Several summers ago, when I first met David – our introduction made through Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2017), David being one of four male artists Laing chose to hover her loneliness around – I didn’t know it then but two years later he’d become my closest friend. We’d even travel together, David and I – his memoir, Close to the Knives (1991), clutched in my hands – through Vienna, then Frankfurt, then back to New York City.
But I couldn’t have anticipated how much time we’d end up spending together. He is dead, after all; died the year I was born, 1992.
David was thirty-seven years old, was killed by a diseased society, as he called it, that failed to recognise, failed to treat the virus that was killing him and his friends and lovers, his fellow artists and activists.
In 2018, my first summer living in New York City, I encountered David again, this time at the Whitney Museum, where his stunning and devastating body of work ran for a short nine weeks. I went several times; I should have gone every day. It was David Wojnarowicz, on the fifth floor at the Whitney, who summoned buried memories of a queer boyhood – mine – where fear burned within the walls of my past; up until then, up until encountering David’s paintings and films and photography and writing, I never had the chance, as an adult, to live inside my own queerness. But by showing me his, David invited me back inside, and I haven’t left since, and I never will again.
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Denne historien er fra September 2023-utgaven av ArtReview.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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"One day this boy..."
How David Wojnarowicz gave me life
Art Encounters Biennial My Rhino is Not a Myth: art science fictions
Various venues, Timişoara 19 May-16 July
Southern Discomfort
A series of upcoming biennials promise to explore the art of the 'Global South'. But what does that mean? And is the term of any practical use?
Casey Reas
Crypto has crashed and burned, but NFT visual culture is the better for it, and here's why, says the pioneering artist and programmer
Isabelle Frances McGuire
Through kitbashing and the hacking of readymades, an artist explores what digital visual culture might look like in material form
No pain, no gain?
What's primary about Matthew Barney's SECONDARY
Fine Young Cannibals
A spate of recent glitzy films have asked us to eat the rich. But what, asks Amber Husain, are we really swallowing?
Mutant Media
Animation and gaming design studios aren’t just for entertainment, claims Jamie Sutcliffe, they’re a geneticist’s lab for producing our spliced bio- cybernetic future
Midcareerism
What's an artist to do when no longer dewy and not yet long in the tooth? Martin Herbert surveys the options, none of them pretty
Diego Marcon
\"In general when I work, it's not like I'm looking for something and I find moles, it's more like moles find me, they pop up. I don't know why, I just try to remain open to these kinds of visit\"