David Wojnarowicz (1954 - 1992)

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In the Shadow of the American Dream : The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz by Amy Scholder  

At the time of his death in 1992, David Wojnarowicz was one of the most vital and important names in the New York arts scene. His openness about his HIV status and engagement in public debates about health care and AIDS policy placed his highly political and determinedly provocative art and writing in a new context. In the Shadow of the American Dream is a collection of journal entries from 1971 (when he was 17) to his death. As he alternates between living on New York's Lower East Side and hitchhiking around the country, we can see the evolution of the artist not only as a young man beginning to understand his life and the world but as a social and political critic.

Wojnarowicz's life was difficult--from his unhappy childhood and adolescence to periods of homelessness and ostracism, coupled with overwhelming despair and loneliness. Yet, ultimately, In the Shadow of the American Dream is a joyful book. We see how Wojnarowicz's art became his salvation--even in the face of AIDS--and his life finally opened and expanded to be able to include other people in ways that never happened before, including a close friendship with photographer Peter Hujar. Wojnarowicz also presents us with insightful commentary on the New York arts scene and the enormous effect AIDS had on gay male life and culture. While In the Shadow of the American Dream is a moving, sometimes frightening self-examination of the life of a gay artist, it is also testimony to how mainstream America treats not only its artists but its radicals and visionaries. --Michael Bronski

Fever : Art of David Wojnarowicz by David Wojnarowicz, Dan Cameron, Mysoon Rizk, Cynthia Carr (Editor), Amy Scholder (Editor)

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

David Wojnarowicz 

by Felix Guattari

Translation from: Rethinking Marxism, vol. 3 #1, Spring 1990

Excerpt:

The authenticity of his work on the imaginary plane is quite exceptional. His "method" consists in using his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he tape-records or writes down systematically in order to forge himself a language and a cartography enabling him at all times to reconstruct his own existence. It is from here that the extraordinary vigor of his work lies.

David Wojnarowicz's intention is explicitly ideological: his aim is to affect the world at large; he attempts to create imaginary weapons to resist established powers...

David Wojnarowicz Reading

From AIDS Community Television from a benefit fund-raiser for Needle Exchange

Excerpt:

"'If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS...' says the healthcare official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour long video of people dying on camera because they can't afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives

 and I can't even remember what his official looked like because I reached in through the T.V. screen and ripped his face in half

and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow and vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country 

'If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers...' says the governor of texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the governor was only joking and didn't know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn't think it would hurt his chances for re-election anyways 

and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I'm carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there's a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I'm waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blowdarts in 'infected blood' and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government healthcare officials or those thinly disguised walking swastika's that wear religious garments over their murerous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs...

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