Close to the Knives. David Wojnarowicz
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CLOSE TO THE KNIVES
David Wojnarowicz wrote six books. His artwork 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. In addition to his artwork, Wojnarowicz attained national prominence as a writer and advocate for AIDS awareness, and for his stance against censorship. He died from AIDS in 1992.
Also by David Wojnarowicz
Sounds in the Distance
Tongues of Flame
Memories that Smell like Gasoline
Seven Miles a Second (with James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook)
The Waterfront Journals
In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz (edited by Amy Scholder)
CLOSE TO
A Memoir of Disintegration
THE KNIVES
David Wojnarowicz
Introduction by Olivia Laing
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate
Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 1991 by David Wojarowicz
Introduction © 2016 by Olivia Laing
Olivia Laing’s introduction first appeared in the Guardian in 2016.
First published in the United States in 1991 by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House Inc.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78689 028 3
Typeset in Bembo by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh
This Book Is For: Peter HujarTom RauffenbartMarion Scemama
“longer than China, bigger than Berlin
I go to a far away place within
taking a journey with 67 eyes
flying through fire all over the skies”
Keiko Bonk
“. . . every stinking bum should wear a crown.”
Iggy Pop
PERSONAL ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to . . .
THE LIVING: Tom Rauffenbart, Patrick McDonnel, Nan Goldin, Siobhan, John Zinsser, David Coles and Peter Weiss of Center for Constitutional Rights, Paul Marcus, Susan Pyzow, Dr. Bob Friedman, Marion Scemama, Carlo McCormack, John Olsoff, Kathryn Barrett, Jonathan Gutoff, Anita Vitale, ACT-UP, Phil Zwickler, John Carlin, Elizabeth Hess, C. Carr, Lucy Lippard, David Hirsh, Bill Rice, Larry Mitchell, Karen Finley, Willy from the West Street days, Norman Frisch, Dennis Cooper, Old Reliable, Richard Kern, Amy Scholder, Ira Silverberg, Lydia Lunch, Ben Neill, Angela Davis, Judy Glantzman, Carmela Perri, Tommy and Amy Turner, Bill Burroughs, Philip Zimmerman, Jean Foos, Doug Bressler, Brian Butterick, Mary Hayslip, Phillip Yenawine, Cee Brown, Fran Lebowitz, Lynn Davis, Barry Blinderman, Christina Nordholm, Laurie Dahlberg, Peter Spooner, Kiki Smith, Syd Stoldt, Sophie Breer, Kathy Acker, Tanya, DeFazio, Ishmael and his dark sexy work, 42nd Street Movie Houses, Ann Northrop, the drag queens along the Hudson River and their truly revolutionary states, and all the guys and girls future and past who give chaos reason and delight.
THE DEAD: Peter Hujar, Keith Davis, Iolo, Montanna, Dean Savard, Arthur Bressan, Jr., Paul Proveaux, Cookie Mueller, Paul Thek, Luis Frangella, Ethyl Eichelberger, and Vito Russo for their beautiful brush fires in the social landscape.
––––
And special thanks to my editor, Karen Rinaldi, and her muse, Lenny Dykstra.
CONTENTS
Self-Portrait in Twenty-Three Rounds
In the Shadow of the American Dream
Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins
The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet
Additional Statistics and Facts
Do Not Doubt the Dangerousness of the 12-inch-tall Politician
The Suicide of a Guy who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine over a Mouse Hole
INTRODUCTION
YOU MIGHT NOT BE familiar with the American artist and activist David Wojnarowicz’s name, but if you’re of a certain age, you have probably seen at least one image by him. His photograph of buffalo tumbling off a cliff was used as the cover of U2’s One, taking his art to a global audience a few months before his death in 1992 of AIDS-related complications.
Wojnarowicz was only thirty-seven when he died, but he left behind an extraordinary body of work, particularly considering the uncongenial circumstances of much of his short life. A refugee from a violent family, a former street kid and teen hustler, he grew up to become one of the stars of the febrile 1980s East Village art scene, alongside Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His paintings were what made him famous – livid, densely symbolic visions, a kind of 20th-century American Dreamtime. But paint was by no means his only medium. His first serious work of art, made in the early 1970s, was a compelling series of black and white photographs of a man wearing a paper mask of the poet Arthur Rimbaud. This enigmatic, expressionless figure drifts through the piers and diners of New York, a dispossessed flâneur.
In the years that followed, Wojnarowicz worked with film, installation, sculpture, performance and writing, making things that testified to his perspective as an outsider, a gay man in a homophobic and violent world. One of the greatest and most abiding of all these works is Close to the Knives,