1991: David appears in Richard Morrison’s film “Bust.” The black and white short (14:38) documents David’s wide range of feelings about the AIDS crisis and those responsible for it. Shot under a strobe against a black background, Morrison transforms David into a living, speaking bust. “Things just touch me less and less,” David explains. “And all the semblances of living that people do or create or enact somehow become more and more empty. I mean I’d prefer that people speak the word death and acknowledge the death that comes along with this disease….. “I’m not just going to crawl into the media grave of AIDS and just die courageously or politely. I have no desire to be polite in the face of being slowly murdered…I know I’m going to die because of the way this disease has been handled by those in positions of power.”
Bust is a film by Richard Morrison with David Wojnarowicz. Produced by Elyse Cheney, Steven Harvey, and Larry Mitchell. Used by permission of the Estate of Richard Morrison. Copyright the estate of Richard Morrison. Courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects.
Richard Morrison (1948-2015) was born in Detroit where he studied art education. After college, he began a life-long, part-time career in social services in Boston and New York. As an artist, Morrison worked in a variety of media—including theater, film and visual art. His friends and collaborators in the East Village included David, Peter Hujar, Bill Rice, Zoe Leonard, John Lurie, Barbara Ess, Jeff Weiss, and Jack Smith. His life partner was writer, publisher and sociology professor Larry Mitchell. Gary Indiana wrote about Morrison: “His pictures catch a reality continually slipping away, erupting in chaos, fracturing into incoherence; the most disturbing thing about Richard Morrison’s work is often that the artist seems as much a hapless spectator of the world he pictures as the viewer is—sometimes a dire, intolerable realm, where figures drizzle into the surrounding landscape or blur beyond recognition.”