The Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin, holds David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Sometimes I Come to Hate People),” 1992.
This photograph of a pair of bandaged hands is overwritten with an excerpt of the essay “Spiral” appearing in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline the same year. In it David writes: “I look familiar but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves … I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there. Maybe it’s only in here, inside my head. But my head is glass and my eyes have stopped being cameras, the tape has run out and nobody’s words can touch me.”
The museum displayed this work in honor of World AIDS Day.
Chazen Museum of Art
University of Wisconsin
750 University Avenue
Madison, WI 53706
