Born in 1954 in Red Bank, New Jersey, David Wojnarowicz spent his life—he died in 1992—building a fiery, committed uvre that used all the visual media from photography to experimental cinema to convey the urgency of his rejection of a rigorously restrictive society. A militant homosexual and the lover of photographer Peter Hujar, he became an art personality on the East Village underground scene in New York during the 1980s, hanging out with people like Nan Goldin, Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and Kathy Acker. Said Beat poet William Burroughs, recognising him as an equal, ‘David Wojnarowicz says he creates each painting, each photo, each sentence as if it were the last. (When facing death head on, at that very moment we’re immortal.) He says that the most dangerous, most subversive thing we can do is observe and see clearly the structure of society and reality. Once we really see it, it disappears.’ The work of art was for Wojnarowicz a resonance chamber for his poetic sensibility: the series Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1979–1980), in which he builds a photographic narrative whose chapters have titles like Rimbaud in Brooklyn Night and Day, Rimbaud in Chinatown and Rimbaud on the Bowery, reveals more than any of his other works his sense of complicity with the author of A Season in Hell, from the traumatic childhood to the homosexuality that liberates even as society imprisons. This sequence of photographs is also the trace of a performance: of Wojnarowicz’s wanderings through New York, his face masked by Etienne Carjat’s 1871 photograph of the poet, in a kind of hybrid self-portrait of two men separated by a century but united by poetry. And in Close to the Knives, written in the twilight of his life, he structures his autobiography as a crossing—at once geographic, oneiric, poetic and political—of that America whose homophobia is resisted by the dazzling prosody that drives the book from its opening Self-portrait in Twenty-three Rounds through to its account of a lover’s death from AIDS in Living Close to the Knives. No one has summed up his talent more accurately than French philosopher Félix Guattari: ‘It is because David Wojnarowicz’s creative uvre proceeds from his entire life that it has taken on such power.’
