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

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
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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:


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

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."

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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.

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.