Product Description

In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's violent childhood in suburbia to eventual homelessness on the streets and piers of New York City, to recognition as one of the most provocative artists of his generation -- Close to the Knives is his powerful and iconoclastic memoir. Street life, drugs, art and nature, family, AIDS, politics, friendship and acceptance: Wojnarowicz challenges us to examine our lives -- politically, socially, emotionally, and aesthetically.

"David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society's truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately." -- Dennis Cooper

"Wojnarowicz's writing fairly smokes with acrid ironies. It's passionate and personal." -- New York

"Everyone should read Close to the Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story." -- Karen Finley

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #230046 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-07
• Released on: 1991-05-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The New York-based visual artist and AIDS activist whose work has been targeted by Jesse Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon as obscene debuts here with a collection of writings marked by stunning originality and sharp polemics. The alternation of poetic observations of a desolate, at times dissolute life on the road and in squalid urban settings with indictments of a homophobic "establishment" might at first appear ill-advised; soon, however, it becomes clear that Wojnarowicz's visual and verbal gifts are inextricably bound to his experience as a homosexual in an American underclass. In images, rhythms and verbal textures that often seem like written analogues to his paintings, Wojnarowicz displays an ability to capture the insensate beauty of much of the American landscape, and light it with a burning human hunger: "Down along the service road the prehistoric silhouettes of sixteen-wheel rigs ground their gears in the blackness. . . . As each cab swung by me there was a video blaze of tiny green and red ornamental cab lights framing the darkened windows containing a momentary fractured bare arm or dim face filled with the stony gaze of road life." In the course of this memoir, the author cooly sketches the outlines of a troubled adolescence--parental kidnapping, drug use, prostitution--making survival alone seem miraculous. What Kerouac was to a generation of alienated youth, what Genet was to the gay demimonde in postwar Europe, Wojnarowicz may well be to a new cadre of artists compelled by circumstance to speak out in behalf of personal freedom. This is a book sublime in poetry, fierce in outrage. Author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Wojnarowicz is a controversial contemporary artist who drew national attention when the NEA withdrew a grant for the artist's gallery, Artist's Space, in response to the lacerating essay he wrote about AIDS to accompany the show. He later sued the Reverend Donald Wildmon for copyright infringement and misrepresentation for using excerpts from his works when testifying before Congress. The book deals with subjects that arouse varied responses but rarely indifference. This very angry young man, the product of a lifetime of abuse inflicted by himself as well as others, is a traveler on the road to emotional and physical disintegration. Neither an autobiography nor essays, the work consists of segments, of incidents and images, some outrageous, some moving. It is an attempt to afford the reader a glimpse into outsider society but does so in a way that seems to aim more at alienation than amity. There is great pain here and a plea for compassion, but the rage and fear of which he accuses the establishment seems as much an echo of his own voice as it is of outside reality.
- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"David Wojnarowicz is brilliantly attuned to American talk and responsive to the moods and innovations of society's truants. He also has the best conscience of any writer I know. This fierce, erotic, haunting, truthful book should be given to every teenager immediately." -- Dennis Cooper

"Wojnarowicz's writing fairly smokes with acrid ironies. It's passionate and personal." -- New York

"Everyone should read Close to the Knives to understand the overall political agenda behind suffering, whether that suffering occurs because of a dysfunctional family, religion, or government. Wojnarowicz explores all of his painful life experiences as a plea for all of us to become more compassionate and caring human beings. This isn't just David's story, it's our story, our nation's story." -- Karen Finley -- Review

Customer Reviews

Simply the best, most beautiful memoir about AIDS.
David Wojnarowicz (pronounced "Wanna-row-its") was what used to be called a Renaissance Man. I use the past tense for two reasons: 1) he died before he could fulfill his potential, and 2) the very notion of a Renaissance, an artistic rebirth subsequently institutionalized, was both hateful to him and utterly appropriate. He wrote, painted, sculpted, took pictures, performed, sang in a band. He became famous, briefly, before his death, and knew a lot of famous people, from musicians to academicians, particularly in downtown NYC. With no training, he simply had a flair for creativity in general, turning the painful and difficult material of his life as an abused child, disadvantaged citizen, hustler, and person with AIDS into some of the most incisive, arresting, heartbreaking work. In _Close to the Knives_, Wojnarowicz does it just right: he tells it like it is, without sentimentalizing or self-pity, but gives his controversial subjects, including his unhappy sex life and the agonzing deaths of friends, a sublimity and meaningfulness that puts most other such memoirs in the shade. It's experimental while being accessible, angry while compassionate, explicit while gentle. A collection held tightly together by the force of Wojnarowicz's personality and talent, _Close to the Knives_ is all the more compelling for the promise it offered of its author's future, which has had its own sort of rebirth in the form of Wojnarowicz's enduring fame. It's simply one of my ten favorite books of all time: a book I'll continue to teach, and to read for its convulsive beauty, as long as I live

One of my favorite artists
I first discovered Wojnarowicz in a "Village Voice" article in 1990. Everything about his work intrigued me. He had a passion for life, and a sort of well-placed fury that is invigorating without being negative and worked in almost every type of art medium possible. I did a Master's thesis on his works that include photography and writing in 1994.

I first picked up _Close to the Knives_ over 10 years ago and I've thumbed through it many times since. It's a combination of stories, essays, talks, and catalogue entries. The beginning is a bit difficult because there isn't a lot of punctuation. But the stories begin to slowly make sense, and get more grammatically correct. Throughout his writing wanders from being angry, scathingly funny, to erotic and back again.

I'd recommend him to anyone interested in gay/lesbian writing, outsider art, the history of AIDS and the anti-NEA battles in the early 90s. Apparently his estate is releasing more writings as time goes on, so I'm not up to date on everything available. But _Memories That Smell Like Gasoline_ is good, although depressing.

Books on his visual art are _Fever_ and _Tongues of Flame_ (both museum catalogues), and _Brush Fires in the Social Landscape_ (a book with essays by friends and great photos published by Aperture photography magazine). I can't easily describe his visual work, but he had a great visual style, a wonderful sense of composition. Early on he exhibited graffiti type paintings, and explored photography/writing more from the late 80s onwards. I like his photography the best, usually including his writing. He died of an AIDS-related illness July 22, 1992.

This Mortal Coil
Enter the young male prostitute, performance artist, author, street monger, and angry prophet. He was all of these things and more until AIDS finally claimed him. But with Close to the Knives, he has left us all a very precious legacy--a frame of reference that begs us to truly witness the politics of suffering in American society and become more compassionate in the process. His omnivorous approach to our culture is dizzying, enraging, mysterious, beautiful, dangerous, heartbreaking, and very very necessary. When I finished reading it, I turned it over and started again. I will never be the same.....I have been galvanized.