The composition of David Wojnarowicz’s “When I Put My Hands on Your Body” fuses together a visual element with a literary element that must be considered together to fully interpret the piece. The background is a black and white reproduction of skeletons laid out on their rocky graves, yet Wojnarowicz has deliberately opted to obscure the image behind a wall of text. The foreground is composed of a blood-red text that encapsulates the narrative of “When I Put My Hands on Your Body.” The color of the red text placed against the dark backdrop renders the print virtually unreadable, yet the sheer size of the text block demands consideration by dominating a majority of the canvas. As the foreground and background vie for the viewer’s attention,
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For one, the block of crimson text that dominates the bulk of the artwork is specifically red. It is the color red against black that makes the text so difficult to read and poses a significant challenge to understanding “When I Put” as a whole. Looking back at Adrienne Rich’s “In Memoriam: DK,” Rich too uses different shades of the color red early on in his poem. In his description of the flowers blooming with certainty, he says “he knows they open / burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo / all the way to their velvet cores” (6-7). The use of the word “open” is particularly interesting because it connotes a sort of unraveling that is visually associated with the opening of a flower. A blooming red flower or opening up these various colors of red is akin to bleeding out, bleeding red. This choice illuminates Wojnarowicz use of red text as not an obstruction to the reader, but rather an artistic complement to the image of skeletons. For “When I Put My Hands on Your Body,” the crimson text is a colored indicator of the visceral content it contains. It is as if the words themselves were bleeding out the innards, organs, and flesh––the toxicity and misery of disease––and leaving nothing but the bones in the background
For one, the block of crimson text that dominates the bulk of the artwork is specifically red. It is the color red against black that makes the text so difficult to read and poses a significant challenge to understanding “When I Put” as a whole. Looking back at Adrienne Rich’s “In Memoriam: DK,” Rich too uses different shades of the color red early on in his poem. In his description of the flowers blooming with certainty, he says “he knows they open / burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo / all the way to their velvet cores” (6-7). The use of the word “open” is particularly interesting because it connotes a sort of unraveling that is visually associated with the opening of a flower. A blooming red flower or opening up these various colors of red is akin to bleeding out, bleeding red. This choice illuminates Wojnarowicz use of red text as not an obstruction to the reader, but rather an artistic complement to the image of skeletons. For “When I Put My Hands on Your Body,” the crimson text is a colored indicator of the visceral content it contains. It is as if the words themselves were bleeding out the innards, organs, and flesh––the toxicity and misery of disease––and leaving nothing but the bones in the background