David WojnarowiczCritiques

Not content to be a tremendous photographer, painter, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) was also the author of three classic books: Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, now back in print from Artspace. This volume collects four tales--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral" and the title story--interspersed with ink drawings by the artist. "Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream. The highway at night in the headlights of this speeding car speeding is the only motion that lets the heart unravel and in the wind of the road the two story framed houses appear one after the other like some cinematic stage set..." From these opening sentences of the book (in "Into the Drift and Sway"), Wojnarowicz lets loose a salvo of explicit gay sexual reverie harshly lit by the New York cityscape.

Dear Jean Pierre collects David Wojnarowicz’s transatlantic correspondence to his Parisian lover Jean Pierre Delage between 1979 and 1982. Capturing a truly foundational moment for Wojnarowicz’s artistic and literary practice, these letters not only reveal his captivating personality—and its concomitant tenderness, compassion, and neuroses—but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to define him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation.

Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud series, the band 3 Teens Kill 4, the publication of his first photographs, his early friendship with Peter Hujar, his participation in the then-emerging East Village art and music scenes, and the preparations for the publication of his first book. Included with these writings are postcards, drawings, xeroxes, photographs, collages, flyers, ephemera, and contact sheets that showcase some of the artist’s iconic images and work, such as the Burning House motif and Untitled (Genet, after Brassai).

Beyond these milestones, the book offers a striking portrayal of Wojnarowicz as a twenty-something, detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with that age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has found in it.

Although the two exchanged letters in equal measure, Delage’s correspondences have largely been lost, leaving us with only a revelatory glimpse into the internal world of Wojnarowicz during what turned out to be his formative years.

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. Wojnarowicz channeled a vast accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences into a powerful voice that was an undeniable presence in the New York City art scene of the 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Through his several volumes of fiction, poetry, memoirs, painting, photography, installation, sculpture, film and performance, Wojnarowicz left a legacy, affirming art’s vivifying power in a society he viewed as alienating and corrosive. His use of blunt semiotics and graphic illustrations exposed what he felt the mainstream repressed: poverty, abuse of power, blind nationalism, greed, homophobia and the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related complications on July 22, 1992 at the age of 37.

David Wojnarowicz's use of photography, often done in conjunction with writing or painting, was extraordinary--as was his way of addressing the AIDS crisis and issues of censorship and homophobia. Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, begun in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged what Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community. Contributors--from artist and writer friends such as Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Vince Aletti, C. Carr and Lucy R. Lippard, to David Cole, the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association--together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. Brush Fires is also the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, this expanded and redesigned edition of this seminal publication puts the work in front of an audience all over again while maintaining the integrity of the original. Through the lens of various contributors, the book addresses Wojnarowicz's profound legacy: the relentless censorship and ethical issues, alongside his aesthetic brilliance, courage and influence.

My favorite book

these short, rich glimpses of various lives read like pieces of the same monologue, one that tells the stories of the hidden and unwanted, the savvy and fearless, the lost and forlorn and hopeful. the only downside, aside from some possible triggers, is that these are too short -- i want to know more about these people, i want to hear them talking to me with their own voices. maybe the abruptness of only two or three pages doesn't suit my current mood. still, from the diaries of a wolf boy was my favorite piece precisely because it stuck around long enough for me to explore all of its corners. and it included some of the most striking writing of the whole heavy pile of beautifully striking writing.

"Death was a smudge in the distance. I don't know exactly what I mean by that but lying down inside this cradle of arms in my head was sometimes all I wanted ... I'm lost in a world that's left all its mythologies behind in the onward crush of wars and civilization, my body traveling independent of brushes with life and death, no longer knowing what either means anymore. I'm so tired of feeling weary and alien, even my dreams look stupid to me."

is it more heartbreaking because wojnarowicz died way too young, kicking and fighting against the forces who tried to tell him, until the very last, that he was sick and wrong? maybe. it's hard to separate the reality of his life from the words and images that came out of it, and i'm not so sure we should try. these things stand together, but they also stand on their own. but i can't help, whenever i read his stuff, mourning the words he could have written.

The nitty gritty life of a young prostitute with the aids virus. I loved the glimpse into his mind but the text at time was very rant like. The artwork was perfect for the content but the long rants almost made me want to throw in the towel half way through.

Raw, powerful and such an important book. Someone should save this book from DC Comics and reprint it.

David Wojnarowicz’s fractured scrapbook of dream journals, political critique and collage―an ultra-rare document of 1980s New York subculture

David Wojnarowicz’s In the Shadow of Forward Motion was originally published as a photocopied zine/artist’s book to accompany an exhibition of the same name at PPOW Gallery in 1989. Despite its meager print run of just 50 copies, the publication has garnered a legendary status, and for good reason.

In it we find, for the first time, Wojnarowicz’s writing and visual art, two mediums for which he is renowned, playing off each other in equal measure. We glimpse the artist’s now iconic mixed-media works, with motifs of ants, locomotives, money, tornados and dinosaurs, juxtaposed with journal-like texts or “notes towards a frame of reference” that examine historical and global mechanisms of power symbolized through the technology of their times.

Wojnarowicz uses the fractured experience of his day-to-day life (including dreams, which he recorded fastidiously) to expose these technologies as weapons of class, cultural and racial oppression. The artist’s experience living with HIV is a constant subject of the work, used to shed light on the political and social mechanisms perpetuating discrimination against not only himself, but against women and people of color, who faced additional barriers in their efforts to receive treatment for the illness. Rooted in the maelstrom of art, politics, religion and civil rights of the 1980s, the book provides a startling glimpse into an American culture that we have not yet left behind. Félix Guattari provides an introduction.

Painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter and activist, David Wojnarowicz was born in Redbank, New Jersey, in 1954 and died of AIDS in New York in 1992. The author of five books―most famously Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration―Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship.

A graphic (no pun intended) reminder and powerful description of how bad the AIDS crisis was in the 80s and 90s.

The memoirs of an American Jean Genet (that's "Jean Genie," then) turned out to be a very good thing--brief encounters not in jail but very Americanly "on the lam" in the midst of the somehow always post-apocalyptic (and like, for an aesthete, terrifying and empty) Middle American landscape and New York in the eighties, so art and heroin and then the AIDS crisis, which blots out all else, and you realize he's imprisoned much more comprehensively than JG ever was--the body unfolds no sensual sphincteral-floral miracle of the rose here but only an ever-expanding Kaposi's lesion; the body is not for pleasure, never again, but for torment and death only, and the memories of friends and lovers and abusers that maybe are unspeakably precious now that there won't be any more memories or maybe just drive you mad before you die. Bleak, and all the bleaker when he starts rattling on about "the State" as though the Big Brother Ronnie Raygun line'll make any of this make sense or hurt any less.

Difficult. Violent language. Bitter.

Close to the Knives employs an aesthetics of rage which is all at once individual and collective, personal and political. The book functions as a high decibel confrontational indictment against the greater culture and those who hold power within it for their ambivalence towards AIDS and their invalidation of queer identity. By queering the formal conventions of memoir through radical prose technique , avid Wojnarowicz puts forth a challenging work that critiques discourses of authority and provides a validation of the personal and collective voice that makes visible the queer experience, asserting that voice is not only valid but that it has a right if not an obligation to be angry and unapologetic. I wholly agree with Dennis Cooper's assertion that this book, ideally, should be read by every teenager in America. Every queer person in America. Probably every straight person too.½

David Wojnarowicz had the microscopic observations of a child. His descriptions were extraordinarily finely detailed and nuanced. But they were direct and stark too. His insights were fascinating. His narrative didn’t so much flow, as roll like a boulder. This is sharp, even piercing writing from a totally off kilter perspective. Most of us do not see life this way.

His world was peopled with damaged friends. He said everyone he knew came from a family of abusive parents, not least his own. His friends were all on the edge, leading fringe lives in which they all psychoanalyzed each other and the country at large from painful perspectives. They lived bizarrely. There was a lot of violence, a lot suicide, and a lot of AIDS. There is constant sex, sometimes romantic, usually brutal, often filthy, always craved.

He was never truly happy, but he was happiest outside his nonexistent comfort zone. “Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to be forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.” That’s the best definition he could admit to, and it’s more than most could own up to.

His thoughts and dreams were populated with hallways, often long, often dark. I’ve never seen the word hallway so many times in a book. Uncertainty played an outsized role in his short life.

The second half of the book is less enthralling, because it is transcripts of interviews he taped of his friends. It is their words, not his. The interviews serve to bring them closer, before they die off in rapid succession. The hunger for more of Wajnarowicz’s own writing has to wait to the end, where he intersperses the description of a bullfight in Mexico with thoughts and reminiscences it inspires. And almost every paragraph admonishes us to smell the flowers while we can. He did not.

Unfortunately for all of us, the last years of his life were consumed with caring for friends with AIDS, followed by his own case. His fury at the hypocrisy of the dominating government agencies and officials, and especially at the self contradictory and insufferable Church, enraged and changed him. We can’t even imagine what kind of writer he might have become without that ugly diversion. That is possibly an even greater tragedy.

This will have to be eloquent enough.

A graphic novel memoir of Wojnarowicz’s experiences as an underage hustler on the streets of New York and later his experiences living with, and slowly dying of, AIDS in a culture that wished for his destruction. Mixes the realistic and the hallucinatory with abandon—bodies dissolve and rot and grow flowers, sometimes all at once—and why not when we live in a world in which people can do horrible things to one another and it’s not shocking or even noteworthy?

David Wojnarowicz was a high-profile street artist, photographer, filmmaker and AIDS activist in New York until his death of AIDS-related complications in 1992. 7 Miles a Second is his graphic memoir, illustrated by friends James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook. It’s a fever-dream of an autobiography of an adolescence spent starving, hustling and abused on the streets of New York, and a masterpiece of trash-art agitprop that rages furiously against the hypocrisy of the Religious Right, set in an apocalyptic landscape of grotesque body-horror. Fantagraphics has reissued the comic, first published in 1996, in appropriately garish watercolor and frantic hand-lettering. Romberger and Van Cook’s art matches the lurid, breathless style of Wojnarowicz’s writing perfectly. It’s heartbreaking and terrifying; it’s a history lesson in a bullet.

I remember loving this, so.

Sugoy!