Category:Mediums

Wojnarowicz worked persistently across media, often combining drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, time-based media, and sculpture in a single work. His omnivorous approach to materials and techniques presents challenges to traditional art historical divisions between media.

Here, we have divided works according to traditional categories in order to promote media-specific research. However, because of Wojnarowicz's tendency to use multiple techniques and varied materials in a single work, the media descriptions are densely interconnected with hyperlinked references. (For example, paintings relate to photography, sculpture to film, and vice versa, and these are reflected by hyperlinks between pages.) This porosity between categories represents Wojnarowicz's non-hierarchical approach to traditional art-making categories, and his willingness to use what was at hand to achieve his desired effect. When asked about his tendency to collage different media together, Wojnarowicz responded: “I was breaking down barriers, whether of time, or history, or spaces of delineations, of occurrences. It’s all energies. So you start making these borders disappear, spaces disappear or fuse. They are all connected anyway, making what we project as borders invisible.” ^[1]

As scholars continue to use this site we invite further additions to these pages.

Archival Material from Wojnarowicz Papers, Fales Library

These pages from the Wojnarowicz Papers at Fales Library demonstrate the range of media that Wojnarowicz employed to create his work. A monthly budget from c. 1990 (above left) reveals that Wojnarowicz was spending as much on photostats as he was on canvas and paint, for example. The installation sketch on the right illustrates the range the media that Wojnarowicz would bring together for a single work, showing that the diverse approaches in his practice were not mutually exclusive enterprises, but rather were various means of expression that could be used individually or together to achieve Wojnarowicz's desired message.