Books about Wojnarowicz from Amazon.com

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically..
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In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvère Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms--a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama.

Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best--the friends with whom he collaborated.

Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer..
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The cultural-historical starting point of Saint Sebastian: Or a Splendid Readiness For Death is found in Gabriele D'Annunzio's Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian: A Mystery in Five Acts, a musical play on which D'Annunzio collaborated with Debussy and in which the role of Saint Sebastian was taken by D'Annunzio's lover, the dancer Ida Rubenstein, whose transvestism in the role brought denunciations from the Church. But that is another story. Nevertheless, our Saint Sebastian is similarly arranged into five thematic focal points: Sebastian as the "exemplary sufferer" (Susan Sontag); as multifarious icon of the history of civilization; as saint, who attracts misfortune upon himself in order to avert it from others; as fetish of erotic subcultures; and as vamp and dandy, whose beauty only blossoms in its full splendor when caught in the throes of excruciating agony. A sixth thematic point sneaks in here, and Saint Sebastian is brought up to date as the great "ecstatician" of art history. Oh, and the art. Contemporary artists whose work is explored through the lens of Saint Sebastian include Ron Athey, Louise Bourgeois, Chris Burden, Francesco Clemente, Bavo Defurne, Kirby Dick & Bob Flanagan, Cerith Wyn Evans, Eikoh Hosoe, Derek Jarman, Adi Nes, Luigi Ontani, Catherine Opie, Ana Maria Pacheco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Schrader, Kishin Shinoyama, Fiona Tan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Joel-Peter Witkin, and David Wojnarowicz..
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Like James MacNeill Whistler, David Wojnarowicz became briefly infamous in his own lifetime by taking a cultural conservative to court. Whistler's antagonist was none other than art critic John Ruskin, who likened Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold to flung paint. Whistler won the trial, but was awarded a penny; legal costs bankrupted him. Similarly, the constantly penurious Wojnarowicz sued Rev. Donald Wildmon of the American Family Association for copying an inset photograph from the artist's Sex series for use in anti-NEA propaganda. Wojnarowicz won an injunction, but was scantly compensated, and the NEA withdrew funding for the exhibition catalog where the series was reproduced.

Whistler was an American expatriate, Wojnarowicz a stranger in his own land, living "in the shadow of the American dream," as he put it, as a hustler, lover, and multimedia artist until his untimely death from AIDS. The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, has mounted a retrospective of Wojnarowicz's work, with funding from Versace Classic, a corporate, rather than public, sponsor. Fever serves as the catalog as well as an excellent introduction to the artist's paintings, drawings, photographs, and writings. With no formal training and little support from the art establishment, Wojnarowicz managed to create a body of work that is complex, compelling, and politically engaged in a way that will remain relevant as long as critics posing as public guardians attempt to stifle art's persistent provocation. --Robert Burns Neveldine.
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In 1978 David Wojnarowicz took a series of photographs of a man wearing a paper mask bearing the face of Arthur Rimbaud, the French poet. Wojnarowicz was 24 when he shot most of the Rimbaud in New York series, and the urban situations in which he poses the masked figure represent a specific moment in history: post-Stonewall but pre-AIDS, a land of sex, drugs, art, love, and wondrous bohemian existence. When a few pictures from the series were published in the Soho Weekly News in 1980, they were the first of his works to make it into print. This volume reproduces for the first time, the series in its entirety..
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This autobiographical account of David Wojnarowicz's life; from his youth on the streets to his adult life as an artist living with aids..
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