[Ridgewood]

Joint reading and listening party with Anna Vitale, Derek Baron and Emily Martin
November 8, 2018, 7:30 pm
at Brethren Gallery

BRETHREN GALLERY is pleased to host a joint reading and listening party at 7:30pm celebrating the work of David Wojnarowicz. Anna Vitale will read from her new long-form essay, "Our Rimbaud Mask" published this month by Ugly Duckling Presse which explores the startling fantasy of suicide as depicted in David Wojnarowicz's famous photographic series "Arthur Rimbaud in New York. Our Rimbaud Mask follows the early publication history of David Wojnarowicz's "Arthur Rimbaud in New York" photographic series in order to show that our identification with Rimbaud, and with any artist, must remain a site of inquiry and curiosity rather than an obvious source of similitude. What forms of identification are sustainable and which ones are destructive? How do we know the difference? This essay draws together archival research, psychoanalytic theory, and impassioned close readings to lay claim to one of the most taboo fantasies staged in the series: suicide. The Rimbaud mask, different from the image of Rimbaud, invites us to become compassionate witnesses to those whose lives feel unsurvivable without assuming the experience can be shared. Derek Baron and Emily Martin will play excerpts from the recent vinyl release CROSS COUNTRY, David Wojnarowicz's Tape Journals, out from their label Reading Group. The Tape Journals are an intimate, often shattering record of a human being coming to terms with his own mortality after being diagnosed with HIV. David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was a writer and artist active in New York's Downtown scene in the 1970's and 80's. In the 1980's Wojnarowicz become one of the central figures in the AIDS struggle, as well as the target of homophobic censorship efforts by the American Family Association. Wojnarowicz kept written and cassette tape journals throughout his adult life. This three-disc vinyl release publishes for the first time three of Wojnarowicz's tape journals, documenting his thoughts, dreams, fears, and environment during two separate road trips he took to the American Southwest and West Coast in the first half of 1989. The original cassettes are archived as part of the Wojnarowicz Collection at Fales Special Collections and Library at New York University. Wojnarowicz died in New York in 1992.