Staff Picks: Tom Rubnitz

e-flux Film is very pleased to partner with Video Data Bank to co-present Tom Rubnitz’s Listen To This (1992, 15 minutes) as the October 2023 edition of our monthly, online series Staff Picks.

Watch the film here.

Listen To This is a fragment of collective memory that finds critical relevance in contemporary queer discourse. Tom Rubnitz weaves narration, image, and a form of temporality dislocated from real time into a video where artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s loss, rage, and desire is palpable.

This document, not definitively finished or unfinished at the time of Rubnitz’s death, elicits various modes that trace their origins to oral history traditions: repetition, non-linear narrative construction, and disruption. In the video, Wojnarowicz sits alone facing the camera, infected with a plague (AIDS) that prevents him from abstracting his own mortality to some point in the distant future. He speaks to the present and in the present. Fragments of popular mass culture—Madonna, the Newscaster, a military helicopter—cut through Wojnarowicz’s impassioned performance, acting as visual prompts for the “diseased society” he has contracted.

Rubnitz constructs the work utilizing the aesthetic framework of the non-site of television, the dominant vessel for mass culture. He marks time and place through Wojnarowicz’s visceral attacks on Western power structures, and commonly held conceptions of the past and present. Listen To This is not an obituary, nor a memorial to its creator and featured performer, but a biting condemnation of homophobic HIV/AIDS policy and at large, the societal terms in which such death and mystification have become routine and necessary.

Video Data Bank began distributing Tom Rubnitz’s video work in 1989 and still today maintains its preservation and circulation along with raising awareness about its immense cultural and historical significance. Over the years since the work entered the collection, VDB developed a relationship with Rubnitz’s mother, and in the early aughts, VDB’s then Director, Abina Manning, and Archive and Collection Manager, Tom Colley, drove up to the northern Chicago suburbs to visit her and gather a car load of old videotapes that she needed to clear out from storage. Many of these tapes were raw footage, or copies of titles already in distribution with VDB, but a few stuck out as unfamiliar.  It took a bit of time to catalog, research, preserve and digitize these tapes, but eventually Listen To This, made in collaboration with David Wojnarowicz, was identified as a “lost” title that had likely only screened once in 1992. It is uncertain if this single screening occurred before or after the month-apart deaths of Rubnitz and Wojnarowicz. Despite being the last known video work by Tom Rubnitz, little documentation and ephemera surrounding its creation has surfaced. A typed draft from 1989 of Wojnarowicz’s monologue, and a storyboard and shot list covering a portion of the tape’s contents, currently provide the entirety of the context surrounding this tape’s creation. This ambiguity also extends to the nature of the relationship between the two artists and the impetus for this collaboration.

”I feel like I’m watching my soul speak in sign language; I feel like I can hear it whispering. The view outside the window of this hospital room where my best friend just died of AIDS confuses me. The doctors behind me are running back and forth like headless chickens because they are so fearful of the process of death. If we as a tribal nation dealt with death in our culture honestly there would be no tribal nation of zombies. To deal with death honestly would be the equivalent of an X-RAY OF CIVILIZATION. People would refuse to spend their entire lives making hamburgers or mopping floors; working as wall street brokers or printing money for the pentagon; paying taxes on our slow deaths or voting for the latest zombie politician. The whole purpose of life; of living would be thrown into question if we didn’t abstract death into something unspeakable—the idea of afterlife would be a joke because we wouldn’t wait til later to truly live.” —Excerpt from David Wojnarowicz’s monolgue

About
Tom Rubnitz was born in Chicago, IL on April 2, 1956. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1978 and moved to New York City where he resided as a painter and video/filmmaker. A quintessential New York underground film/video artist, the late Tom Rubnitz took a bite out of the Big Apple and spat it out in a wild kaleidoscope of unequivocal camp and hallucinogenic color. Ann Magnuson, the B-52s, Lady Bunny, and the late John Sex are but a few of the stars that shine oh-so-brightly in Rubnitz’ glittering oeuvre. A genre artist par excellence, Rubnitz treated the sexy-druggy-wiggy-luscious-desserty qualities of the 1980s downtown club scene with the loving care only a true hedonist could show. His work has been featured in screenings and exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, European Media Art Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival among many others. His work has also been broadcast on PBS, Channel 4, and MTV. In the queer film festival circuit of the 1980s and ‘90s, including The San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival and The New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film, Rubnitz’s videos were a celebrated staple. On August 12, 1992, Rubnitz died from an AIDS-related illness. 

Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs.

Staff Picks is a monthly streaming series on e-flux Film of recommended videos designed to disrupt the monotony of an algorithm. Before the end times of big data, we used to discover suggested content along dusty shelves in video rental stores, where Post-it notes scribbled by shift workers implored us to experience the same movies that made them guffaw, scream, or weep. Sometimes the content bored us, sometimes it overwhelmed us, and sometimes, as if by magic, it was just right. e-flux invites you to relive this rental store mode of perusal, with personalized picks curated through judgment that does not take into consideration your viewing history. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.