ART REVIEW : Wojnarowicz: Artist on a Collision Course

The collage sensibility at work in David Wojnarowicz’s art is responsible for both the high-intensity pitch and the minor level at which it typically hovers. Too restless and obsessive to be ignored, yet surprisingly conservative in tone and bearing, Wojnarowicz’s work compels the same curious attention that surrounds the utterances of any committed prophet of doom.

Among the 60 works included in “Tongues of Flame,” a traveling survey of Wojnarowicz’s work from the past 12 years that opened Friday at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the familiar meaning of the term collage is much in evidence. Amid the paint and plaster, the artist’s paintings and sculptures regularly incorporate scraps of sheet music, maps, post cards, clock faces, found photographs, grocery store posters and other assorted items, which have been shifted from the world of the everyday into the fictive realm of art.

Wojnarowicz’s use of collage also extends to a collision of standard styles and strategies, which often bump up against each other in a single painting. A Surrealist juxtaposition of wildly disparate images is dominant, while Expressionist distortion and subjective emphasis meet the blaring commercial imagery of Pop.

Sometimes, he calls on scenes and subjects from his dreams for ingredients in the pictorial stew. But the artist’s Surrealist strategy is not turned toward an interior examination of either the personal or the collective unconscious. Nor does it often seek a dislocated jolt of recognition. Instead, Wojnarowicz typically wields the method to construct a stream-of-consciousness display of private symbols for public maladies, often shrouded in the dark obscurity of nighttime terrors.

However disparate the images in a single picture, they are always seamlessly arrayed in a coherent, expressive unity. Wojnarowicz is, at bottom, an Expressionist, and his art is as devoted to compulsion and inner necessity and as aggressively stylized as any Expressionist predecessor’s. Like those early 20th-Century forebears, who were reacting forcefully against the superficial sentimentality of so much fin de siecle art, Wojnarowicz’s Expressionism is nothing if not plainly fueled by sheer disgust with the trivialities that pass for enlightened culture during our own end-of-century wallow in appalling shallowness.

Pop culture trivia is everywhere entangled in Wojnarowicz’s paintings, like wild-eyed woolly mammoths stuck in the tar of the La Brea pits. Among the most convincing works in the show are four mixed-media collages on supermarket advertising posters, which constitute a withering critique of the debasements of consumption. In “Seven Miles a Second,” a poster listing this week’s coupon sales is the ground for small paintings of dung beetles, who furiously feed on dinner embedded with tawdry 3-D postcards of Frankenstein’s monster, Donald Duck, the skyline of Manhattan and Jesus with a crown of thorns.

As a medium, collage was a radical disjuncture for art because, suddenly, art was opened to the inescapable stuff of daily life--what Rimbaud eloquently called life’s “poetic junk.” A newspaper clipping embedded in a still-life drawing brought an actual piece of flotsam into the hitherto elevated plane of art, and it brought as well whatever tale of mayhem or moment the news clipping happened to describe.

At its origin, collage represented a radical adulteration of artistic content. Trailing into Wojnarowicz’s art, through its commitment to a material and stylistic method of collage, the stuff of daily life includes drug addiction, sexual abuse of children, homelessness, heterosexist discrimination and a variety of other social horrors, many of which the artist himself has suffered. The chief claim made on our attention by Wojnarowicz’s hyper-collaged art will be found in its determined refusal of purity, especially purity that demeans by exclusion.

That refusal of purity, of course, is also the principal source of the attempted suppression of Wojnarowicz’s art by the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family Assn. and others of that ilk. For them, impure art is obscenity. The mere expression of homosexuality is blasphemous, for it ranks as a crime against the supposed purity of their religious faith.

Ironically, Wojnarowicz himself travels a rather conservative path in his art, simply because collage became perhaps the most common technique in all 20th-Century art. (From Cubism on, a credible history of successive movements could likely be told with recourse only to works of art that employ collage techniques.) Through Surrealist and Expressionist means, Wojnarowicz uses collage to peel away the glossy surface of popular culture, and to render a world characterized as a fetid morass of rancid decay. The unbroken apocalyptic tenor is harrowing, but finally too unmodulated to be convincing.

I find myself wanting to like Wojnarowicz’s art far more than I actually do. Its greatest use seems to be as a kind of social lightning rod, around which like-minded people can cluster. This is no small achievement. (It speaks as well of the sudden rise and fall of the East Village art scene in New York in the early 1980s, in which Wojnarowicz was an active player.) But few of the individual works move me in unexpected directions.

One that does is “Untitled (Buffalo),” a simple, strange, black-and-white photograph from 1988-89. The tragicomic image shows four buffalo tumbling headlong off a cliff, plunging ignominiously into the peaceful river valley below. Apocalypse, yes, but whose? A double-take is required to recognize that Wojnarowicz couldn’t have photographed an actual sight, and a triple-take is necessary to discern that the picture is a set-up. (Look closely. The photograph actually shows a detail from a diorama at a natural history museum.) The photograph deftly takes you on an instructive journey from blind faith to skeptical regard. For an artist attuned to a perception of social and political decay, that’s an important path to sharply illuminate.

At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2437 Main St., to Sept. 5.