Survivor’s Remorse

2018
9-channel video installation with 29.8 x 14 x 50.4 inch shipping crate. HD color, stereo sound, 20:11 minutes.

Commissioned by the Harvard Art Museums, Survivor’s Remorse takes the life and art of David Wojnarowicz as a point of departure to examine the unequal distribution of value between artists’ living bodies and the bodies of work they produce. In a society built on the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, medical, political, and social institutions often fail to properly care for human life whereas art institutions take painstaking care of aesthetic objects. Wojnarowicz’s story and archive epitomizes this chasm of care. As a queer artist with AIDS who was at times homeless, Wojnarowicz failed to receive the structural support he needed to survive, yet his work remains meticulously maintained by institutions like Harvard.

Survivor’s Remorse queries how various institutions value different types of bodies and in what ways creative labor can be particularly toxic. Why does the value of an artist’s work often increase after death? In what ways does the fluctuating and irregular valuation of an artist’s cultural capital affect his or her ability to live? As the old narrative goes, the artist, or visionary, or genius lives on “the fringes of society” or is seen as “ahead of her time”—in other words, is perceived as being “out of sync.” Marginalized bodies exist on “the margins” because institutions either ignore or do not adapt to the experiences of the non-normative, non-citizen, poor, ill, or racialized subject.Yet the marginalized “genius” or others deemed exceptional may be recuperated and highly valued through historicizing institutions—but often only after they are gone.

Survivor’s Remorse invites viewers to observe the Harvard Art Museums conservation lab interwoven with a tour of the ‘toxic’ qualities of the pigment collection at Harvard,Wojnarowicz’s political views and poetry, Audrey Lorde’s reflections on dying from cancer, and Donald Judd’s self-canonizing by building the Chianti Foundation in Marfa. The work is displayed on a synced grid of nine flatscreen monitors, one of which has been removed from the wall with the cords (or guts) exposed. Contained within the protective casket of an open shipping crate,the lone screen appears to be at times in sync with the other eight monitors while at other moments it falters.