After the Smithsonian’s G. Wayne Clough decided to remove David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Wojnarowicz became a household name and a cultural touchstone, to the point where Vanity Fair can now glibly claim, “Right-wing America will be begging for David Wojnarowicz…” and expect its readers to get the joke. In September, Clough[…..]

To transport an Occupy movement to the sanitized dominion of a museum is, as my art historian friends would say, problematic.  This year’s incarnation of the Berlin Biennale (the seventh) has thus far received anemic reviews, with some hinting at real vitriol.  The exhibition is partly as curator Artur Zmijewski envisioned it; full o’ problems.  In interviews Zmijewski offers cryptic monologues about equally cryptic solutions.[…..]

You Killed me First (1985), one of Richard Kern’s longer films starring David Wojnarowicz and Lung Leg, could be read as a clear teenage allegory of the Cinema of Transgression itself.  A girl (Lung leg) bristles at the religious directives of her parents, asserting her right to personhood outside demure hairstyles and turkey dinners, constructing voodoo dolls and entertaining other manners of dark drawing in[…..]