"The face of Arthur Rimbaud worn in David Wojnarowicz's photographs comes from an image taken by Étienne Carjat. In the image, Rimbaud is 17 years old, still a child. Captured like this - and used as material by Wojnarowicz - his youth becomes eternal and symbolic, a lens through which the outsider artist was also able to see himself. The Arthur"
"On the surface, there might not be much in common between Rimbaud's poetry and Wojnarowicz's intense, politically furious collages and graffiti, but Wojnarowicz casts the poet as an outsider like himself, unable to find a concrete place in a world that seems more than willing to turn its back on him. This imbues the series with a haunted feeling; the unmoving face of Rimbaud becomes uncanny, ripped out of time."
David Wojnarowicz appropriated Étienne Carjat's portrait of a 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud, using the fixed youthful face as a mask worn by friends, collaborators and lovers across New York between 1978 and 1979. The immutable image functions as an eternal, uncanny symbol of outsider identity that mirrored Wojnarowicz's own sense of exile. The Rimbaud face appears in diners, hotels, and amid urban rubble, evoking graffiti signatures and public political intervention. The series forges an artistic kinship between poet and artist while confronting contrasts between Rimbaud's Paris and a changing New York and questioning the possibility of institutional or social change.
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