Philip Gefter

 

Untitled 1990, by David Wojnarowicz, is a picture I came across while researching photographs for a show I organized at the Grey Art Gallery in New York earlier this year. The show, “Downtown Pix,” included 300 images that documented culture-in-the-making in downtown Manhattan from 1960 to 1990. If I could have just one picture from the show, this is it. I love the layers and the planes. I love the angle of the frame within the frame. I love the two-dimensionality of the mask, flattened to a drawing in photographic terms. I love the mask and its archetypal associations. I love the anthropomorphic representation of animal to man to animal. Finally I find him sexy– his classical, youthful torso, his hearty dick, the point at which his penis merges into gravelly rock. Rock as in rock hard. Rock as in rock n’ roll. Rock as in “of the earth.” I don’t think I would ever get tired of looking at this picture on my wall. It would keep me in touch with that part of myself, that part of us all.