DEAR JEAN PIERRE
by David Wojnarowicz
Edited by James Hoff
Primary Information. 605 pages, $40.
IT WAS at one of my first ACT UP meetings that I learned of both the existence and the death of artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), a central figure of the East Village scene in the 1980s. I had moved to New York only a few weeks earlier, but even I could see that his death had hit members of ACT UP unusually hard. While I didn’t know it at the time, behind the scenes there was an unsuccessful scramble to honor his request for his corpse to be dumped on the steps of either the FDA or the White House. I joined a boisterous march in his memory but peeled off before the planned civil disobedience, for which I had not yet been trained. A few months later, however, I co-organized ACT UP’s “Ashes Action,” in which the ashes of people who died of AIDS were thrown onto the White House lawn, one of several political funerals that drew inspiration from texts by Wojnarowicz and others. Some of his ashes were used in the second Ashes Action, two years later.
Wojnarowicz’ importance to my thinking about art, life, and death in the age of AIDS has only deepened over the years. But when I went to see “Dear Jean Pierre,” an exhibition of letters and postcards sent mostly between 1979 and ’82 to his on-again, off-again French lover Jean Pierre Delage, I confess I was looking for a different, more intimate connection. The exhibition, curated by Anneliis Beadnell and Cynthia Carr for New York’s PPOW Gallery in spring 2022, didn’t entirely dash that hope. Most of the exhibited material is now available in Dear Jean Pierre, which reproduces the correspondence in full color and scale.
Mirroring the exhibition, the book offers no introduction, explanatory essays, or even captions. Indeed, its only text comes at the end, in the form of a timeline of Wojnarowicz’ life and work in the three years on display, written by co-curator Carr and based on her more extensive timeline for the catalogue of the Whitney’s 2018 retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night. Without any editorial explanation, the correspondence is left to speak for itself, not only in words but in the images that either were already part of the materials (postcards, flyers, etc.) or were added by Wojnarowicz. To assess what the material says, one has to begin with what it doesn’t say. With the exception of a single letter from 1991 tacked on at the end, the material precedes the emergence of AIDS in Wojnarowicz’ circle of friends. Wojnarowicz and Delage corresponded throughout the 1980s, so the focus on the early exchanges is noteworthy but never explained. This sense that one is not being told the whole story is consistent with Wojnarowicz’ many omissions and evasions, which are richly documented in Carr’s biography. That he was less than candid with Delage about his other sexual activities and romantic attachments is perhaps not surprising, but there are those gaps. The letters cast light only occasionally on other parts of his rough-and-tumble milieu. The grittiest passages tend to be about the perennial New York quests to find an apartment and to make the rent. Much of the rest is a patchwork of epistolary conventions mixed with ardent if ultimately noncommittal expressions of love. Wojnarowicz’ efforts to convince himself, more even than his correspondent, that they have a future together seem as sincere in their hope as in their doubt. The ensemble is touching in an almost literal sense: the two clearly experienced a physical and emotional connection that Wojnarowicz had not really found before, and his writing seems an effort to linger in that embrace—or to frame it in negative terms lest he risk getting hurt yet again. Each letter is like a sparsely furnished room somewhere between New York and Paris where Wojnarowicz and Delage luxuriate in nothing more than one another’s proximity, speaking de tout et de rien. Tacked to the walls of each room are the correspondents’ eclectic visuals. The standouts, of course, are images by Wojnarowicz himself. These range from whimsical doodles and figures in the margins to photocopies of contact sheets and larger prints from his photographic projects, including Rimbaud in New York. A few drawings cover a whole page; there are also photocopies of Wojnarowicz’ collages. In some cases, the artist has modified an existing image by drawing or stenciling in stylized people, animals, or machines. One striking work is the result of stenciling over a postcard reproduction of Paul Klee’s Arches of the Bridge Stepping Out of Line, itself drawn on paper-mounted fabric, yielding a remarkable multiplicity of layers, media, and time. No less interesting are the images already on the postcards and more improvised stationery that caught Wojnarowicz’ artistic eye in the first place. Among these are works by famous artists—an occasional Hockney or Rothko, a great deal of O’Keeffe—as well as others who are less famous, mixed in, to be sure, with a wide array of New York postcard schlock. There is also a persistent interest in Japanese and Chinese woodblock prints, an underappreciated influence on Wojnarowicz’ visual vocabulary to date. There are also more playful moments, such as the eight successively mailed postcards in which he spells out in exuberantly colorful letters J’aime toi. Never mind the faulty phrasing (Wojnarowicz never really learned French and depended instead on Delage’s English): the artist is always looking for a language beyond what he frequently disparaged as the “pre-invented world.” The opportunity to draw such connections makes this book essential for scholars and committed Wojnarowicz fans, though others may prefer a reprint of the Whitney catalogue.
Shane Butler is a professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University.
