Monday, February 7, 2011

Visual Pollution Causes Retinal Warming

A 2004 article at Artopia giving an overview of a New Museum retrospective of East Village art shows no love for David Wojnarowicz's visual work or graffiti in general.

In case you are wondering, I always hated graffiti art and still do. I am not against art-in-the-streets per se. I really can't be, since I sometimes still do Street Works myself. But graffiti always struck me as dumb, visual pollution, and moving it indoors, in most cases, only made it worse. I can get behind signatures as paintings since, satirically, paintings are signatures, but I don't think that's what the artists had in mind. Any art promoted by Norman Mailer (and many years before the Fun Gallery) can't be good.

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found via googling: '"crazy like a" wojnarowicz' inspired by this 1958 Time article about John Fox which details media manipulation of a US Senate race.

His story now is that after discussions with others, including Neanderthal Republican Publisher Basil Brewer of New Bedford, Mass., he decided that Cabot Lodge was "soft on Communism" and that therefore he decided to move over and back Democratic Candidate John Kennedy. The day the Post's Kennedy-for-Senator editorial appeared, by Fox's account, Fox talked to Joseph Patrick Kennedy, multimillionaire father of the candidate, who agreed to lend Fox a cool $500,000—and later achieved the feat of getting it back. John Kennedy won the Senate by a slim 70,000 votes, and Fox still claims credit for his election.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Wojnarowicz Words

In this 1991 interview by David Dashiel at queerculturalcenter.org, David Wojnarowicz predicts his art's position at the center of cultural censorship:

The landscape of this country is so controlled. What is freedom at this point? My frustration comes from wondering how one achieves any sense of freedom. Just about any activity - physical, mental, sexual - is slowly being controlled or hampered. I foresee a time when certain books and ideas will just be banned.
Also contains my favorite quote of the decade:

Acting in prescribed notions of what identity should be is a joke.

Wojnarowicz's influence on a younger generation of artists featured in a 2008 group exhibition at P.P.O.W., History Keeps Me Awake at Night: A Genealogy of Wojnarowicz,  is described in this article at Art Fag City.

Monday, January 31, 2011

These People ~ Now It's The Orphists

Orphists or Smithsonian Museum Board of Regents?  Awaiting official reaction.

This April 23, 1913, Milwaukee Journal article describes a century old artistic stance that has now been institutionalized as the curatorial process.

"Do not for a moment suppose that these people feel grieved by any amount of sarcasm or abuse in the press. It is all good advertising, and that is what they are after."

New word! Divigations!

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Morality and language have been reduced to their simplest expression, at last!

James Franco, in the tradition of David Wojnarowicz's Rimbaud in New York series, has recreated the set of sitcom Three's Company on the streets of Park City for a Sundance New Frontiers installation.

Need further explanation? LAtimes blog says you can get "it from Franco himself: Just call 801-349-3498, hit 18 and the # sign, and listen to Franco explain the work in his own words."

via Jimmy Chen, who provides dialogue

over there on the frosting list ---------->>

Friday, January 21, 2011

Herd's Up.

 From Issue One of Paper Monument
Amazing David Wojnarowicz street graffiti at link


join the artists occupying
the city storefront at 125 Delancey
Street (Delancey St. stop on the M)
for cheap booze and propaganda
chill thrills on New Years
chill thrills on New Years Eve
—poster for The Real Estate Show, 1979

It is New Year’s Eve 1979, and an anonymous group of thirty-five artists have organized a guerrilla-like protest exhibition titled “The Real Estate Show” in an abandoned storefront on the Lower East Side. The object of this exhibition is to call attention to the gentrification of downtown neighborhoods and the practices and politics surrounding...

Monday, January 10, 2011

Chicago Wojnarowicz

Eye Exam gives an overview of David Wojnarowiczs' Chicago history.

The mentioned painting "Queer Basher/Icarus Falling" viewable at New Museum Digital Archive.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

From the Archives

092.2.0116  Title: Rattle  undated
Description: Figure of hanged man in hat, noose around neck. Body consists of jar with animal skull and teeth inside, bone attached to bottom as handle
Maker: none
Where Made: n.p.
Materials: ceramic, paint, rope, cloth, glass, bone
Dimensions: 11.25 x 6 x 2.75 inches

From the Fales Library & Special Collections Guide to the David Wojnarowics Papers

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Rag(e)time

Slave Pianos transforms visual artworks into musical performance pieces and includes a work by David Wojnarowicz.

Difficult Subjects ~ Today in WojnaBloggery and Prehensile Toes

The Akron Art Museum will be showing the censored David Wojnarowicz video "A Fire In My Belly" with Museum Director Mitchell Kahan warning

Potential audiences should know that A Fire in My Belly is not easy viewing. It involves sex, violence, politics and religion, all of which are difficult subjects to view.

via The 330
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two protestors ejected from the National Portrait Gallery for their independent showing of A Fire In My Belly on iPads will return across the street with a Davidian trailer flickering images to smote the Smithsonian Goliathan.

Support for their efforts can be displayed at http://dontcensor.us/

via washingtoncitypaper.com
via popnography quickies

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Here's a few takes on the legend:

David and Goliath
flickr result found imagoogling "david and goliath" smithsonian

Study for David and Goliath, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 127 x 137cm,
Collection Colorado Springs Fine Art Center
via this hot take on Paul Cadmus from contemporarybalears.com

Monday, January 3, 2011

Upscale and DIY

In 1999's Hunger Artist: The Timely Ressurrection of David Wojnarowicz Richard Goldstein at the Village Voice describes a surge of interest in Wojnarowicz's work and perhaps the most commercial appropriation of his work with:

"Buy a Versace garment at Saks this week and you'll get a free pass to the New Museum, where you can see the work up close and purchase a T-shirt of David's burning house. He made the image as a stencil, and in the uncivilized '70s, he spray-painted it on walls all over Downtown. Today, such a gesture would brand him as a quality-of-life offender."

~~~~~

This 1996 New York Times Magazine Article titled The Do-It-Yourself Art World starts off:

Great Moments in 'D.I.Y.' History
1982: Gracie Mansion, a D.I.Y. forerunner, shows artists like David Wojnarowicz in a former East Village beauty shop.

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Grids and Iron

 My Head Is Like A Burning House / Luis Cruz Azaceta 1981 (via George Adams Gallery)

This March 25, 1991, New York Magazine profile by Kay Larson of Luiz Cruz Azaceta laments "I miss the searing metaphors and dark-night monologues of David Wojnarowicz, who has set a standard for AIDS painting that hasn't yet been surpassed, by fusing the personal and political in a blinding flash of survivor's panic."

This nola.com article featuring Luis Cruz Azaceta's 2009 New Orleans Museum of Art exhibition has a bit of more recent bio.

"Azaceta is an award-winning artist whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, plus 60 other museums across the world...  He can be a color-crazy abstract painter, a wildly inventive junk sculptor, or a master collage maker who specializes in grids of snapshots.
"Once the work becomes mechanical, then I stop right there, " he said of his mercurial style. "Because I like to be surprised and engaged by the process of the work."... All of the tiny, mournful figures that haunt his canvases are him...
He says he doesn't include self-portraits "as a narcissist to display myself, but as a vehicle to convey certain political and social conditions; an actor playing different roles. I can make a self portrait as an aggressor or a victim.""

Pictures of his amazing early work at George Adams Gallery and his amazing recent work at Arthur Roger Gallery, including photographs on cooking pots.  I hope he makes it back to Cuba.