When David Wojnarowicz became Arthur Rimbaud

American artist David Wojnarowicz (1954−1992) was born into the dark heart of empire, his life and death exposing the brutal truth underlying the American Dream. Abused and kidnapped by his father, Wojnarowicz and his siblings reunited with their mother after finding her information in a New York City phone book. He started working as a street hustler in Times Square while in high school, before leaving home in 1971, at the age of 17. 

During his first of many trips to France in 1978, Wojnarowicz immersed himself in the Parisian environs where poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854−1891) had done the same a century earlier. Theirs was a path that ran parallel in more ways than one. Born exactly a century apart, both would die at age 37, and in between, both would become radical figures of queer liberation. 

Growing up amid the splendours of the French bourgeoisie, Rimbaud was a desperately restless boy whose precocious gifts made him the enfant terrible of symbolist literature. In 1870, the 16-year-old ran away to Paris, where he and married lover Paul Verlaine set the city ablaze with a whirlwind affair fuelled by opium, absinthe, hashish, and scandal. Both poets, their tempestuous liaison eventually came to an end in 1873 after Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years in prison. 

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In 1875, Rimbaud bid it all adieu: Verlaine, Paris, and poetry. Just 20 years old, he stopped writing and went into self-imposed exile, travelling the world until his untimely death from cancer at the age of 37 in 1891. In his death, Rimbaud was resurrected as the patron saint of New York’s ​’70s punk scene. Musician Patti Smith serenaded the poet every year on his birthday with her ​‘Rock ​’n’ Rimbaud’ shows, while punk band Television’s front man Tom Miller renamed himself Tom Verlaine. 

Upon his return to New York in 1978, Wojnarowicz embarked on his project Arthur Rimbaud in New York. He and collaborators donned a paper mask of the poet’s face, adopting poses provocative and prosaic around town, crafting sumptuous scenes cast against the crumbling city streets. Photographed with the knowing eye of the Pictures Generation, we see Rimbaud’s pallid veneer haunt New York landmarks like Coney Island and Times Square, hipster joints like Terminal Bar, and cruising grounds including the West Side Piers, the mask taking on a life of its own. 

The new book, David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Skira), revisits this seminal chapter of the artist’s work, reading as both a living elegy as well as a premonition of things to come. ​“I felt, at that time, that I wanted it to be the last thing I did before I ended up back on the streets or died or disappeared,” explained Wojnarowicz, who later died from AIDS at age 37.

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The series began appearing in the Soho Weekly News on May 14, 1980, the hypnotic image of ​‘Rimbaud shooting up’ inset alongside a larger feature on the downtown heroin scene. On June 18 of that same year, the series was given its proper due with a double page spread with banner headline, earning the artist his first pay cheque as a photographer: $150 ($592 today). The series largely remained underground until a 1990 exhibition at P.P.O.W. Gallery. The negatives had been neglected, their damage and disregard an extension of Wojnarowicz’s embarrassment for the youthful naïveté of these works. 

With the passage of time, Arthur Rimbaud in New York has become canon, the prototypical queer performance photograph that prefigures our present obsession with documenting the glamorous magic of our everyday lives, set against the romantic decay of a crumbling city in the last years before AIDS. ​“This is one of the most important works of the 1970s and ​’80s in New York,” says curator and author Antonio Sergio Bessa. ​“It came from pure necessity. David Wojnarowicz didn’t have a place to live and he didn’t have a camera, but the sheer ambition of doing a very deep project of about 500 shots as an itinerant artist is truly remarkable.” 

As Bessa speaks, he is overcome with emotion, the proximity to Wojnarowicz’s sheer force of will visceral and ever present in the works he left behind. In his lifetime, Wojnarowicz stood apart from the art world, which was making a killing as auction prices hit the stratosphere with record sales. ​“He never did anything just to sell. What he did had a lot of intention,” Bessa says. ​“David’s work was not an easy sell for any collector, because it has so much pain in it because of his life on the street, he had the experience of the outcast, the other. David should be canonised.”

David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York, edited by Antonio Sergio Bessa, is published by Skira.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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