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David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, and (Other) Worlds Past a “Pre-Invented Existence”

by Gillian Yee

When Peter Hujar died from AIDS-related complications on November 26th, 1987, David Wojnarowicz’s first inclination was to photograph his mentor and former lover’s body in excruciating detail. In the chapter “Living Close to the Knives,” from his memoir Close to the Knives, he recounts his experience with Hujar’s death: the rapid decline in his physical and mental health, his angry outbursts as he sought last-ditch attempts for treatment, and Wojnarowicz’s attempts to talk to him as he coasted in and out of consciousness on his hospital bed. This chapter further describes Hujar’s last living moments in painstaking detail. Following the twitching of his eyelids, the final slow, steady intake of breath, and an all-encompassing stillness of his body, Wojnarowicz’s ensuing impulses managed to surprise even himself:

… I barely cried. When everyone left the room I closed the door and pulled the super-8 camera out of my bag and did a sweep of his bed: his open eye, his open mouth, that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble, the full sense of the flesh of it. Then the still camera: portraits of his amazing feet, his head, that open eye again—I kept trying to get the light I saw in that eye—and then the door flew open and a nun rushed in babbling about how he’d accepted the church and I look at this guy on the bed with his outstretched arm and I think: but he’s beyond that.¹

In a whirlwind of quickly intensifying emotions, Wojnarowicz’s impulse was to visually capture this intimate encounter with death that would heavily influence the rest of his artistic practice. Although the 23 resulting photographs taken in these moments allude to his lifelong occupation with human consciousness and mortality, they also permitted him to reside in an in-between space where both life and death coexist, and where Wojnarowicz was unrestricted by society’s expectations to grieve properly.

Living during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz resented the idea of “properly” dealing with these experiences of tremendous loss. This meant grieving quietly and out of sight, thus following a Euro-American tendency to deny, ignore, and avoid death and its resultant indicators. Many of the works he would create in the following years would directly respond to the deaths that resulted from the overt, widespread neglect and maltreatment of populations most affected by HIV/AIDS. Wojnarowicz’s photographs of Hujar show how this exploration into the “essence of death” acts also as an exploration into existence beyond the grasp of the “pre-invented,” which he describes as: “A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies.”² The pre-invented existence is therefore one that, in its ascription of white cisgender heterosexuality as the norm, commonly restricts life and marginalizes individuals based on race, class, gender, and sexuality in its promises of false histories and futures.

In using death and the corpse as the subject for his work, Wojnarowicz utilizes that which is typically considered abject as visual provocation for unraveling the boundaries between interior and exterior, self and other. In questioning the processes of subjectification—the defining of the ever-transitory, networked, indeterminate, and ephemeral self—this work offers an alternative ontological viewpoint regarding human existence, refusing to be bound by commonplace definitions of what being human is and how one should exist.³ That is, death and life are not two ends of a binary where cross-contamination (the “infection” of life with death) signifies abjected Otherness but are intertwined in a never-ending dance of feelings, sensations, intensities, and memories.

Both in their galleries and online collections, the Whitney Museum of American Art commonly displays three of these photographs as a triptych (fig. 1). Each black and white print shows its respective body part in complete isolation from the rest of Hujar’s figure; there is nothing else within the frame to focus our gaze on aside from the rumpled fabrics of his hospital gown and the bed linens below him. By isolating and centering the body parts almost perfectly within each frame, Wojnarowicz’s intimate shots of the (dead) body force the viewer to focus on details that might have gone unnoticed if he had captured the complete form. With the shot of Hujar’s head, for example, one’s gaze may catch at the places where shadows dance underneath his unkempt beard or the dip of his clavicle. In this same photograph, his vacant, unfocused stare interrupts a viewer’s gaze and discomforts them; it looms out from underneath half-lidded eyes, cast far beyond the picture plane. In their invitation for contemplation and close looking, the parts of the body presented in each photograph almost take on a life of their own, eliciting different sensations in their viewers and pointing to the reality that although we idealize our identities as whole concepts, they are often naturally incomplete and without borders. Wojnarowicz’s practice of separating the body into pieces through the camera lens, then, enforces the multiplicity of the human form, bypassing common perceptions of identity and knowledge as each piece holds distinct meaning and value for the photographer.

As Tomasz Sikora asserts in his analysis of Wojnarowicz’s work, death and mortality play a vital part in the artist’s oeuvre by producing an array of sensory and affective responses not commonly associated with the lifeless body, called “queer life-worlds.”⁴ Refusing to gloss over what we consider bad experiences that produce negative feelings, Sikora argues that Wojnarowicz used photography and the subject of the lifeless body in tandem to propose these experiences as an avenue toward extending our existence past our corporeal forms. As such, his work subverts the expectation of death as a bad experience; in its place is an embrace of “the cosmic dance of photons and images and bodies and sensations,” where a focus on lived experiences with new ways of feeling, living, and being affected give way to possible life-worlds that are alternative to pre-codified attachments in a necropolitical state.⁵

Hujar’s body is an exploration into these worlds through Wojnarowicz’s take on the essence of death: “the fears and joys of it the flight it contains … just all the thoughts and sensations this death this event produces in bystanders more spirituality than any words we can manufacture.”⁶ Undeterred by a reductive life/death dichotomy, Wojnarowicz utilizes these photographs to emphasize the ability to connect within a larger matrix of human existence. The close-up shots of his body—perhaps replicating a gaze that carefully and lovingly regards another’s body one final time—contribute towards a sense of absolute veneration, grieving the loss of one of the most influential men in Wojnarowicz’s life and capturing, in simple shots, all the wonderful memories and joy this body brought him over the years. It is a radical gesture of love and intimacy, an expression of life and death simultaneously, and a transformation of death from an all-encompassing endless void to a liminal state of being that allows temporary freedom from what he calls a pre-invented existence.

Wojnarowicz’s response to Hujar’s death is immediate artistic action, turning towards the reception and production of aesthetic sensations instead of rendering the dead body a passive, powerless object. As he lands his photographic gaze on different parts of Hujar, he releases the parts from the organic unity of the body, as if they’ve “become their own little persons” with their own subjectivities, histories, and sensations.⁷ In each shot, Wojnarowicz lays bare his relationship to this body so informed by love, intimacy, respect, and raw connection that it goes far past what should be conceivably possible in a pre-invented world of self-regulation and carefully codified rules. The photographs of Hujar’s body thus unravel the boundary between “I” and “Other” rather than reinforcing it, sharing contemplative, quiet, life-changing moments suspended in time, as if they represent the artist’s eyes traveling over Hujar’s corpse for the first time. They seek to capture the amalgamation of beauty, joy, and acceptance within a subject commonly associated with ugliness, trauma, and rejection.

As self-regulatory subjects within a pre-invented existence, we reject death as the supposed antithesis of life and avoid signifiers of death (i.e., aging and disease) because they threaten to violate a life/death binary. In contrast, the mournful quality of Wojnarowicz’s photographs is, as Marietta Radomska states in their discussion of queer death studies, an example of “practices that transgress the effects of white humanist melancholia and establish a relational ethics apt for unlocking congealed power matrices, and opening towards alternative futurities.”⁸ These images of the corpse become a conduit for alternative ways of being, inhabiting a liminal space where one isn’t cast into the outer bounds of society due to attributes of race, gender, sexuality, and able-bodiedness.⁹ Such an alternative is apparent in these quiet moments after Hujar’s last breath, when Wojnarowicz is alone with his body and captures all the things he finds beautiful and captivating. There is, in these alternatives, a certain freedom from a pre-invented existence that can only be seen and witnessed in death.

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Gillian Yee (they/them) is a second-year PhD student at Temple University specializing in global contemporary art history from 1980 to the present. Their goal as a scholar is to explore the realm of queerness, transness, and “non-normative” identities within art practices, thereby circumventing a traditional canonical understanding of the discipline.

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1. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (Open Road Integrated Media, 2014), 111-12. Super-8 cameras are typically for recording video, but in this instance Wojnarowicz only used one for photography.

2. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 96.

3. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond. Abjection Incorporated (Duke University Press, 2020), 19.

4. Tomasz Sikora, “Queer Life-Worlds and the Art of David Wojnarowicz,” Journal of Gender Studies 29, no. 1 (December 15, 2019): 76-87, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692194. 

5. Sikora, “Queer Life-Worlds,” 82.

6. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 111-12.

7. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 82.

8. Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke, “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective,” Australian Feminist Studies 35, no. 104 (April 2, 2020): 92, https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952. 

9. Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, 118.