DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-1992)
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-1992)
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-1992)
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On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial int… Read more LOISAIDA: 1980’S GRAFFITI AND STREET ART FROM THE JOHN P. AXELROD COLLECTION
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-1992)

Tuna

Details
DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-1992)
Tuna
signed, inscribed and dated 'WOJNAROWICZ NYC '83' (lower right)
acrylic and printed paper collage on supermarket poster
43 1/4 x 31 3/4 in. (109.9 x 80.6 cm.)
Executed in 1983.
Provenance
Gracie Mansion Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Exhibited
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, Institute of Contemporary Art, Investigations Series, June 1985.
Normal, University of Illinois State University, David Wojnarowicz, Tongues of Flame, January-March 1990.
New York, Temple Gallery & Tyler Gallery, EXIT Art, February-March 1991.
Bard, Art Institute, Art What Thou Eat: Image of Food America Art, Eve Blum, September-November 1990.
New York, New York Historical Society, December 1990-March 1991.
New Museum, Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz, January-April 1999.
Andover, Massachusetts, Addison Gallery of American Art, Loisaida: New York's Lower East Side in the '80s, April-July 2014.
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Madrid, Museo Reina Sofia and Madam-Luxembourg - Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, July 2018-February 2020, p. 159, pl. 45 (illustrated).
Special notice
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in the outcome of the sale of certain lots consigned for sale. This will usually be where it has guaranteed to the Seller that whatever the outcome of the auction, the Seller will receive a minimum sale price for the work. This is known as a minimum price guarantee. This is such a lot.

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Lot Essay

TUNA is a sublime example of David Wojnarowicz’s early use of supermarket posters as backgrounds for his paintings. Here, the vibrant, eye-catching green poster acts as a foundation for Wojanrowicz’s painted and collaged vignette of a stereotypically suave cowboy with his hands tied behind his head and his mouth covered with a red bandana. Upon closer inspection, there is a smaller scene within this snapshot that illustrates a headless figure, presumably a victim of the smoking gun that stands before it. While it is unclear who the headless victim is, the ultimate issue Wojnarowicz wants viewers to question is the narratives that are fed to American society through mass-market and popular culture imagery.
TUNA specifically reflects on the violent roles expected of men as perpetuated through tropes, such as the rugged cowboy, in turn analyzing “how much more attention society gave to the killing of men than the loving of them” (D. Cameron, "Passion in the Wilderness," Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz, New York, 1999, p. 8).

When Wojnarowicz created this work in 1983, the visual language of commercialism and mass-produced images was not unique to the artist, having been a core pillar of the preceding generation’s interests and expressions through Pop art. These artists used similar source material, such as comic strips and advertisements from the newspaper, to stress the monotony of commercial America, as evidenced with works, such as Andy Warhol’s Dr. Scholl’s Corns (1961). Unlike Warhol’s Dr. Scholl’s Corns, which is painted on canvas, Wojnarowicz’s TUNA is painted and collaged onto an actual advertisement poster. Without any real income, Wojnarowicz sought materials from various stores in his Lower East Side neighborhood, such as local supermarkets, where he would salvage “Sale of the Week” posters from trash bins before altering their surfaces. By using an object that epitomizes conspicuous consumption as the foundation for the works in this series, Wojnarowicz offers viewers something recognizable and self-referential. The simplicity and “everyday” nature of this series is where its power lies—the messaging by Wojnarowicz as clear and direct as that of the poster.

Wojnarowicz also set himself apart from the preceding generation of artists engaging similar materials by blending the public, or the commercial, with the private. Whereas Pop artists, like Andy Warhol, purposefully stripped their work of any sense of originality or personal reference, Wojnarowicz portrayed subject matter that was important to him, and that others were too fearful to address, such as homophobia and the AIDS epidemic, to censorship, and failings by the United States government. These issues not only affected the artist, but also the community he built of other creatives and self-ascribed outsiders in the East Village of the 80s and 90s. The anxiety and fear felt by those affected are poignantly captured in the uncertainty and violence of Wojnarowicz’s supermarket poster series. In this way, the supermarket poster works serve as a metaphor for this forlorn fellowship—seemingly abandoned and cast aside, but garnering the power to alter human consciousness through visual expression.

Along with his fervent belief in the power of art to transform perspective, Wojnarowicz adhered to a firm ethos that an artist’s materials and imagery should evolve, much as the artist does. While the supermarket poster series spanned just two years of the artist’s career, it is recognized as an important evolution where Wojnarowicz continued to explore his visual language, as exemplified through the present lot’s inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake At Night, a seminal exhibition that highlighted the most important works of the artist’s brief, yet impactful career.

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