations of many of Wojnarowicz’s early poems, at least in glimpses; rogue phrases like the “smoking exterior of the convict” travel directly from the manuscript pages of the mid-70s to the Rimbaud project, and provide a textual foundation, albeit in fairly juvenile form, through which to explicate the workings of erotic fantasy that inform these images.
Text and image are amorphous variables in Wojnarowicz’s work. They are forms that refer to one another in a desirous bind. Many of his paintings, for example, foreground textual matter and typography, and just as the Rimbaud images are illuminated by Wojnarowicz’s earlier textual or poetic experiments, which offer something of a conceptual framework, his later published prose works are steeped in consciously framed images, seeming to yearn for the slippage into visual form. Composed largely of cruising stories that take place on the streets of New York and the abandoned Hudson River piers, Wojnarowicz’s prose works speak to the imagistic nature of anonymous erotic experience, and construct a textual collage of impressions at the moment of apprehending a stranger. This imagistic quality is meant less as a term for overtly descriptive prose than it is the often explicit invocation of photographic form to mediate these experiences, for Wojnarowicz frequently invokes “the temporally complex practices of photography and cinema as analogies for autobiographical strategies,” as Anderson writes.50 In this regard Arthur Rimbaud in New York provides a vivid precursor; a blueprint for the mode of queer temporal experience that animates Wojnarowicz’s later writing, which is marked by a sustained interest in cruising and its relation to artistic practice. It is a portrait of the artist as a young man, in a frame extending beyond youth and toward death.
The Appearance of a Portrait
There is an artifice in the staging of Arthur Rimbaud in New York, where the protagonist’s place in each image depends upon the photographer getting a clear shot, or the beholder a good look. Compositionally speaking, the “turn” of the head that conditions its phenomenology is relatively free from the contingencies or obstructions that could obscure the “new love” from view: the urban crowd, the speed of encounter, the darkness of the piers. These images execute in augmented fashion the momentary arrest, the double take that seeks to make visible something (or someone) that could easily be missed in the motion of passing by. The prose piece “Losing the Form in Darkness,” as its title suggests, is structured around such perceptual obstructions, in particular the dreamlike setting of the abandoned piers, and describes the kind of first-person resources available for rescuing images from immediate experience. The piece begins in the pier’s “maze of hallways wandered as in films,” observing “the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light” and later describing a cruising prospect as “a passenger on the shadows” (CK, 9–10). In such a setting “it is the appearance of a portrait, not the immediate vision I love so much.” For a shifting tableau made up of fragments drifting along like shadows, the “portrait” offers recomposure and mediates the “immediate vision.” In the face of the strange or partial, portraits can reintroduce the familiar; resonances or correspondences that provide, as in Rimbaud’s poem, the “clef de cette parade.”
The portraits Wojnarowicz enumerates transform the “immediate vision” into something stranger, and invoke “the childlike rogue slipped out from the white-sheeted bed of Pasolini; the image of Jean Genet cut loose from age and time and continent,” in a similar uprooting to that of Arthur Rimbaud in New York (12). This is the construction of an intimacy that functions intertextually, both intensifying the sense of the fantastical (what is Jean Genet doing here?) and making it seem more real or tangible. This doubleness is after all consonant with Wojnarowicz’s assertion in another piece, “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins,” that there is “no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision” (26). In this moment, “sight” arises out of cultural “memory,” and “vision” out of the fantasy of resuscitation. Mapping the “immediate vision” (which is not an a priori category, but one of “disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought”) onto the cultural field makes it memorable, in a process with equal stakes in distance and closeness. After cruising the piers during a drugs trip in “Losing the Form in Darkness,” where “old images raced back and forth” like the “old senses of desire,” Wojnarowicz writes of “sitting over coffee and remembering the cinematic motions as if witnessed from a discreet distance, I lay the senses down one by one” (12–13). Distance itself has a cinematic quality, as something that heightens or intervenes in “immediate vision” and confers a glamour, making matter all the more vivid for recollection over coffee. This account short-circuits the truism of memory as a distant or “discreet” iteration of what was raw and immediate and suggests that these motions were felt as “cinematic” and distant even at the moment of witnessing them. This aesthetic heightening brings a paradoxical and retrospective closeness, “lay[ing]” the memory down as if in a reverie.
Along with “Pasolini” and “Genet,” Wojnarowicz also name-checks the filmmaker Tod Browning, whose notorious 1932 film Freaks, with its cast of deformed carnival side show performers, structures his apprehension of “a small, dwarfish man, someone out of an old Todd [sic] Browning image” (19). The appearance of this man is a cinematic gloss upon a tension Sontag identifies in the history of American portrait photography. The form’s candid “leveling of discriminations between the beautiful and the ugly, the important and the trivial” that was inherited, Sontag writes, from “Whitman’s” democratic “project,” and exemplified by such photographers as Walker Evans, ultimately gave way to a darker, less generous photographic focus upon the freakish.51 Sontag identifies this latter tendency in the work of Diane Arbus, a photographer who “chooses oddity, chases it, frames it, develops it, titles it” and found plenty of portrait subjects in “New York,” a city “rich with freaks.”52 Wojnarowicz’s mention of the “small, dwarfish man” blends the leveling impulse Sontag identifies in early portrait photography with the fixation upon oddness in Arbus and Browning’s work. In a tape journal from 1981, Wojnarowicz himself claimed that “I like ugly people with some sense of derangement [ . . . ] somebody who’s off in some way, somebody who’s interesting, who has character, through lack of beauty or whatever.”53 Yet the man’s appearance goes beyond a “lack of beauty,” and Wojnarowicz lights upon his freakishness, a quality lexically recalled in the mention of Browning, and contributes to the text’s larger framing of the pier as a space of a performance, where life is rendered as a sideshow, as a display of the erotic and the freakish that once again recalls Rimbaud.
These “cinematic” referents in “Losing the Form in Darkness” are more than just similes. Unlike other instances where “like” carries descriptions into the realm of comparison, like the “deaf mute” in another text who “looked like he just walked out of some waterfront in an old queer french novel,”54 works by Genet, Pasolini, and Browning are cited as actual sources “out of” which these figures are yanked prepositionally. They are “slipped out” and “cut loose,” beyond mere “like”-ness. This conflation of semblance and reality, whereby the subjects of these “portrait[s]” appear as performers uprooted straight out of cinematic works, recalls Peggy Phelan’s description of the portrait as:
a developed image which renders the corporeal, a body-real, as a real body. Uncertain about what this body looks like or how substantial it is, we perform an image of it by imitating what we think we look like [ . . . ]. Wanting to look like someone else, we quote and imitate the look of the visible model.55
Phelan’s account illuminates the conundrum of the photographed subject, for whom the corporeal and exterior shape of the “I” finds visibility through the “them” of available cultural reference. This projection suggests that the scene of posing for a portrait—in its sense of artifice and differentiation from everyday time—shines a light on a condition that is also true more widely of self-presentation: namely, the question as to whose image(s) we make ourselves, or imagine ourselves made, in. In Phelan’s words, the answer lies in “the confrontation with one’s body, the surface image upon which subjectivity is visible to the camera’s eye” (37).
This “confrontation” is also true in reverse, and can be experienced by the beholder, for whom the camera’s eye is the surrogate in this formulation, if extended beyond the immediate context of posing for a portrait. If the portrait is a “developed image,” produced within a duration of exposure and composition, the performances which occur with equal reliance upon “visible model[s]” outside such a duration—off duty, as it were—offer an even more partial or contingent sense of our own “body” as exterior surface, but also obscure the sought-after wholeness of the “real bod[ies]” of others, whose “cinematic motions” we witness perhaps only instantly. This is a parallel “uncertain[ty]” with that of the portrait’s subject, for we too only glimpse what a stranger’s “body looks like or how substantial it is” and thus “perform” its image through description, projecting upon it the imitative surface of the already existing “visible model.” Phelan’s double-sided statements about the portrait are assimilable to Barthesian terms, for both the subject and the photographer to some degree consciously intend the studium of the image they create together, by wearing and teasing out the markers by which the subject can be recognized in historical space and time. Similarly, the photographer facilitates what will for the beholder be the image’s punctum without meaning to, just as the subject possesses that “something” without consciously directing it toward the gaze.
The dialogic relation between the studium and punctum, in which the former is implicitly relegated to a lesser category of truth value with regards to the subject being photographed, speaks to the evidently different kinds of knowledge about a person contained by a portrait, on the one hand, and a glimpse of the “real” them, at the optically brief turning point that determines the future of your relation to them. Wojnarowicz’s apprehension of figures “out of” Genet and Pasolini reveals the impulse to match strangeness with studium, a blend of apparitional mystery and the culturally familiar. Yet these descriptions go beyond statements of resemblance and suggest figures drawn from discrete aesthetic worlds, rather than merely citing corroborable counterparts or doppelgangers. In this sense the studium, which goes beyond the “immediate vision” to envision and elaborate upon the nature of the stranger’s “cinematic motions,” becomes a powerful tool of sight in the act of cruising. It draws upon externally available fields of reference in order to get at the perceived personal essence obscured by parameters both temporal and spatial and is lent a particular erotic charge by the liveness of the apprehension itself. Any claim to knowledge of that person is simultaneously a state of possibility; an encounter that could be consummated in one way or another, where the stranger’s place within a cultural repertoire becomes the basis of a sexual fantasy.
These fantasies are not only the product of an individual reverie, or a personal construction made in the rush of encounter, but refer to collective codes within the nexus of self-presentation and its particular queer inflections. To resemble, or perceive a resemblance of, a character from a work by Genet or Pasolini is to refer to something of a gay urtext, and thus to “perform” a code legible within a shared semiotic understanding among gay cruisers. The mask, like Rimbaud’s face, is a product of features, like “costume and fashion,” that “perfect the image stereotype” (36). And it can be a powerful invitation; the tip of an imaginative iceberg that offers some indication of the kind of sex, for example, to expect with this person. If this semiotic performance has historically been a survival tactic, arising from the necessity of concealment, as well as an expediency in gay sexual practice, it does not mean that the code is mere appendage, or a sign with only a minimal claim upon personhood. Stereotypes often, after all, have some truth. The interpersonal “image,” like the look, is a gesture of both understanding and of being understood. It imagines this communion as a form of conversation. Cruising encounters are often wordless, at least at first, and this anonymous silence is often itself erotic. As such, they rely upon visual signs to approximate the verbal. The “images” exchanged by each party at the moment of apprehension are akin to a form of inquisition, a reciprocal but contingent truce which may last only a few seconds or may lead to a sexual act.
The quality of this exchange has telling parallels with Phelan’s assertion that “portrait photography reflects the transference of image between the photographer and model. Like a good correspondence, the model’s reply to the inquiry of the photographer is based on the quality of the photographer’s question” (36). The look which initiates a cruise determines its trajectory; as an ocular “question” it must be direct enough to be legible, to elicit the like “quality” in its addressee, while furtive enough to evade the glare of the gaze. As Olivia Laing writes of Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud images, they simultaneously “express” a “conflict between the desire to make contact, to reach beyond the prison of the self, and to hide, to walk away, to disappear,” like “a question not yet resolved.”56 The “look” of the addressee, as a stylistic term, prefigures the “question” of contact. The relation between cruisers, like that of the photographer and the subject, is one of “transference,” and involves a reciprocity of visual information. The look of having “just walked out of some waterfront in an old queer french novel,” say, can provide the answer that precipitates the question, and invites closer inspection.
What’s in a Neck?
In “Doing Time in a Disposable Body,” Wojnarowicz encounters a man “with an air of desperation and possible violence around him like a rank perfume.”57 Interrogating why “the remote edge of violence attracts” him to this man, and to seemingly dangerous men more generally, Wojnarowicz reflects:
I associate with certain gestures or body language or scars or other physical characteristics an entire flood of memories and fictions and mythologies. It’s something in the blue-ink tattoos or coal-scratched rubbings made in prison cells or delinquent basement parties. Maybe it’s the sense that he could easily and dispassionately murder someone or rob a liquor store or a small roadside gas station or bang some salesman in the head at a highway rest stop and steal his automobile; it’s something about the sense of violence carried as a distancing tool to break down the organized world.58
This passage recasts the erotic “image” as an assemblage of parts; “certain” features of a stranger’s countenance that summon “an entire flood” of images. Tattoos here inscribe more than just the skin’s surface. They conjure up pulp narratives of homicide and robbery on the open road, somewhere far away from the downtown coffee shop in which this encounter takes place. The devil is in the detail, and the breakdown of this image into parts threatens to “break down the organized world.” The erotic aura of this figure is thus the product of an act of reading, a reorganizing of the stranger’s body into constituent parts with their own narrative potential. These narrative projections range from the particular, “a small roadside gas station,” to the more diffusely ominous, like the “violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security” that Wojnarowicz later describes in the same passage.
The multiplicities of scale contained in this passage, which moves between the small and the big, and the specific and the general, renders the image of cruising less as a fixed whole than as a separable ensemble of semiotic phenomena. The distance of anonymity is collapsed by Wojnarowicz’s reliance upon genre tropes, like the Americana of “liquor store[s]” and “highway[s],” as though such clichés offer a way of familiarizing the strange. The strange here does not simply mean the unknown, but also the specific, and specifically those discrete features of a person that seem out of place or susceptible to imaginative probing. This passage in many ways crystallizes Wojnarowicz’s sense of cruising—its cinematicity and its dangers—but it also reveals the importance of circumspection to the act. Wojnarowicz’s corpus is, unsurprisingly, full of anatomical features, as befits the physiognomic nature of reading strangers, but these range from the expected to the unusual. If “blue-ink tattoos” and “coal-scratched rubbings” are readily synonymous with a strain of dangerous masculinity and serve to make more vivid the bodily whole, the archetypal associations of certain other body parts that appear in Wojnarowicz’s writing are less immediately apparent. Take again, for example, this moment in “Losing the Form in Darkness” (CK, 14–15):
He had a tough face. It was square-jawed, and barely shaven. Close-cropped hair wiry and black, handsome like some face in old boxer photographs, a cross between an aging boxer and Mayakovsky. He had a nose that might have once been broken in some dark avenue barroom in a distant city invented by some horny young kid. There was a wealth of images in that jawline, slight tension to it and curving down toward a hungry looking mouth.
This passage takes in the visage of this stranger in terms of the discrete but interrelated parts which make up the “image.” It is structured around this relation between the whole and the part and enumerates “detail[s]” according to an order of individual features. The descriptions “square-jawed” and “barely shaven” serve to illustrate “tough[ness]”; the addition of the “wiry and black” hair recasts this toughness as that of a “handsome” old boxer crossed with “Mayakovsky.” Those first three sentences contain miscellany enough, and the accumulating trajectory of “tough[ness]” culminates in a surprising yoking of the vintage Americana of “old boxer photographs” to Russian futurist Mayakovsky, famously handsome and broadly built, who reinflects this physicality with a literary quality.
In “Cruising Ghosts: David Wojnarowicz’s Queer Antecedents,” the third chapter of her study, Fiona Anderson argues that Wojnarowicz maps his erotic “connections” with past writers “onto the bodies of anonymous toughs, onto men with whom he shared sex, conversation, a cheap coffee in the Silver Dollar Café,” as he does here.59 These men are conjured or sketched out in the act of storytelling, and the backstory of the broken nose is attributed to “some young horny kid.” It has the stock feel of fantasy, taking place in a nondescript “city.” Does this “young horny kid” refer back to the young Wojnarowicz of “masturbation photo,” and thus give something away of the author’s own sexual fantasies? The faint echo of Wojnarowicz’s earlier writing about childhood and masturbation makes it seem as if this man could be a figment conjured by the author’s earlier self who appears in the here and now, “cut loose” from linear temporality, as an uncanny visitor. The temporal flux underlying this fantasy presence recasts this passage as a form of collage, marked by the way body parts are assembled in a manner akin to that of masturbatory fantasies. Fantasies, as Wojnarowicz states in the interview with Nan Goldin, “were stored pieces of information that I create collages out of.”60 They are “pieces” ripe for recollection, or reattachment to new facial features yet to be encountered. Conceiving of the “image” as a collage also accounts for the reliance of a style upon parts that have a life of their own, or a certain autonomy from the whole they help constitute. If this nose is capable of telling a story by itself, the same can be said for the stranger’s jawline, and the passage appears to ask: what’s in a jaw? The “wealth of images” contained in this jawline is connected to but separate from the “hungry looking mouth” the jaw leads “down” to. This mode of attention, with its predilection for zooming in, betrays an interest in minutiae and thus in acute anatomical images less obviously noticeable than eyes and faces. Going beyond the quasi-disembodiment of Rimbaud’s “turn of the head,” or Whitman’s “talk of those turning eyeballs,” this moment lights upon a poetics of joints found throughout Wojnarowicz’s work, one marked by a particular fascination with napes and necks.
There is an image of one neck in particular that is so specific as to exceed the scene out of which it arises, and it recurs again and again throughout his writing. It is framed most comprehensively in a Super 8 script for a silent black-and-white film, never made, that follows a character simply named “Drifter” around the city. Wojnarowicz frames the first series of shots as “attempting to place on film the sexual/erotic symbols inherent in street/crowd movements flash—glimpses of strangers entering taxis, doorways, subway staircases—the wounding nature of a neck (the lines of that neck).”61 The film also later contains a series of closeup shots of “anonymous mans [sic] head,” “mens [sic] hands,” “chest,” “lips, noses, throats,” “asses,” “crotches, legs beneath trousers.”62 But the opening “neck” is the only body part of the film given such a characteristic, the capacity to be “wounding.” The nature of the wound remains unspoken and has the flavor of the punctum’s “prick.” It is a contingent feature emerging out of a visual field with the power to hurt its beholder even within its own passive and perhaps oblivious existence, and is animate only as a constituent part of the living person it has been abstracted from in Wojnarowicz’s shot. While arising from a “sexual/erotic” symbol “inherent in street/crowd movements,” this capacity to wound is not an “inherent” property of necks but rather reveals something of the beholder’s interiority. This revelation is akin to that of the punctum which, in the words of Margaret Olin, is “so private” that it may not actually be “in the photograph at all,” a “literary device to make us understand how he [Barthes] could feel his kind of pain [ . . . ] analogous to the smell and taste of the madeleine” in Proust.63
The neck for Wojnarowicz is a sign of “his kind of pain.” It is related directly to his own experience, and perhaps also to “his kind” of pleasure. The recurrence of napes and necks—which are repeated throughout the sexual trysts described in his prose—also calls to mind the fetish. Freud’s identification of fetishism stresses not only its basis upon object-choice, but on a particular and indeed private relation to said object that may not be readily shareable. Freud writes of a particularly “extraordinary case” in which “a young man had exalted a certain sort of ‘shine on the nose’ into a ‘fetishistic precondition.’”64 Caught linguistically between German and English, the young man “endowed [the nose] at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others,” and “the shine on the nose” was “in reality ‘a glance at the nose.’” The fetish functions through the glance, and Wojnarowicz’s “neck” shares with Freud’s account of fetishism the sense of an exalting projection. The film script presents the “wounding nature of a neck” as a truism, a given endowment of necks that may not be immediately “perceptible” to those for whom they are not a fetishistic locus. Similarly in “Losing the Form in Darkness,” where this opening to the film script eventually took published shape, Wojnarowicz zooms further in upon the neck within a textual montage of “old images” that “race back and forth” and incorporate the “flashes of a curve of arm, back, the lines of a neck glimpsed among the crowds in the train stations, one you could write whole poems to” (CK, 12.) This iteration substitutes the cinematic for the written as the locus of the neck’s power, and its invocation of poetry both puns upon the “lines” of that neck and lends a literary concreteness to the fetishistic transformation of the object described by Freud. That the indeterminate “you” could write “whole poems” to this neck is cited as an indicator of its remarkableness and the sense that, like a muse, it can elicit creativity itself.
Yet the word “whole” also points to something stranger. It echoes semantically with the way the neck is described—“a neck”—such that we think of a whole neck. To think of body parts in terms of wholeness is to think of their disembodiment, for their entirety depends upon a degree of separation from the bodily whole they are connected to. The neck thus resonates, per se, as a free-floating erotic charge that goes beyond the bounds of its immediate urban context. Its evident relation to the city goes some way to accounting for its “wounding nature,” and at the end of the film script the Drifter is shown smoking at the edge of the pier with the “suggestion of solitude among crowds. quiet feelings.”65 Within its common citational setting the neck thus becomes a figure for urban alienation, as though the “whole poems” Wojnarowicz imagines would take the form of riffs upon loneliness. This neck’s melancholic resonance can be accounted for in one sense by the specular tableau it suggests. To look at someone’s neck from behind becomes a figuration for estrangement because it renders that someone out of reach. The person may not be physically distant, but this posterior vantage suggests with it an elision of the face, and in turn identification itself. A neck cannot return your glance but reflects back at you your own fetishistic desire for it. It becomes a figure for all the ones that got away, those possible “new love[s]” who disappeared because their “head[s]” never turned “back,” to return to the terms of Rimbaud’s poem. The lines of the neck wound because they contain what Wojnarowicz describes later in “Losing the Form in Darkness” as the “slight traces that cut me with the wounding nature of déjà vu, filled with old senses of desire” (CK, 17). The apprehension of the neck thus lights upon an amorous lack straddling the past, those lost and temporally distant “senses of desire,” and the future, insofar as the possibility of consummation with the desired object is staged and thwarted by this moment. The city itself, with its obstructions of vision and identification, provides the backdrop for the neck’s symbolic resonance, and their copresence in the image of “the neck in a crowd” marks a limit point for cruising’s sense of intimate possibility.
Nonetheless this neck, in its specificity, also discloses meanings that exceed the immediate situation of its apprehension. It is separated out as an art object that elicits an affective response but remains impenetrable, and as such becomes a figure for desire itself. While Freud’s account of the fetish provides one optic on Wojnarowicz’s fascination with necks, it cannot alone account for it, nor for its melancholic tenor, which seems at odds with Freud’s suggestion that the fetish is “seldom felt” by the fetishist “as the symptom of an ailment accompanied by suffering.”66 Suffering is in some sense native to fetishism, in that the construction of the fetish frequently involves an imagined process of disembodiment. This applies in turn to fetishization, the process whereby the scopic disposition of fetishism meets with the social hierarchization of bodies. The separating out of body parts recalls Fanon’s description of fetishism’s violent dismemberment, and Silverman identifies how this “obligatory identification with an intolerable imago” is “experienced through the fantasy of a body in bits and pieces, as a violent mutilation.”67 Although Wojnarowicz’s “neck” scene neglects to address the power dynamics of looking, and remains coy about the exact nature or vantage of its gaze, it seems to turn the corporeal violence of fetishistic looking inward. While Wojnarowicz emphasizes the amputating frame through which the neck is apprehended, with its “lines” like forms of incision, it is he himself who is wounded by it. That Wojnarowicz seems to dwell upon and even take pleasure in this “wounding nature” is matched by the imaginative capacities induced by such moments. Body parts in Wojnarowicz are synonymous with desire because they invite an ekphrastic filling-in, as in the early poem “Auto Portrait”:
seeking something in this strangers [sic] forehead
something that takes me beyond the bar, beyond the bed
seeing photographs he makes I dream black and white
I get tired of the silences of interior life68
The stranger’s forehead is a space to be filled, a surface of possibility, and the hope of going “beyond” is animated by what he describes as the “photographs he makes.” The photographic dream, “black and white” like those “old boxers photographs” or a film by Jean Genet, perhaps, yield the “lines” to be written “on” that forehead. This act of inscription writes this stranger into being. Yet the fantasy of the “beyond” remains ambiguous and is legible primarily as a form of negation. Wojnarowicz’s dreams of escape from the alienation of the “quiet feelings” or the “silences of interior life” are frequently described as a site of desire that takes violent or annihilatory form. The erotic appeal of the tattooed man he cruises part by part in “Doing Time in a Disposable Body” is, after all, the “violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security.” It is in this sense, then, that the neck goes “beyond” its iteration as a desirable quotidian apparition. As a haunting, oddly disembodied figuration of the erotic, this recurring neck seems eerily cognizant of an interrelation between cruising, desire, and death that, for Wojnarowicz and his peers, would soon be thrown into sharp relief.
Dead Man Walking
In November 1987, the photographer Peter Hujar died of complications related to AIDS. A mentor (and former lover) of Wojnarowicz, Hujar died in a hospital bed in the Cabrini Medical Center in Manhattan, where Wojnarowicz kept vigil. In “Living Close to the Knives,” he describes Hujar’s death as an image that lingers cinematically, “as if it’s printed in celluloid on the backs of my eyes,” and this description is not entirely metaphorical (CK, 103). Wojnarowicz bore witness to this moment by filming his body with a Super 8 camera and taking “portraits” with a “still camera,” with the aim of capturing “his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again” (102). These portraits have gained an elegiac iconicity as documents of the HIV/AIDS crisis; “images of the deceased” that “harken back to the long-standing traditions of life and death masks, as well as casts of hands of famous artists.”69 They dwell upon Hujar’s corporeality not as an entire corpse, but through a loving inventory that reinvests discrete body parts with individual character. Wojnarowicz attends at close range to the “lines” of these body parts, and attests to their “wounding nature” as reminders of loss. Death is an ultimate form of estrangement, and images of the dead can render strange the familiarity of their subject while also providing documents of idiosyncrasies which offer signs of life that might yet be easy to miss in the course of living, like “his amazing feet.” These portraits cast light back upon the stranger’s “neck”—an emblem which itself seems “printed in celluloid” throughout Wojnarowicz’s writing—and accounts for the ambivalent meanings of its “wounding nature.” Such an image, caught uncannily in a crowd, introduces a morbid quality to this “amazing” physical sight. In its disembodiment the “neck” possesses a deadness all its own and offers no futurity outside of itself. It is a strange object that is not easily forgotten.
In the Hujar photographs, Wojnarowicz’s aspect shifts from that of the fetishist to that of the coroner, at least as far as body parts are concerned. The act of zooming in here constitutes a mode of elegiac tribute and seeks to provide documentary truth of Hujar’s corporeal existence in its specificity, and even in its diminished and emaciated form. The mournful resurfacing here of what we might call the neck-optic of Wojnarowicz’s prose, that fascination with the expressive faculties of body parts that rise out from metropolitan tableaux, in turn points to the effect of HIV/AIDS upon such faculties. With the onset of the epidemic, the annihilatory or “wounding” nature of consummatory acts was transformed from an erotic fantasy or imaginative projection into a complex and dangerous reality. In this regard the disease has obvious implications for cruising; it not only introduces anxieties around anonymous, spontaneous sex, but for cruisers with AIDS, threatens to alter one’s sexual currency and appearance altogether. HIV/AIDS has rendered so many invisible to history in their early deaths, and it often fell upon artists and activists like Wojnarowicz to recuperate the memory of friends and lovers through art and resistance itself. Yet in more immediate ways, the disease has also made hypervisible the stock specter of the fragile, emaciated gay man on death’s door. As Henning Bech writes, in the anxious age of HIV/AIDS, “surveillance is doubled” and “the exterior” becomes “not only a sign of homosexuality but also of death.”70
Wojnarowicz writes about the peculiar experience of being positive but able to pass, as it were, and thus efface the latter “sign.” If the experience of cruising is ultimately one of recognition, of an apprehension which takes the form of a “transference of images” between persons versed in the code, Wojnarowicz’s account of a post–HIV/AIDS erotics suggests instead one of misrecognition, of being apprehended as a sexual agent one no longer believes oneself to be. This often comes to light in the changing face of minutiae, as in Wojnarowicz’s lament in “Postcards from America: X Rays from Hell” that “the sexy stranger nodding to you on the street corner [ . . . ] reminds you in a clearer than clear way that at this point in history the virus’ activity is forever” (CK, 118). Cruising, once everyday and repeatable, and which Wojnarowicz once described as a simultaneously transient yet lasting set of “extended seconds,”71 now has the inflection of an unwelcome “forever.” It is a reminder of the virus’s spread and the danger of its consequences. The friction between “at this point in history” and “forever” in this sentence misunderstands and in turn troubles the workings of temporal measurements by mixing deictic delimitation with the eternal. It suggests not only that HIV/AIDS threatens to “forever” change the face of cruising, but that what has changed is the very meaning of “forever” at Wojnarowicz’s historical moment. In erotic fantasy’s projection, the transient hangs suspended in the balance of “forever,” but for Wojnarowicz the virus profoundly disrupts this temporal multiplicity. Lee Edelman writes that AIDS “pervasively [ . . . ] reinforces an older connection, as old as the antigay reading imposed on the biblical narrative of Sodom’s destruction, between practices of gay sexuality and the undoing of futurity” altogether.72 This fatalism goes by numerous names, and harks back to Sedgwick’s observation of that “peculiarly close, though never precisely defined, affinity between same-sex desire and some historical condition of moribundity.”73
This relation between death and the visible is a contradiction for Wojnarowicz, who sees in the “sexy stranger” this “undoing of futurity,” perhaps precisely because he does not apprehend Wojnarowicz as sick. In spite of William F. Buckley’s barbaric call “for a program to tattoo people with AIDS,” as Wojnarowicz recalls in “Living Close to the Knives,” AIDS and HIV-status are not legible like a tattoo (CK, 107). The imaginative capacity Wojnarowicz cites in “Doing Time,” where “certain [ . . . ] physical characteristics” usher in an “entire flood of memories and fictions and mythologies,” is vexed in the age of HIV/AIDS because it renders the body of the cruiser an unstable hermeneutic surface. Inhabiting an HIV-positive body, for Wojnarowicz, means being aware of the lack of “certain [ . . . ] characteristics” associated with illness, which he instead experiences as an internal phenomenon amounting to a certain subjective blankness. This confrontation between one’s abject body and its misrecognized exterior takes the form of a vexed portrait. In the final section of “Spiral,” a late, fragmentary prose piece, Wojnarowicz writes that “Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am [ . . . ] all they see is the visual form.”74 The body has ceased to be the “surface image” which makes subjectivity visible, the surface that is the very currency of cruising, an empty visual form that is a “xerox of my former self,” “a carbon copy of my form.” In this state, reproduction is synonymous with a certain pallor, or a loss of proximity between the self and its image, where Wojnarowicz had once framed such repetition as a supplementarity or erotic surplus. Here there is no Genet or Pasolini to be Xeroxed, no visible model to quote and imitate. The body loses it connection with this referential field to become only a body; a disposable one that has done its time.
In “Spiral,” the dying Wojnarowicz casts himself as an ultimate form of stranger. Not the stranger of cruising, whose very strangeness is an invitation to familiarity, but one made strange by a more profound sense of displacement. “I look familiar,” he writes, “but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves. I am a stranger and I am moving [ . . . ] I am no longer coded and deciphered [ . . . ] I am an empty stranger” (60). This is a subjectivity estranged from interpersonal exchange, “empt[ied]” of erotic or affective potential. It is not only Wojnarowicz’s own image that breaks down, in a process which manifests as a pallor in his “visual form”; a whole structure of vision is lost too. His “eyes,” at last, “have stopped being cameras.” This work marks a sobering endpoint in a writing career dedicated to thinking through the “filmic exchange” between fantasy, memory, and vision, along with its queer potential as an everyday mode of being. An earlier section of “Spiral” paints a vivid recollection of a dream which suggests not that the cameras have turned themselves off in the face of illness, but that they have been hijacked by the political reality of the epidemic. It begins with a familiar scene, “walking through this city not really sure where or why” and going “down this staircase of a subway or a hotel,” and “I could sense sex as soon as I walked in” (55). Wojnarowicz proceeds to pick up a “guy in his late teens early twenties” in the cubicle, and when “his pants are down” notices a “fairly large wound on one of his thighs [ . . . ]. The wound does something to me. I feel vaguely nauseous but he is sexy enough to dispell [sic] it.”
As Wojnarowicz moves closer to the man’s body to fellate him things take a turn toward the surreal, and he notices “two chrome cables with sectioned ribs pushing under the sides of flesh. Then this blue glow coloring the air above the wound,” eventually seeing that “it is a miniature monitor, a tiny black and white television screen with an even tinier figure gesticulating from a podium in a vast room” (58). This vision proceeds to enumerate political figures: “the current president, smiling like a corpse in a vigilante movie,” the “pope [ . . . ] seated next to buckley.” Gone is that “flood” of possible “fictions and mythologies” that this wound could prompt, or the enticing possibility that it’s from a heist gone wrong, or a knife fight in some back alley. This is another kind of film altogether, one in which tropes like that of the “vigilante movie” still abound but which, in a hyperreal fashion, pertain to the very real and negligent decisions made by political figures in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The crime caper has been replaced by the geopolitical and the wound is no longer recuperable as “sexy”; it’s just nauseating. The metaphorical weight of a gruesome wound as a screen for the political crisis of the epidemic is self-evident. It is the collective wound of an entire community that has been failed by the state, reducing the body to a “nauseating” and moribund form. The televisual runs throughout “Spiral” and Wojnarowicz writes, just sentences before this dream, of turning “on the television to try and get some focus outside my illness” (54). And yet the illness, “Spiral” suggests, refocuses everything “outside” of it, and colonizes even the erotic visuality that is a dominant conceptual frame in Wojnarowicz’s writing. This is an illness doubly militarized, its consequences perpetuated by the heads of state and figures of “biological warfare” (58). Its bodily manifestation is felt acutely as an assault and erupts from the text accordingly, as an enraged zenith of what Hanya Yanigahara describes as Wojnarowicz’s “imperfect” style, which “assaults the reader” in its “hyperactivity,” “lack of deference,” and “scattershot capitalizations.”75 The section ends: “THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY BLOOD AND IT’S TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME.”76
This exclamation echoes the mantra “Silence = Death” that was disseminated by the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), with whom Wojnarowicz was involved, and also sits in melancholic counterpoint with another moment in his writing that seeks to resist silences; those of “the interior life,” as in that phrase first rehearsed in the poem “Auto Portrait.” In “Losing the Form in Darkness,” Wojnarowicz follows the Mayakovsky-like figure deeper into the pier buildings, where the “sunlight” burns “through a window emptied of glass,” and a “rusted screen” reduces “shapes and colors into tiny dots like a film directed by Seurat” (CK, 16). The visual stage is set for a consummation that in turn prompts another kind of vision, unfolding in montage:
In loving him I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life. (17)
This incantatory passage has a resolutely utopic tenor; a resistance to the here and now of an existence that “other men spend their lives trying to fill.” This vision is not one of men behind podiums “gesticulating [ . . . ] in a vast room” as in “Spiral,”77 but conversely a pacifist one of “men encouraging each other to lay down their arms.” It inhabits the precarious temporality of cruising, suspending the present participle of “loving” between its own incipience and the past of completed occurrence, “I saw”; between the singularity of encounter and the repeatability of an image. As Olivia Laing writes, Wojnarowicz “rarely encountered the same men twice” but nonetheless fell “half in love with an imagined personality, a mythic being he’d conjured out of an accent or a single word,” and in so doing preserved “what might have seemed even then like a transient, impossible utopia.”78 Tensions of transience and impossibility underpin utopic thinking itself, in particular the status of queer utopic thinking in relation to the “excavations” left by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Muñoz refers to utopic thinking as a mode “to conceptualize new worlds and realities that are not irrevocably constrained by the HIV/AIDS pandemic,” and writes that “queer memories of utopia and the longing that structures them [ . . . ] help us carve out a space for actual, living sexual citizenship.”79
Responding to Bersani’s “Cruising and Sociability” and the work of Samuel Delany, another great prophet of the piers during this period, Sarah Ensor traces cruising’s efficacy for environmentalism in suggesting that, if “eroticism, sexual contact, and open expressions of desire are fundamental to the democratic potential of the spaces in which we dwell,” the very ecology of cruising, then it is by “attend[ing] to the impersonal, collateral, and insistently ambient effects of casual relationships” that we can image a more disanthropocentric form of “environmentalism.”80 And cruising’s ecological and ethical capacities are not only analogical, but relate intimately to the “space[s]” of Muñoz’s “sexual citizenship.” The piers—as liminal spaces, both urban and wild—offer up anonymous intimacy in the face of ecological ruin, and for Wojnarowicz provide a home for imagining the breakdown of the “erected” edifice of the present as a dominant mode of experience; turn your head away, toward the new love, in a suspended process of “loving” where a new kind of futurity not yet here appears. The metaphor of the ruin, as Anderson writes, “provide[s] us with a means of visualizing sexual liberation beyond a homophobic causal relation between cruising and the development of HIV/AIDS” and normative distinctions between time periods and generations, between past and present.81 This passage from “Losing the Form in Darkness” eschews finality to dwell not only in a present tense conscious of its own passing, and retrievable in writing, but also among the physical ruins of a culture under threat. The artist’s “great and enduring subjects” both “before and after AIDS” are shored up here; the “themes of encounter and precarity” and the attendant “admixture of sexuality and ethics.”82 This passage produces, at last, a moving prose portrait whose temporal moment is not restricted to the “here and now” but instead unfolds in “extended seconds,” like a film directed by David Wojnarowicz.