David Wojnarowicz
A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the
Lower East Side
Interviews by Syvère Lotringer, Edited
by Giancarlo Ambrosino, Co Edited by Hedi El Kholti, Chris Kraus,
and Justin
Cavin.
here
was one thing Peter [Hujar] in his Bhuddist leanings, told me. He
always encouraged me to do meditation. I tried it and it made everything
I did worthless: I no longer wanted to paint these images, and I
no longer wanted to deal with violence. I’d given up smoking,
sugar, salt, meat, all these things. I did it for four months and
it scared the shit out of me. I said, the one hold I have in the
world is dealing with my expression. I can’t think of an interesting
way to present beauty unless it’s inside of death or violence.
So I gave up meditation and went back to eating sugar and pancakes
and became violent again. It made me feel much better.
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| In the wake of David Wojnarowicz’s
death, critic and cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer undertook
to track down all of Wojnarowicz's friends and former collaborators,
such as Bill Rice, and Kiki Smith and Marguerite Van Cook, amongst
others. Lotringer wanted to talk not just about David, but about
the East Village cultural scene they'd created. Through their detailed
and candid, sometimes lurid, often hilarious and profoundly moving
accounts, the protagonists of the East Village art scene reclaim
their history, on their own terms. Profusely illustrated with photographs
and artworks by Gary Azon, Nan Goldin, James Romberger, Peter Hujar,
Richard Kern, Marion Scemama, Andreas Sterzing, Tommy Turner and
David Wojanrowicz, Five or Six Years tears open art history’s
myth of the single Great Artist to reveal Wojnarowicz’s real
life, and the real lives surrounding him. |
“Gathered over the course of more
than 12 years, these interviews create a compelling and often moving
testament to the enduring significance of David Wojnarowicz’s
art. The breathtaking sweep of Wojnarowicz’s output (drawings,
paintings, writings, films and videotapes and social activism)
is well represented. Five or Six Years also discloses, with all
the minutiae that make up a life, the degree to which Wojnarowicz’s
ideas arose through his formal and informal collaborations with
friends. The artist is seen here not just (as art history often
would have it) as a solitary originator, but a master synthesist.
In their conversatons with Sylvère Lotringer, Wojnarowicz’s
friends unwittingly document one of the last cohesive art movements
of the 20th century.”
— Ralph Rugoff
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coming soon
“The image is not only meant to exhibit
passively significant forms, but to trigger an existential movement,
if not of revolt, at least of existential creativity. When everything
seems to be said and repeated at this point in Art History, something
emerges from David Wojnarowicz's chaos which confronts us with
our responsibility to intervene in the movement of the world. ”
-- Felix Guattari, 1989 |
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