Shankar, Louis; (2024) “We Are Born into a Preinvented Existence” — a psychoanalytic investigation into the art of David Wojnarowicz, circa 1989. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This project focusses on the art of David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), drawing primarily on psychoanalytic theory, and focussed on the year 1989. This was the year that Wojnarowicz first exhibited many of his most influential pieces of art; it was, I demonstrate, the apotheosis of his late practice, at the overlap of art, writing, and activism. Wojnarowicz began work on the three projects that I focus on after a number of important events in his life: the death of Peter Hujar from AIDS-related illness in 1987; and his own diagnosis with ARC (AIDS-related complex) in 1988. Each chapter takes as its focus a different project: In the Shadow of Forward Motion, a solo exhibition at P.P.O.W. Gallery; Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a group exhibition responding to the AIDS crisis, curated by Nan Goldin; and ITSOFOMO, a performance piece created in collaboration with composer and musician Ben Neill. I put to work a different area or grouping of psychoanalytic theory in each chapter: Chapter I uses Lacanian understandings of subjectivity, including psychosis and the sinthome; Chapter II thinks through trauma and mourning, looking at the work of artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger; and Chapter III focuses on the death drive, as well as related concepts such as Freud’s “oceanic feeling”. I understand Wojnarowicz's practice — enfolding together his art, his writings, his activism — as a limit case for subjectivity, specifically a queer subjectivity, as someone at the edge of the social and the Symbolic and, thus, offering a unique perspective on these mechanisms of power. I argue that the difficulty — occasionally, the impossibility — of communicating this perspective is not a deficiency in Wojnarowicz’s work but, rather, reveals something fundamental about the role of art within discourse, activism and, indeed, life.

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