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.

~~~
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.

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.

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!

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 ---------->>

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...

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.

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