dopewokeprobablybroke

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

Alleged is a poem inspired by and developed from a Facebook status posted by poet and professor Tony Medina. The original post was responding to the surfacing of video footage in which a young woman, who had been drugged, is being molested publicly on a beach with several witnesses standing around. No one is intervening. In fact, there appears to be some young men standing guard of the altercation. There was very little coverage and very little public outrage. Medina posted the article with a caption that I used to shape an erasure poem reducing the post to a few select words illustrating a way in which hatred for women and rape culture manifests itself in everyday settings and behaviors of this time. 

#Candice Iloh

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

Removed from context, "I Want A President" presents itself as a landmark piece of prose, its crticizms echoing nearly 27 years after it was written. However, when viewed within the confines of Leonard's work, it begins to form new meanings. I'll let you find her work and decide for yourself what those new meanings may be.

#Zoe Leonard

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

Zoe Leonard (b. 1961)­, Wax Anatomical Model, full view from above, 1990. Gelatin silver print, 30 7/8 × 44 in. (78.42 × 111.76 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth, New York

#Zoe Leonard

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

“WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.”

#David Wojnarowicz

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), Das Reingold: New York Schism, 1987

A nightmarish allegory of violence and capitalism, Das Reingold: New York Schismmakes reference to Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold (1854), in which the holder of a magical ring will gain the power to rule the world should he renounce love. This narrative assumed particular power at a moment when artists were joining the group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) to protest the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies and government mismanagement of the AIDS crisis.  

#David Wojnarowicz

[dopewokeprobablybroke]

David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), Fuck You Faggot Fucker, 1984

This work was one of Wojnarowicz’s first to directly tackle homophobia and gay bashing and to embrace same-sex love. Its title comes from a scrap of paper containing a homophobic slur that Wojnarowicz found and affixed below the central image of two men kissing. Made with one of his stencils, these anonymous men are archetypes, stand-ins for a multitude of personal stories. Using photographs taken at the piers and in an abandoned building on Avenue B, Wojnarowicz also includes himself and his friends John Hall and Brian Butterick in this constellation. Maps like those in the background here often appear in Wojnarowicz’s work; for him, they represented a version of reality that society deemed orderly and acceptable. He often cut and reconfigured the maps to gesture toward the groundlessness, chaos, and arbitrariness of both man-made borders and the divisions between “civilization” and nature.

#david wojnarowicz