Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
David Wojnarowicz
American; 20th-century
Normal, IL: University Galleries of Illinois State University
71%
The Four Elements: Earth and Wind/Fire and Water (Diptych). 1990. Lithograph
The spit-swapping between these two prints of various shapes and grounds and symbols and images is the best thing about this artwork; the diptych altogether is better than either of the two prints separately, which is proper. The globe gets mirrored as the snowman, the bird becomes the raw heart, etc. While there's certainly a political symbology at work that seems at first to be a bit hammy — money'll fuck up the world, dude! — the unstraightforwardness to how all of the constituent visual building blocks relate to each other undermines any easy conclusions about meaning. Is the guy with the gun a cop or a robber? Is the devil he's aiming at (or is he even aiming at him?) good guy or bad? Did the earth get to be where the snowman was by some kind of displacement? Is that what caused the fire? And given the system of frames and transparencies, what the hell sort of space is all of this stuff taking place in? Wojnarowicz's thing, it seems, was figuring out how to get away with piling treacly shit on top of easy metaphor. (2025)