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Memories that smell like gasoline

Name: Memories that smell like gasoline
Author: David Wojnarowicz
ISBN: 9780963109507

by David Wojnarowicz

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Overview

Not content to be a tremendous photographer, painter, film-maker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was also the author of three classic books: Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, now back in print from Artspace. This volume collects four tales--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral" and the title story--interspersed with ink drawings by the artist. "Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream. The highway at night in the headlights of this speeding car speeding is the only motion that lets the heart unravel and in the wind of the road the two story framed houses appear one after the other like some cinematic stage set..." From these opening sentences of the book (in "Into the Drift and Sawy"), Wojnarowicz lets loose a salvo of explicit gay sexual reverie harshly lit by the New York cityscape: escapades in movie theaters and bus terminals, amid the ascent of AIDS and Wojnarowicz's own consciousness of the virus in himself and at large in the gay community.

About the Author, David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1954. A member of the first wave of East Village artists, Wojnarowicz began showing his work during the early 80s in such now-legendary spaces as Civilian Warfare, Club 57, and Gracie Mansion. He gained prominence through his inclusion in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, and was soon showing in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe, and Latin America. In the late 80s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, his art took on a sharply political edge. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness in New York in 1992, at the age of 37.