National Portrait Gallery show. Photo by Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
TODAY'S POSTING IS PRESENTED IN SOLIDARITY WITH AA BRONSON AND MANY OTHER ARTISTS, OUTRAGED IN THE WAKE OF A DECISION BY THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY IN WASHINGTON DC TO REMOVE
"A Fire in My Belly" VIDEO ARTWORK BY DAVID WOJNAROWICZ FROM "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," CURRENTLY ON VIEW. AA BRONSON HAS DEMANDED THAT HIS WORK BE REMOVED FROM THE EXHIBITION. WOJNAROWICZ'S VIDEO WAS REMOVED BY MUSEUM DIRECTORS DECEMBER 1st IN REACTION TO PROTESTS BY CONSERVATIVE MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AND THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE.
SYNOPSIS OF WOJNAROWICZ VIDEO
BY HOLLAND COTTER (NYTimes, 12-10-10) "A Fire in My Belly" was made from video shot in Mexico, a country that Wojnarowicz found mesmerizing for its combination of vital popular culture and daily life lived shockingly close to the bone. The 13-minute video opens with a panning shot, taken from a moving car, of the streets of a Mexican town, interrupted by quick shots of newspaper headlines reporting violent crimes. These sequences are punctuated, very briefly, with a few other images: a suspended world globe; a cartoonish dancing puppet wearing a sombrero; a disembodied hand dropping coins. Then three scenes of combat alternate repeatedly: a bullfight and a cockfight - each gruesome - and a masked and acrobatic wrestling match. Travelogue-ish sequences follow - of a circus with performing animals and a visit to a mesoamerican archaeological site with demonic-looking sculptures, ... and the video ends abruptly when the dancing puppet is shot with what looks like a pistol full of paint. The 7-minute excerpt feels more packed and purposeful, and quite complete. The opening image, which will recur again and again, is of metal wheels turning, like some machine of fate. Then, interwoven and rapidly repeated, we see pairs, not necessarily juxtaposed, of related images: street beggars and armed police; Day of the Dead candy skulls and a painting of an Aztec human sacrifice; mummified bodies displaced from graves in a cemetery and an undisturbed tombstone being gently washed. Certain images were evidently filmed in a studio: coins falling into a bandaged hand, and a hand held under splashing water; halves of a loaf of bread being sewn together, and a man's lips being sewn shut. A short sequence of a man masturbating alternates with images of sides of beef in a slaughterhouse. The (CONTROVERSIAL) image of the crucifix with ants comes almost in the middle of all of this, between shots of bread being sewn and blood dripping into a bowl. At the end, images from the first video reappear - the puppet and the globe - both burning.
VIEW THE VIDEO - POSTED BY PPOW GALLERY, NYC
J.Galligan y L.Mulero
75GRAND/SUR
Santa Olaya, PR