Memories That Smell like Gasoline
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"Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable." --New York Magazine
David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space--all under the specter of AIDS.
Here are David Wojnarowicz's most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and "Memories that Smell like Gasoline"--are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz's Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.
About this Author
David Wojnarowicz was an accomplished artist, writer, and activist, born September 14, 1954. He came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, part of a cohort of East Village artists including Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, and Peter Hujar. His work--from the graffiti that first brought him recognition in his teens to the photography and films produced before his AIDS-related death at the age of thirty-seven--center his experience on the margins of American society. His multi-media artworks and political advocacy were the focus of a Whitney retrospective, which named both as signs of his "radical possibility."
Reviews
"Instead of giving in to political exhaustion, Wojnarowicz fanned his rage and channeled it into a message of--not hope, exactly, but insistence. I am here."
--Christine Smallwood, New York Times
"[H]is 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."
--The Whitney Museum of American Art
"[Wojnarowicz] took his outsider citizenship as a subject and weaponized it."
--New York Times
"Wojnarowicz's already impressive shadow seems to have grown longer over the past few years . . . It's moving, if maddening, that we keep uncovering new gifts from a visionary whose life was cut short by a callow administration."
--Brittany Allen, Literary Hub
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