Regulating Desire and Imagination: The Art and Times of David Wojnarowicz

• Pages: 3-32
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37001-3
• Date: 15 December 2005
• Published date: 15 December 2005
• Author: Mysoon Rizk

REGULATING DESIRE AND

IMAGINATION: THE ART AND

TIMES OF DAVID WOJNAROWICZ

Mysoon Rizk

ABSTRACT

More reverberant today than ever, given the current legal and political

climate, artist David Wojnarowicz’s victorious lawsuit in 1990 against

evangelist Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association tangled with

still relevant contexts: plight of the NEA, disastrous AIDS pandemic, and

continuous church/state involvement in public debate over social values,

including individual rights to sexual representation and artistic expres-

sion. Yet strangely, the artist remains largely absent from both ‘‘culture

wars’’ narratives and the general record. Increasing his visibility and ar-

guing his significance, this essay re-inserts Wojnarowicz into history, his

work profoundly challenging what he called ‘‘the illusion of the ONE

TRIBE NATION.’’

WHO EXACTLY IS TRYING TO CENSOR THIS MAN?

In 1990, the New York-based queer artist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992)

initiated a lawsuit against generously funded ‘‘decency’’ group, the American

Crime and Punishment: Perspectives from the Humanities

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 37, 3–32

Copyright r2005 by Elsevier Ltd.

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ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(05)37001-3

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Family Association (AFA) and its Executive Director Donald E. Wildmon.

‘‘Limited purpose public figure’’ Wojnarowicz (‘‘Voy-na-row-vitch’’) was

responding to a misrepresentative, defamatory, and arguably pornographic

pamphlet issued by the Reverend Wildmon (Wojnarowicz v. AFA, &

Wildmon, 745 F. Supp. 130, 1990, p. 147). The Tupelo, Mississippi-based

Christian corporation had targeted every member of Congress in protest of

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) monies awarded the work of this

Red Bank, New Jersey-born artist. With a mailing list of millions, they had

also distributed to 178,000 church-leaders, plus radio, television, and print

media outlets, together with individual AFA members. On June 25, after a

daylong non-jury trial in a packed courthouse, the United States District

Court, Southern District of New York, amazingly determined in favor of

alleged pornographer Wojnarowicz. As a result of Wildmon’s own testi-

mony, in fact, the artist-plaintiff won financial damages. That day, more-

over, the judge imposed a permanent injunction barring further distribution

of the leaflet in question and requiring 178,000 mailed correctives.

The pornography-obsessed Reverend, meanwhile, amplified his mailing

list. Indeed, despite the court’s injunction, plaintiff’s lawyers later found out,

the AFA brazenly continued fundraising, using the libelous, censorious, and

now unlawful pamphlet for at least a few more years (see Wojnarowicz

v. AFA, 772 F. Supp. 201, 1991). They persisted in what was, after all, highly

effective rhetoric by slandering an already extremely marginalized artist,

mindlessly derogating his work, and falsely charging the NEA with being

manipulated by perverse minorities. Fifteen years later, however, Wojnarowicz

would seem to have evaporated from their sight-lines, no longer needed as

inflammatory target, long since cleansed away. A search of his name on the

AFA website, for example, yields zero results. The NEA, after all, no longer

needs monitoring, having suspended, for example, individual artist pro-

grams. Fully mediated today, the AFA seems stronger than ever, Wildmon

offspring and devotees actively keeping up the ‘‘family’’ business.

Wojnarowicz, by contrast, since 1992, when he died of AIDS-related ill-

nesses after a several-year period of severely degraded health, has been

corporeally absent. Although his voice was once in the thick of civic debate,

even when sick, he has since been ‘‘disappeared’’ from public domain. The

AFA, having already strenuously angled for his eradication, need no longer

concern themselves, given the artist’s current invisibility even in the history

of art, not to mention history of American cultural democracy.

1

Strangely,

nevertheless, trace effects of his words, works, and deeds linger in public

memory. His name may remain withheld, even permanently obliterated, yet

his example – as someone who would normally be understood as having no

MYSOON RIZK4