David Wojnarowicz

A personal account of the tragic impact of AIDS chronicles one man's battle with the disease

A Memoir of Disintegration

Close to the Knives

David Velasco

Lisa Darms

Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time. In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence. --from The Weight of the Earth Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-4w`1992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence, and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth. The Weight of the Earth presents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time. In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987-1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft, the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.

The David Wojnarowicz Audio Journals

The Weight of the Earth

The late author, a gay activist, artist, and writer, presents a collection of his early works--never before published--of autobiographical fiction, written as short monologues delivered by a variety of characters from the highways and byways of America.

The Waterfront Journals

James Romberger

Marguerite Van Cook

7 Miles a Second is the story of legendary artist David Wojnarowicz,written during the last years before his AIDS-related death in 1992, and drawnby James Romberger with colors by Marguerite Van Cook. The graphic novel depictsWojnarowicz's childhood of prostitution and drugs on the streets of Manhattan,through his adulthood living with AIDS, and his anger at the indifference ofgovernment and health agencies. Romberger and Van Cook's visuals give stunninglife to Wojnarowicz's words, blending the gritty naturalism of Lower East Sidestreet life with a hallucinatory, psychedelic imagination that takes perfectadvantage of the comics medium.

7 Miles a Second

Chronicles the life of an introspective writer, filmmaker, radical artist, and AIDS activist from age seventeen until his AIDS-related death at thirty-seven.

The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz

In the Shadow of the American Dream

Autobiographical stories and drawings by the artist and AIDS activist featured in the new documentary by Chris McKim. For most of his life, David Wojnarowicz considered himself the ultimate outsider and a true invisible man. “I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization,” he writes in this fierce and unforgettable collection of four blistering autobiographical pieces, illustrated with his own arresting ink drawings. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in New York City at the age of thirty-seven, left behind a body of work that was staggering in its variety and originality. Painter, writer, photographer, performance artist, and filmmaker, he made an indelible mark on virtually every stage of the national arts scene. Yet nowhere does his anger, love, or compassion show itself as strongly as in his writing, which earned a Lambda Literary Award and prompted critics to call him the Jack Kerouac of his generation. The horrors of Wojnarowicz’s past inform his literature—his years spent as a child prostitute and living homeless on the New York streets, his outspoken, very public battle against the disease that would eventually take his life, and the entrenched government bureaucracy that sat by and did nothing. The world as seen through Wojnarowicz’s eyes in these four masterful short works is stark, cruel, and cold—and yet gloriously alive, ennobled by surprising acts of heartrending humanity. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a celebration of sorts: of sex, of love, of art, and of having truly lived.

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

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

Rimbaud in New York 1978-79

James Hoff

An epistolary portrait of Wojnarowicz's formation as an artist and writer through his tender letters to his Parisian lover--with artwork, photographs and ephemera This volume 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 compassion, neuroses and tenderness--but also index the development of the visual language that would go on to codify him as one of the preeminent artists of his generation. Through this collection, readers are introduced to Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud series, his 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 20-something detailing his day-to-day life with the type of unbridled earnestness that comes with his age and the softness of love and longing. This disarming tenderness provides a picture of a young man who is just beginning to find his voice in the world and the love he has discovered 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. Painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, songwriter and activist, David Wojnarowiczwas born in Redbank, New Jersey, in 1954 and died of AIDS in New York in 1992. He authored five books, most famously Close to the Knives. Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness and for his stance against censorship. His work is in numerous private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, among other institutions.

David Wojnarowicz: Dear Jean Pierre

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.

Twentieth Anniversary Edition

David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape (Signed Edition)

Sounds in the Distance

Brush Fires in the Social Landscape

Jim Lewis

Edited by Andrew Roth. Essay by Jim Lewis.

/David Wojnarowicz /James Romberger, illustrator This is the gripping autobiography of David Wojnarowicz, a controversial, world renowned artist and writer who died of AIDS-related causes in 1992. This unflinching story chronicles Wojnarowicz's childhood of prostitution in New York City, his homelessness and drug addiction, and the devastating illness that made him a pariah and took t

Seven Miles a Second

John Chaich

Hunter Reynolds

P.P.O.W. (Gallery)

The Rimbaud Series : Hunter Reynolds : Survival AIDS.

Mysoon Rizk

Nature, Death, and Spirituality in the Work of David Wojnarowicz

A powerful and evocative retrospective collection of an artist's life. Flaring with immediacy and unbridled intensity, David Wojnarowicz's work embraces and illuminates the repressed, the unspeakable, and the intolerable. This collection of Wojnarowicz's paintings, photographs, and writings also includes essays by Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Fran Lebowitz, and Karen Finley, among others.

American Center for Students and Artists (Paris, France)

My Brain is Driving Me Crazy -- Photographies

Félix Guattari

P.P.O.W. (Art Gallery)

David Wojnarowicz, in the Shadow of Forward Motion

Voices from the margins of American life tell tales of trickery, betrayal, sex, and defeat in these short monologues by “a spokesman for the unspeakable” (New York magazine). In his full but regrettably brief lifetime, David Wojnarowicz was many things: a visual and performance artist whose radical work incensed the right-wing establishment, a tireless AIDS and anticensorship activist, and, most emphatically, a writer. His Waterfront Journals are a remarkable collection of fictionalized stories spoken in the voices of unforgettable characters the author met during his time spent living on America’s streets and traveling her back roads. The narrators speak from the heart and from the depths of despair, creating an often shocking and powerfully moving mosaic of life in the shadows. Here are junkies and boy hustlers, truckers and hoboes. A runner tells of his encounter with two drug-using priests who openly and proudly discuss their various sexual exploits. Whores tell of johns who brutalized them and corrupt cops who did the same. A young man relays his tale of a seedy movie balcony pickup and his shocking discovery that his “date” was not who she seemed. Another man describes sex with an amputee Vietnam veteran. Each of their stories stuns with hard and haunting truths that will leave the reader staggered and breathless, yet exhilarated. From a Lambda Literary Award winner and the subject of a new documentary by Chris McKim, these are “dispatches from that region of dissolute grace at the city’s edge” (Time Out New York).

David Wojnarowicz

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