David Wojnarowicz (b. 1954, d. 1992) lived and worked in New York City as an artist and writer. Working across a broad range of media–including photography, painting, music, film, sculpture and writing–his art always illuminated the experiences of unseen people, starting with himself. Writing for the New York Times, Holland Cotter explained, “From the start, he took outsiderness itself, as defined by ethnicity, gender, economics and sexual orientation, as his true native turf.”

Fed by his early life experiences: an abusive childhood in suburban New Jersey, adolescent homelessness and sex work, coming to terms with his own queerness in a society that violently shunned it, Wojnarowicz worked to share these kinds of lives through his art. Part of his motivation was in retaliation against the “one tribe nation” – the forcefully maintained illusion of shared desires and family structures in the United States. But his greatest achievement was making “outsider” lives visible, to acknowledge individual existences and prevent them from being erased. Unsurprisingly, this project has faced fierce resistance throughout his life. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts revoked funding for an exhibition after seeing Wojnarowicz’s contributions. The obstruction has continued beyond the artist’s death from AIDS in 1992. In 2010, the Catholic League pressured the Smithsonian Museum into removing Wojnarowicz’s video, “Fire In My Belly,” from an exhibition, claiming the work was “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians.”

A recent retrospective of David Wojnarowicz’s work at the Whitney Museum demonstrates the continued relevance of his work, and the role that art can play in shaping human consciousness. “Like an irate guardian angel,” wrote Holland Cotter in 2018, “the American artist David Wojnarowicz was there when we needed him politically 30-plus years ago. Now we need him again.”

“I didn’t want people to just think that, we were up there making a bunch of noise, and it was purely an outpouring of anger or something. Frankly a lot of that content, the political stuff, was the very last layer. I didn’t really even know exactly what [David] was going to do until we got into the final rehearsals before we premiered it. So much of the work on the structure wasn’t really about that, it was more about pacing and timing and how the whole thing was going to feel.” – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

“That’s my diagram of the whole set up. Don played an electronic drum pad and then there were triggers on the acoustic drums, piezo discs on the timpani. When he would strike or roll on the drums, he had a foot petal where he could control the send of the sound into the drum pad. So when he plays it could go into this lexicon effect, where the sound is bending up, and that was another way of expressing acceleration through increasing frequency. David had a pedal like that, all the effects that were added onto his voice was his choice, he controlled that, in performance and on the recording.” – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

“It was highly structured, all the durations of the notes. Writing it down, it almost like a puzzle or something, I had these different parameters I was working with in terms of those frequency structures and the ratios and all. Some of it just came out of playing: I want it to sound like this. Other things, the long notes in the Aggregation for example, those are all very much timed out. It was the kind of thing, I couldn’t have conceptualized it, it’s not like writing music where you sit down at the piano: oh here’s a melody, I like this. There was a little bit of that, but so much of it was structured. Almost a Cage-ian, non structured process going on. So the realization of that, when you put it down on paper, that’s when it becomes something.” – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

Originally from Ohio, percussionist Don Yallech moved to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music. In addition to his ongoing musical collaboration with Ben Neill, Yallech has collaborated with Rhys Chatham, Joey Ramone, and the New Music Consort. He has been a member of the bands Feed and The Psychedelic Furs, and has performed with John Cage, the Armitage Ballet and numerous touring Broadway shows.

“I was working out of my apartment. I was living in downtown Brooklyn for most of this, on Willoughby Street, I had a loft there. When I first met David, I still lived in the East Village, but by the time we started working on this piece I’m pretty sure I had moved. I didn’t have a studio in the sense that I could record anything, at that point the live setup and the studio were the same thing. Now I have the studio computer where I would make recordings and my little live rig set up separately, but back then it was just one thing all based around this Atari 1040ST computer and hardware synthesizer.

“The Atari 1040ST was purely a MIDI controller, so all the sounds came from hardware synthesizers. It took floppy discs, and you had to boot up the whole thing every time you turned it on. Put the disc in with the program. It was very popular with musicians because it had a built-in MIDI interface which was a big deal back then. I think it was probably the only computer that had a built-in MIDI interface.” – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

“Anyway, the way the train went into the American West and blew open or exploded Indian culture, that’s the same way that I see telecommunications today–the way the authorities have used telecommunications. There’s no longer real culture. I can turn on the TV and find myself six thousand miles under the ocean; or turn a station and then suddenly I’m in China, walking the Great Wall; or turn the station and suddenly I’m in the Amazon, watching a rainforest get cut down. The way telecommunications has blown through the cultures of different countries, I believe it’s like we’re on a fast train that becomes a faster train, that becomes a plane, that becomes a missile. Which means, in terms of speed, that eventually we won’t have to go anywhere at all because everything’s the same. It becomes the same after a while, and there will be no need for movement.” – David Wojnarowicz in a January 1989 tape journal, from Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz, edited by Lisa Darms and David O’Neill, published 2018 by Semiotext(e).

“Right after my diagnosis, the things I appreciated for a period of time, about people who were dying from AIDS, was how courageous they were all the way up to the end, and all the words that connect to courage in people’s minds for those who are facing death. I thought Peter [Hujar] was courageous, and even in the midst of his rage he was courageous. Every time I experienced a friend’s death, or knew of a friend’s death, or a friend’s illness and experienced part of it, I thought it was with great courage that they were living.

“Once I was diagnosed, the idea of courage enraged me. I thought this is bullshit really, they’re talking about politeness, that the more politely a person dies, the more courageous they are, that they should contain the experience of their death within themselves and make it very easy for everybody so that they slip through, die and that’s it. And everybody can live with it, rather than confront themselves with death, with rage, with all the expressions that somebody who’s not being polite exhibits.” – David Wojnarowicz in a 1989 interview with Sylvère Lotringer, from David Wojnarowicz: A definitive history of five or six years on the lower east side, edited by Giancarlo Ambrosino, published 2006 by Semiotext(e).

“I think [George] Bush’s voice is in the piece a couple of times. It might’ve been something that David had recorded and distorted or manipulated. We collected a lot of sound effects, those are the sounds that start coming in near the end of the Intermezzo before the Ragtime. Some of them were cassettes that David had, and there were some sound effect CDs and LPs. We just made a kind of collage on the 24 track. When we would play it live, we would run a DAT tape of the hollerin’ voices and these sound effects were on the same tape. – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

“I was really frustrated, because I had a really hard time finding anybody to put that tape out. I held it for over a year, trying to get someone to distribute it. It’s a controversial, very heavy piece.” – Ben Neill in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, from David Wojnarowicz: A definitive history of five or six years on the lower east side, edited by Giancarlo Ambrosino, published 2006 by Semiotext(e).

“and wanting a shout to come from my throat, a shout that would level all the buildings or else have the strength in my hands where I could rip open the earth like a cheap fabric and release a windscreen of lava and heat or with the fists banging against my thighs create shockwaves that would cause all the manufacturing of the preinvented world to come tumbling down in a slow and terrifying beauty till all the earth was level or maybe or maybe or maybe just to have some water pour from my head.” – David Wojnarowicz,”LIVING CLOSE TO THE KNIVES: Liberty” lyrics (excerpt) from ITSOFOMO.

“When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I and simultaneously and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle dis- disappear from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly resolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of you, of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep, it makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain.” – David Wojnarowicz, “THE ATTEMPTS AT FORMATION OF THE ILLUSORY TRIBE: Intermezzo” lyrics (excerpt) from ITSOFOMO.

“The Bang on A Can festival was the first performance we did of ITSOFOMO after David’s death, Don and I, just the two of us.” – Ben Neill in a 2018 interview with Know Wave.

“I’ve been asked to perform it in a number of different places since David died, and I had mixed feelings about doing it. I didn’t want it to be like a funeral… It’s really sad to hear his voice on tape.” – Ben Neill in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, from David Wojnarowicz: A definitive history of five or six years on the lower east side, edited by Giancarlo Ambrosino, published 2006 by Semiotext(e)