‘I’m carrying rage like a blood-filled egg’: the best of Glasgow International – review

From his deathbed photographs of his former lover to a face emerging from dirt, New Yorker David Wojnarowicz is the festival standout, although Renèe Helèna Browne’s film about cows contains multitudes

Setting the mood for this year’s Glasgow International (GI) is a show dedicated to David Wojnarowicz – artist, writer and fixture of the 1980s East Village scene. Including paintings, photographs and video works, it is arranged inside a Georgian terrace house so decayed that you can see through perforations in the building’s fabric. Stoop to peer between crumbling bricks and you’ll see a reproduction of a mural of a cow’s head that Wojnarowicz painted in the New York piers. On the top floor, Wojnarowicz’s deathbed photographs of his former lover Peter Hujar occupy one elegiac wall. Look up. Through the splintered ceiling play fragments of a film unfinished at Wojnarowicz’s death, in 1992, aged 37.

Sometimes the artist’s voice permeates the friable architecture, emanating from the soundtrack to Itsofomo (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) playing on a box TV. “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg,” he declaims with spitting fury. The words had specific context – New York during the Aids epidemic – nevertheless Wojnarowicz’s rage at a system that failed to serve or preserve him feels emblematic.