Stray Dogs: David Wojnarowicz and the One-Tribe Nation

Paisley Polk

Advisor: Dr. Ann Reynolds

Abstract

Ronald Reagan’s presidential tenure in the 1980s was marked by fears of nuclear war annihilation and the domestic war on drugs. Public fear of these looming threats was amplified by the onslaught of the 24-hour media cycle in the 1980s with the founding of the Cable News Network and the continued commercialization of news media. At this time, American exceptionalism as well as consumerism were amplified to new levels due not only to globalization but also to conservative politics, namely Reaganism. These conservative values were parodied in the Cinema of Transgression, a subversive genre of film in the 1980s, which was centered around young filmmakers in Lower Manhattan. The well-trodden, trash-ridden corners of Manhattan’s East Village set the stage for many of the works within this genre, including those of David Wojnarowicz and Richard Kern, The stage of New York City made Wojnarowicz and Kern’s videos especially effective in expressing their shared disillusionment with the blasé, alienated, and decaying milieu of contemporary American youth culture, urban infrastructure, and relationships. The disintegration of the nuclear family and the failure to perform conservative conventions is delved into through depictions of sex, violence, and isolation in You Killed Me First, a 1985 video-turned-installation exhibition at Ground Zero Gallery by Wojnarowicz and Kern. This work, paired with Wojnarowicz’s activist texts, spotlight the artists’ inherently subversive ideas of how the panoptic structures of society lead many people to their breaking points. And what better way to reenact these situations than in the palpable atmospheres of their fallout?