You may have heard of this: Last week the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, removed a four-minute extract of David Wojnarowicz‘ video piece “A Fire in My Belly” from the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture”. The four-minute video Wojnarowicz recorded in collaboration with composer and performance artist Diamanda Galas in 1987 piece is an elegy dedicated to his boyfriend Peter Hujar (see tribute post below) and a comment on the AIDS epidemic. It was removed after threads by conservatives such as William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, who called it “hate speech” and John Boehner, Republican House Leader, who’s speaker called it an “outrageous use of taxpayer money” and “an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season”. The good news: Yesterday the New Museum, New York announced that as a respond to the censorship it will show the film both its thirteen- and a seven-minute excerpt in its lobby, where visitors will be able to see them without paying admission (statement as pdf here).
UPDATE: The video posted here at first was a 7-minute posthumously edited and mixed with music of Diamanda Galas. Unfortunately it turned out that this version’s origins are unclear and that it’s got nothing to do with the original version. Galas and Wojnarowicz have never worked together and he has never authorized her to use her music to accompany his unfinished film or the other way round. What you can see here instead is the 4-minute version edited Jonathan Katz for the Smithsonian exhibition. The original 13-minute version can be found on the webchannel of P.P.O.W Gallery on Vimeo. Thanks to the anonymous reader who corrected this. For more links take a look at the comment field below.
The Youtube video does not represent David’s film. Galas and Wojnarowicz never met and did not collaborate. The Youtube posted film is illegitimate and was not the version pulled from the Smithsonian. Please correct and link to the original films on the P..P.O.W. gallery vimeo channel. http://vimeo.com/user5389555
(resources below)
ICP PANEL:
“No less important, he maintained, is the unreliability of the Internet as an archival resource. To demonstrate this last point, Nayland noted that a search for Wojnarowicz’s Fire in My Belly on YouTube turns up a version that Marvin Taylor, founder and executive director of NYU’s Fales Collection, described as an unauthorized travesty—“a mess.”
“Amy (Scholder) Amy likened her experience of watching the YouTube version of David’s film to trauma—for its lack of fidelity to historical fact, and for its fabricator’s disregard for the integrity of the works by each of its makers.”
http://icpbardmfa.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/faculty-member-david-deitcher-on-icps-david-wojnarowicz-panel-12-16-2010/
http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=675
http://open.salon.com/blog/imwriteaboutart/2010/12/18/convenient_misinterpretations_the_saga_of_wojnarowicz
It should be made clear that Diamanda Galás never used or requested use of his footage to accompany her music.
no less important than the Youtube travesty is the adaptation from Wojnarowicz’s SILENT film footage (FIMB)residing at the Fales Collection (NYU) to which Jonathan Katz felt entitled to add a soundtrack of ACT UP members acting up. Wojnarowicz’s unfinished film footage was left SILENT – NO SOUNDTRACK AT ALL.