The Lazzaretto, a New Painting from the David Wojnarowicz Series

A lazzaretto is a quarantine hospital in a port city.  Venice built the first lazzaretto (and coined the term) in the wake of the Black Death of 1348.  People who were ill, or were thought to pose a hazard to the population, were isolated in these hospitals usually located on an island or far from the city.  I'm not sure that these institutions still exist.  The USA certainly had them; there were several here in New York in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Philadelphia preserves the oldest lazzaretto in the USA.

I felt intimidated with the prospect of painting David Wojnarowicz's struggles with AIDS, his personal struggles and his political struggles.  This was the central experience of the last years of his life and the focus of some of his finest work.  He first went through the experience of his dying friends, especially the death of his mentor and sometime lover, the photographer Peter Hujar.  Then Wojnarowicz had to face the prospect of his own death which came in 1992 when he was only 37.  And then there were my own experiences with the disease.  I lost quite a number of people to the disease, including people I was once very close to; so many attractive capable charming young men cut down before their lives even started.  How to paint all of that?  How to paint the horror of it, the loss, the official negligence, the popular fear and contempt, and the anger and desperation?

I got the idea for this painting from David Wojnarowicz himself.  In 1990, David Wojnarowicz collaborated with a few other artists on an installation piece at P.P.O.W gallery in New York titled The Lazzarretto.  It was a labyrinth built from black plastic bags with the first hand stories by AIDS sufferers of their illness and of the discrimination they faced written out on large sheets of paper.  In the center of the labyrinth was a horrific sickroom consisting of a skeleton under a blanket on a cot.  It was surrounded by pills, garbage, and a small TV tuned to daytime soap operas and game shows.  There were other chambers in the labyrinth that pointedly mocked prominent political and religious figures of the day from Jesse Helms to Ed Koch to Cardinal O'Connor.

I decided to take the idea of a lazzaretto, a place of exile, isolation, and neglect, and build upon that.  The most prominent figure in make-up and a Tina Turner wig is based on actual experience.  Many years ago, I went to one of the regular monthly dances the Lesbian and Gay Center in New York put on to raise money.  In the dim light, I saw a young man in almost perfect Tina Turner drag, the hair, the jewelry, the black mini dress, etc.  As I got closer, I could see that she was emaciated and covered with Kaposi's spots.  I decided to put that memory front and center in the picture.  This is the one picture from the Wojnarowicz series where David is not front and center, though he is there in the painting.

After 3 years of work on this series, it's finally taking shape.  I've decided that it will be a 16 panel series.  The Lazzaretto is the ninth panel completed in the series so far.

It's finished, at least until I decide to go back into it again at some point, something I've been doing a lot with these pictures.

NOTE:  Since I posted this, I've gone back into the painting and tweaked and sharpened extensively.  I replaced the original photos for this post with new ones of the painting in its current state.

I also took new and better photos of another painting from the series that I finished a few months ago, Painting Fire.

The Chief Glory of the Upright Ape

Orson Welles at Chartres Cathedral, from his very last film, "F Is For Fake," 1976.





Today as 5000 years ago, people pick their noses and scratch their butts.  And yet then and now they can make art, unique to the upright ape and her/his chief glory (together with music and literature).
Did any king or bishop or theologian or philosopher ever leave so happy and stirring a legacy as that of the anonymous master masons who built Chartres?

Every ruler from Ramses to David to the Qin Emperor to Caesar to Louis le Grand to Mao is ultimately a thug on a throne.  Political history is mostly a record of crime.  It's the artist who makes it worth the bother.

God

We can credit or blame Michelangelo for the “Old Man in the Sky” that instinctively comes into our minds whenever we hear the word “God.” Of course, such an image long predates Michelangelo, but the great Florentine gave that metaphor a depth, force, and seriousness that is unprecedented. 
Michelangelo shows God, the greatest of sculptors, putting the spark of life into his greatest creation, Adam. That Adam is already living and responds shows us that this is not a literal illustration of the Genesis story in any sense, but a conceptual image, a picture intended to inspire us to think about the larger issues beyond the literal story; God and humanity, being and nothingness, creator and creation, agency and reception, etc. 
The greatness of Michelangelo is that he can put so much meaning so convincingly into such a bare image; an encounter between 2 large figures with no landscape setting, no assisting allegory, no other special effects or additions. Both figures can exist only in the realm of art. They would be impossible in real life. Adam, the first and most magnificent of men, closest to the prototype in the mind of God, reclines in the pose of a Classical river god, and looks up with a certain sad reluctance as he reaches out to accept the spark of life from God. God is an impossible figure, an old man with an athletic body that would be the envy of the healthiest of young men. He is literally ageless in this picture. What’s more, he flies through the air with an unselfconscious ease. He wears a mantle that billows out like a sail in the wind and is filled with tumultuous figures. Who are they? Angels? It’s not clear. There is a mysterious figure under God’s arm that some scholars identify as Eve, already present in the Creator’s thoughts. Others identify her as the Virgin Mary since she is next to a large infantile figure. Michelangelo gives us no clues. 
Michelangelo painted the figure of God to be an image of what God does, not so much of who God is. In contrast to the passive Adam, God is action, a figure boiling with energy, the very embodiment of creation, history, and life itself.

Michelangelo’s god remains a powerful and compelling image, though not a very satisfactory image, perhaps not even to Michelangelo himself. Even in this famous work of art, God remains mysterious and unapproachable. This figure is only a metaphor, and like all metaphors for God, an inadequate one despite its power.

It is a commonplace that ours is a secular or “godless” age. Balderdash! We’ve only traded in one god for another.

Behold the Lord your God:

This is the god we really believe in despite what we say we do or don’t believe in. Money may not be a personal or a transcendent god, but it is a god nonetheless commanding our fear and obedience; and it requires our faith. All currency is an act of faith, even gold. What gives those scraps of engraved paper in our pockets any value at all is “the full faith and credit of the United States.” In order for those dollars to mean anything, we have to hold that faith. Money works the miracles, heals the sick, provides our daily bread, and protects us from misfortune and our enemies. Money puts in our hands powers that we once attributed to the gods. Money gives our lives meaning and purpose. We pin our hopes for salvation on money.

Money has only one morality, profit. Anything and everything goes no matter how obscene and evil in the name of profit. Profit is the sole measure of virtue and success. All the meaning we need is written on a price tag.

Does money have any kind of will or agency? Was this the original purpose of money? Of course not. For centuries, money was an instrument, a tool. Whether it was for power and glory or a modest level of comfort and dignity, money was always nothing more than a means to a desired end. Now, through not fault of its own, money is an end in itself. In a polarized age where there is no agreement on anything, money is the last universally accepted criterion left to us. It is the very last true article of faith that we really do believe in unreservedly with all our hearts, with all our minds, and with all our might.

Ours is not a materialist age, but a nihilistic age. Materialism requires a certain measure of conviction that not many people can muster or sustain.

I sometimes think that in the war between the fundamentalists and the missionary atheists over the existence of God, they are both looking in the wrong place. They are both appealing to the orderly designs of nature for definitive proof that God does or does not exist. 

 First of all, a god whose existence could be proven and demonstrated probably would not be God (a point made by thinkers from Augustine to Kierkegaard). As philosophers from Aquinas to Kant have gone to great pains to point out, arguments for the existence of God always end in cul-de-sacs of tautology. 
Just like faith in the value of currency, so belief in God is ultimately an arbitrary act of faith. 

Second, why should we be looking at nature for “proof” that God exists? Nature and all that is in it are as material and mortal as we are. We are part of that nature, tied in our very substance and by descent to all other life and matter. When we look at nature, we are looking not at God, but an extension of ourselves, at the community of being from which we emerged and to which we will return. So we are infinitesimally tiny in comparison to the cosmos, so what. We are the ones who feel small. The cosmos doesn’t feel anything. We don’t live in the cosmos or the subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. We can’t live in those places. Both of them are lethal to human life. Our world is embedded in those worlds, but they are not what we live in.

 We live in the world that we apprehend with our senses and our reason. The world that we see and experience every day is the world for which we are ultimately responsible. The rest of the vast cosmos can take care of itself without us. Most of us will never visit the cosmos except in the realm of imagination. Our senses and reason may indeed be very limited, may even be less than many other animals (none of us will ever have the hearing of our dogs or see as clearly and sharply as the hawk or see the colors that a bee sees), but our reason and senses are all that we have to find our way through a vast and mysterious universe. We are the prisoners of a single moment in time and a single place in space. Our knowledge will always be limited and conditional.

For that reason, I hold to a kind of reverent agnosticism. I have no idea what may or may not lie outside the bounds of my comprehension. Perhaps death is an end, or perhaps another horizon beyond which I can’t see. I like everyone else will find out eventually. Even so, whether I end in destruction or transcendence, my dying may resolve no more mysteries than my living.

It is the business of visionaries and heroes always to expand that world of the known and familiar. We may indeed be prisoners of time and space, but our cell has grown exponentially larger over the past 500 years and will grow larger still.

This print by Francisco de Goya from his series The Disasters of War has always meant a lot to me. In it a long dead corpse writes the word “nada” “nothing” on a tablet.

Is this a confession of atheism as critics once thought? The blackness around the corpse is hardly empty space. If you look carefully, it is filled with distorted and shrieking faces. The Beyond in this print is hardly empty or silent, but it remains inexplicable. Perhaps the noble war dead, always invoked in memorial speeches, ultimately have nothing to say (as one of my students suggested). Or perhaps they are telling us from the beyond that there is nothing there, or nothing that we would understand. I’ve always understood this print to be an implicit rebuke to the easy explanations of religious orthodoxy and to an equally facile secularism.

If we are to find signs of God anywhere, assuming he exists, then they won’t be anywhere out in the cosmos or the Beyond. Perhaps God is to be found in something that we share with each other and with other forms of life, love. That’s hardly definitive proof, but then, faith is ultimately and unavoidably an arbitrary decision. Love, what a strange place to imagine finding traces of God! The ancients understood love to be a kind of madness that was destructive and yet indispensable. Love can destroy life and make life at the same time. Love can humiliate the gods and glorify mortals. Love inspires crime and creation (“Eros, builder of cities” – WH Auden from his “Homage to Sigmund Freud”). There is no emotion more selfish or more selfless than love. And yet the Christian faith (among others) proclaims that God is Love. What may be nothing more than a biochemical reaction to sexual arousal that ultimately means nothing, might actually have a transcendent dimension that lives at the very point where Being and Nothingness meet, where Life and Death meet. That same passion that can drive us to murderous fits of jealously could also move us to look outside ourselves and see not just the objects of our sexual desires, but our neighbors, and even our enemies, as our Beloveds. The God who Loves and is Love could hold each and all of us as His Beloveds; God the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between them in Augustine’s formula for the Holy Trinity. Out of Love, that same God became one of us in our full humanity sharing our limitations and our mortality. Out of Love, that God accomplished our salvation for us, and died as one of us and for us. In the Resurrection, God does not promise to revive our corpses, or to give us any free pass from death. God promises that our ends will not be our conclusions.

What keeps me coming back to an insufferably obscurantist religion, which must by necessity of human nature fail the large expectations it cultivates, is the revolution at its heart. In the idea of God becoming a mortal human being, and choosing to live among us not as a glorious all-powerful monarch but among the least of us. In that act, the grim mathematics of power and weakness, domination and submission, success and failure, by which the world has always worked are thrown out the window. Our salvation is a free gift. We don’t have to take any tests or even fill out any forms. It is there for us already. The idea of pulling ourselves up into heaven by our own bootstraps, of attaining apotheosis through mighty works of strength and virtue is out the window along with all other criteria of success and power.

Science and Religion

I think science and religion are about as closely related as fishing and stone cutting.

Science is about finding out and figuring out without preconceptions.  Explaining the world and how it works according to what the material evidence indicates --and only what it indicates no matter what-- is the business of science.

Religion is under no obligation to explain anything.  Religion is about relationship, and a personal relationship, with whatever may or may not be there at the point where being and nothingness meet.  Religion is a leap of faith, but it is hardly the only one in life.  Currency is always a matter of faith, and so is our daily conviction that everyone else beyond ourselves is not a robot.  Neither the value of currency nor the my-neighbors-are-not-robots idea are demonstrable or provable.

D-Day

The largest military invasion in history took place 70 years ago today.  American, British, Canadian, and other forces landed on the beaches of Normandy in occupied France, dealing the coup de grace to Hitler's dream of a racist empire.

The first wave of soldiers hits the beach.

Robert Capa's famous photo taken under fire of the first wave of American troops hitting the beaches in Normandy on June 6, 1944

General Eisenhower speaks to American paratroopers the day before the invasion.

A beach in Normandy several days after the invasion; an indication of the huge industrial build-up, unprecedented in size and speed, in the USA to prepare for the invasion.  The Allies were able to absorb huge losses in weapons and equipment that would have defeated armies earlier.

An anonymous American soldier lies dead on the beach.

Treating the wounded.

Allied wounded from the first wave of the invasion, June 6, 1944

American paratroopers with a captured German flag and helmet, June 9, 1944





70 years ago today and every day.

To Govern or Not

A Libertarian state would not necessarily be a democratic one.  It certainly would not be an egalitarian state since it would be a hierarchy of "producers" and "moochers," or if you prefer, "winners" and "losers."  Why should the "producers" be bound by the same law as the "moochers?"  And why should the "losers" have an equal vote with the "winners," or any vote at all?  The idea of "free association" (each to their own kind) would effectively nullify all civil rights and anti-discrimination laws.

No-government is not the same as self-government.  Why bother with the niceties of due process and equal protection under the law when the "survival of the fittest" must necessarily cull the herd?  Why not let the Free Market determine who is capable of governing?

Idolatry

Guns, money, hatred, the arrogant certainty of the fanatic are idols that tempt us away from the path of righteousness; the path of justice, mercy, peace, and love.

Images of Durga, Astarte, Kuan Yin, Buddha, or the Virgin Mary are not.