April 2, 2012
In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr (Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America) reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Carr begins by describing Wojnarowicz’s abusive, chaotic childhood, which couldn’t be redeemed despite his intense love for drawing. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life. Meeting fellow artist Peter Hujar, who became his partner and artistic mentor, was a turning point in Wojnarowicz’s life: “‘Everything I made, I made for Peter.’” Vividly detailing the East Village art scene and Wojnarowicz’s place in it, Carr also depicts the personal and professional significance of his relationships with female artists like Kiki Smith, Judy Glantzman, and Karen Finley. The most powerful sections of this engrossing book give insight into the intersection between the culture wars of the early 1990s and Wojnarowicz’s 1991 work, Tongues of Flame. Agent: Joy Harris, Joy Harris Literary Agency.
June 1, 2012
Former Village Voice arts reporter and columnist Carr (Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America, 2006, etc.) examines the life and art of provocative artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), a star of the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s. The author, who covered the arts during Wojnarowicz's heyday and knew him personally, delivers the definitive biography of this complicated artist, from his troubled childhood to his untimely death from AIDS-related complications at the age of 37. After years of abuse as a child, he left home while still a teenager; for a time, he was homeless and prostituted himself to men in Times Square. Soon he became a Beat-influenced writer and quickly moved into visual arts, including painting, sculpture and photography, as part of an East Village-based art scene that included such notable figures as Keith Haring, performance artist Karen Finley and underground filmmaker Richard Kern. His controversial art, which portrayed such disturbing images as burning children, skeletons and disembodied heads, ambitiously addressed what he termed "the wall of illusion surrounding society and its structures." His work took a more activist turn after the 1987 AIDS-related death of his close friend, photographer Peter Hujar, and his own AIDS diagnosis the following year. Carr conducted countless interviews with the artist's surviving friends, family and acquaintances, and she provides a thoroughly researched picture of his life and times. While the author offers some intriguing insights about Wojnarowicz's inner demons and his devotion to his art, the narrative is repetitive in parts--particularly when Carr relies on his journals, in which he worries constantly about loneliness and his difficulties revealing himself to others. An ambitious bio that may seem overlong to casual readers but will appeal to Wojnarowicz's most fervent fans.
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May 15, 2012
Former Village Voice columnist Carr (Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America) weaves an intense if sometimes over-detailed portrait of a complex artist in a complex time. Carr knew David Wojnarowicz (1954-92), the controversial creator of the art film A Fire in My Belly, and she bears him witness in this politically charged look at his life. She writes of his painful life and prolific career as a poet, artist, and activist before he died from AIDS at age 37, and, at the same time, she documents the rise and fall of the East Village arts scene in the 1980s. Using her skills as a reporter, Carr has pieced together this moving though unsentimental tribute from interviews with friends, candid conversations with Wojnarowicz before his death, and his own deep and provocative writings. She also discusses the politics then and now that dominate the so-called culture wars. VERDICT An up-close look at the devastation of AIDS, this first full-length biography explains Wojnarowicz's powerful iconography in the context of a (literally) dying art scene. Recommended for art and queer studies scholars. [See Prepub Alert, 1/21/12.]--Marianne Laino Sade, Maryland Inst. Coll. of Art Lib., Baltimore
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