David Wojnarowicz (1954- 1992)
One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come
to know something at causes a sensation equivalent the seperation
of the earth from it's axis. One day this kid will reach a
point where he senses a division that isn't mathematical. One
day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat
and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind
and body and a soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid
will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of
priests and rabbis, men who inhabit stone buildings, to call
for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation on
this kid. One day families will give false information to the
children and each child will pass that information down
generationally to their families and that information will be
designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this
kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment
and information will compell him to commit suicide or submit to
danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and
invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to
talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence
him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation
, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles,
knives, relgion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors
will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus.
This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the
governments invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced
with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in
laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists.
He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and
all concievable fredoms. All of is will begin to happen in
one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked
body on the naked body of another boy.
-- David Wojnarowicz "untitled" 1990 Text accompanied by a
photo image of the Artist as a young boy.
David died of AIDS in 1992 at age 37. He has a full retrospective
in New York City, and he has several books pubished containing his
comics, his art, and his memoirs/ Philosophies. The latter is
titled "Close to the Knives; a memoir of decintagration" (and is
highly reccomended reading- though is not for children, or people
who don't want their pleasant little life-bubble broken to bits)