"Magic Box Slideshow," 2005
80 Looping 35mm slidess, audio cd

I first came across the artist David Wojnarowicz as an angry gay teenager in San Jose, California. It was 1997, I was fifteen and I did an Internet search for "gay" and "art." The first thing I clicked on was about David. This early fan website had crude digital reproductions of the late artists’ work and some of his texts. Needless to say, this first glimpse of David Wojnarowicz deeply affected me.

Four years later I was making a film about David. I was shuffling through his archives at NYU’s Fales Library, which holds David's entire collection of things—his diaries, receipts, tape collection, photographs, slides, original artworks, toys, porn and more. This is a very overwhelming way to acquaint yourself, materially speaking, with someone who is gone and also someone who is very public.

But certainly the most mysterious object of all was what David called “The Magic Box.” This wood crate was stored under David’s bed until he died. The box contains a collection of symbolically loaded objects—toy bugs, skulls, target pins, flowers, rocks, soil, currency, and religious trading cards. Many of these figures appear again and again through David’s artwork. So in many senses the Magic Box seems like a mini museum or an archive of David’s feelings, filled with the personal artifacts, which infused his political rage.

Towards the bottom of the magic box, many of the objects are wrapped, numbered, and labeled. Apparently David was starting to organize all of his materials before his early death in 1992. It seems that the Magic Box was being archived by David Wojnarowicz, perhaps in hopes that this private case would be found and rediscovered in the future.

Soon archivists at Fales Library will disassemble the box—placing each individual toy or figure into separate archival cases, which will correspond to a coherent library finding aid. Eventually images of the magic box's contents will be accessible on the Internet, and available for discovery, much like how I first found out about David’s work years ago. So these slides are the last documentation of the magic box before it refigures as something that is officially preserved.

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