Human sacrifice

On my recent trip to New York, I had a spiritual experience of a particular sort. It happened on Friday when I was visiting the campus of New York University. April 2, 2010, was the second-to-last day of an art show at the Grey Art Gallery. The show was Downtown Pix: Mining the Fales Archives, 1961-1991.

Earlier in the day, I'd had the opportunity to meet the Director of the Fales Library and Special Collection, Marvin J. Taylor, as my colleague and friend Jennifer Vinopal was giving me a tour of NYU's Library. I'd made a mental note to come back to the show after Jennifer and I went our separate ways. Taylor has been collecting the work of artists, playwrights, choreographers, photographers, and activists of New York's downtown scene since 1994. The show "reveal(ed) the vital intersections of experimental theater, performance and installation art, graffiti, punk rock, and sexual liberation." (I'm quoting the show brochure.)

As I walked downstairs to the lower level, I encountered the moving work of Fred McDarrah who covered New York's Gay Pride Parade every year from its inception for the Village Voice.

And then, suddenly, I came upon David Wojnarowicz's photographs and silent films. He worked in the late 1980's and early 1990's at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. The installation included a film running in a loop of Wojnarowicz's lover's last moments and then his prone body, draped in a sheet, and carried by four or five men from a table to a dark, unclear space.

I stood still, watching this, aware that the hour approached 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday, and I wondered: what turns a death into a sacrifice? Did Wojnarowicz's lover die for a purpose, as I was taught to believe about the Nazarene carpenter?

And what about all those other young men who died so young? After all this time, I must say I have not discerned any meaning.

I remember the late '80s and early 90's well. We lost Iris's brother Jon and our friend Kevin Lally in 1993. Indeed, everybody we knew lost someone or many someones. Even though there is a great temptation to make some sense of death, it looks to me now very much as Wojnarowicz depicted it: simply a dark unclear space we are left to ponder.