![]() ![]() This does not prevent the surreal shock at the last image in the Cabinet show, in which the paper mask lies abandoned on the broken pavement, as though severed. However, in using Rimbaud’s image – that of someone already dead – it manifests an understanding of Barthes’s sense of the mortality at stake in the very act of posing for a photograph. ![]() ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ pre-dates the AIDS crisis and thus the narrative of loss that informed Wojnarowicz’ later work. The photographs generate an impulse to peel the mask’s image skin back from the subject’s face in order to see: impossible because the photograph is, of course, a single surface. Finished the year before the publication of Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980), this series anticipates and rebuffs Barthes’ assertion that the photograph ‘is’ the sitter: ‘in the photograph, being coincides with self a true being, not resemblance.’ Wojnarowicz’ use of a photographic portrait as a mask simultaneously doubles (intimating soulful identification with the poet) and cancels out our access to the subject, embedding a camouflaged blind spot in the picture plane. But the work is tough in its refusal to reveal identity. Tilted towards the camera, the white of the mask haunts each black and white image like a pale moon. Like the commedia dell’arte character, he is positioned centre-stage and yet appears impassive and dislocated. In these photographs the subject’s stance has a melancholy quality that recalls the Pierrot figure in Antoine Watteau’s paintings. Available alongside the photographs on show at Cabinet are copies of texts by Wojnarowicz in which his own authorial voice is disguised as monologues based on different characters he encountered in the city. ![]() We assume that the posing subject is Wojnarowicz himself, but we cannot, ultimately, know this. The mask is made from a cut-out photocopy of Rimbaud’s famous portrait photograph. The locations are related to what the artist described as ‘urban activities, mostly illegal’. Wearing a paper mask made from a picture of someone else’s face, the subject in David Wojnarowicz’ photo series ‘Arthur Rimbaud in New York’ (1978–9) poses in the rooms of an abandoned pier, outside a cinema and on street corners. ![]()
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