David Wojnarowicz’s Still-Burning Rage | The New Yorker

“History Keeps Me Awake at Night,” the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of the works of the artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz, opens with a mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Wojnarowicz made the mask out of cardstock and a rubber band, using a famous photograph of the poet at the age of seventeen, and then took a series of photos of his friends wearing it around New York City in the late seventies. Rimbaud rides a densely graffitied subway train; Rimbaud tries to cross an avenue in rush-hour traffic; Rimbaud lies naked on a bed with his penis in one hand; Rimbaud poses with a syringe in his left arm, a bandanna used for a tourniquet. Wojnarowicz, whose artistic career spanned the late seventies to his death, from aids, in 1992, at thirty-seven, posed the Rimbaud portraits in spots around New York that were significant in his own life, primarily the places where he had hustled as a child prostitute in his teen years.