Rimbaud in New York 1978-79

Rimbaud in New York 1978-79
Author: David Wojnarowicz
Publisher:
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2004
Genre: Artists' books
ISBN:

Images from a series featuring a lone figure with the visage of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in seedy Manhattan locations.

Close to the Knives

Close to the Knives
Author: David Wojnarowicz
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2014-06-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1480489611

The “fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful” memoirs of an extraordinary artist, activist, and iconoclast who lit up late-twentieth-century New York (Dennis Cooper). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” David Wojnarowicz’s brief but eventful life was not easy. From a suburban adolescence marked by neglect, drugs, prostitution, and abuse to a squalid life on the streets of New York City, to fame—and infamy—as an activist and controversial visual artist whose work was lambasted in the halls of Congress, all before his early death from AIDS at age thirty-seven, Wojnarowicz seemed to be at war with a homophobic “establishment” and the world itself. Yet what emerged from the darkness was a truly extraordinary artist and human being—an angry young man of remarkable poetic sensibilities who was inordinately sympathetic to those who, like him, lived and struggled outside society’s boundaries. Close to the Knives is his searing yet strangely beautiful account told in a collection of powerful essays. An author whom reviewers have compared to Kerouac and Genet, David Wojnarowicz mesmerizes, horrifies, and delights in equal measure with his unabashed honesty. At once savage and funny, poignant and sexy, compassionate and unforgiving, his words and stories cut like knives, leaving indelible marks on all who read them.

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz
Author: David Breslin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018
Genre: Photography, Artistic
ISBN: 9780300221886

Beginning in the late 1970s, David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) created a body of work that spanned photography, painting, music, film, sculpture, writing, and activism. Largely self-taught, he came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, a period marked by creative energy, financial precariousness, and profound cultural changes. Intersecting movementsgraffiti, new and no wave music, conceptual photography, performance, and neo-expressionist paintingmade New York a laboratory for innovation. Wojnarowicz refused a signature style, adopting a wide variety of techniques with an attitude of radical possibility. Distrustful of inherited structuresa feeling amplified by the resurgence of conservative politicshe varied his repertoire to better infiltrate the prevailing culture. Wojnarowicz saw the outsider as his true subject. Queer and later diagnosed as HIV-positive, he became an impassioned advocate for people with AIDS when an inconceivable number of friends, lovers, and strangers were dying due to government inaction. Wojnarowiczs work documents and illuminates a desperate period of American history: that of the AIDS crisis and culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But his rightful place is also among the raging and haunting iconoclastic voices, from Walt Whitman to William S. Burroughs, who explore American myths, their perpetuation, their repercussions, and their violence. Like theirs, his work deals directly with the timeless subjects of sex, spirituality, love, and loss. Wojnarowicz, who was thirty-seven when he died from AIDS-related complications, wrote: To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific ramifications.

Cruising the Dead River

Cruising the Dead River
Author: Fiona Anderson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2019-10-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 022660375X

In the 1970s, Manhattan’s west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers’ sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz’s work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront’s ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.

David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz
Author: David Wojnarowicz
Publisher: Aperture Foundation
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781597112949

Twentieth Anniversary Edition David Wojnarowicz's use of photography was remarkably innovative, as was his unprecedented way of addressing the AIDS crisis and issues of censorship, homophobia, and narrative. Brush Fires in the Social Landscape began in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published inn 1994, engaged those who Wojnarowicz would refer to as his tribe or community. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, Aperture has expanded and redesigned this seminal publication to be even more inclusive. It is the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography. The contributors--from artist and writer friends to the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association, to the next generation of artists who were influenced by Wojnarowicz's sensibility--together offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. Contributors include: Vince Aletti, Barry Blinderman, Cynthia Carr, David Cole, Shannon Ebner, Leonard Fink, Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Félix Guattari, Wade Guyton, Melissa Harris, Elizabeth Hess, Tessa Hughes-Freeland, Peter Hujar, Fran Lebowitz, Lucy R. Lippard (introduction), Sylvère Lotringer, Carlo McCormick, Henrik Olesen, Wendy Olsoff, Adam Putnam, Tom Rauffenbart, James Romberger, Emily Roysdon, Marion Scemama, Gary Schneider, Amy Scholder, Kiki Smith, Andreas Sterzing, Zoe Strauss, Marvin J. Taylor, Lynne Tillman, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

DIY on the Lower East Side

DIY on the Lower East Side
Author: Andrew Strombeck
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2020-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438479824

The severe financial austerity imposed on New York City during the 1975 fiscal crisis resulted in a city falling apart. Broken windows, crumbling walls, and piles of bricks were everywhere. While, for many, this physical decay was a sign that the postwar welfare state had failed, for others, it represented a site of risky opportunity that could stimulate novel forms of creativity and community. In this book, Andrew Strombeck explores the legacy of this crisis for the city's literature and art, focusing on one neighborhood where changes were acutely felt—the Lower East Side. In what became a paradigmatic example of gentrification, the Lower East Side's population shifted from working-class people to Wall Street traders and ad agents. This transformation occurred, in part, because of high-profile local artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, and Kiki Smith, but Strombeck argues that neighborhood writers also played a role. Drawing on archival research and original author interviews, he examines the innovative work of Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Miguel Piñero, Sylvère Lotringer, Lynne Tillman, and others and concludes that these writers still have much to teach us about changes in the nature of work and the emergence of a do-it-yourself ethos. DIY on the Lower East Side shows how place and politics shaped literature, and how New York City policies adopted at the time continue to shape our world.

Radiant Days

Radiant Days
Author: Elizabeth Hand
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 110156704X

She is a painter. He is a poet. Their art bridges time. It is 1978. Merle is in her first year at the Corcoran School of Art, catapulted from her impoverished Appalachian upbringing into a sophisticated, dissipated art scene. It is also 1870. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud is on the verge of breaking through to the images and voice that will make his name. The meshed power of words and art thins the boundaries between the present and the past - and allows these two troubled, brilliant artists to enter each other's worlds. Radiant Days is a peerless follow- up to Elizabeth Hand's unforgettable, multiply starred Illyria.

Saul Steinberg masquerade

Saul Steinberg masquerade
Author: Inge Morath
Publisher: Viking Pr
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2000-10-26
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Highlighting the photographer's unique collection of "paper bag" images from the 1950s and 1960s, this series of individual and group portraits recaptures the whimsy and humor of this period in photography. 17,500 first printing.

David Wojnarowicz: In the Shadow of Forward Motion

David Wojnarowicz: In the Shadow of Forward Motion
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 54
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781732098688

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.