Fire in the Belly The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

by Carr, Cynthia

• ISBN13: 9781596915336
• ISBN10: 1596915331
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-07-17
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Summary

In December 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington made headlines when it responded to protests from the Catholic League by voluntarily censoring an excerpt of David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Bellyfrom its show on American portraiture.Why a work of art could stir such emotions is at the heart of Cynthia Carr's Fire in the Belly, the first biography of a beleaguered art-world figure who became one of the most important voices of his generation. Wojnarowicz emerged from a Dickensian childhood that included orphanages, abusive and absent parents, and a life of hustling on the street. He first found acclaim in New York's East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and '80s for its abandoned buildings, junkies, and burgeoning art scene. Along with Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz helped redefine art for the times.As uptown art collectors looked downtown for the next big thing, this community of cultural outsiders was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. The ensuing culture war, the neighborhood's gentrification, and the AIDS crisis then devastated the East Village scene. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Carr's brilliant biography traces the untold story of a controversial and seminal figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.

Author Biography

Cynthia Carr was a columnist and arts reporter for the Village Voice from 1984 to 2003. Writing under the byline C. Carr, she specialized in experimental and cutting-edge art, especially performance art. Some of these pieces are now collected in On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. She is also the author of Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Bookforum, Modern Painters, the Drama Review, and other publications. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. Carr lives in New York.

Table of Contents

"In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, [Carr] reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics...Vividly detail[s]the East Village art scene and Wojnarowicz’s place in it... Powerful... Engrossing." —Publishers Weekly

"Fire in the Belly is a painfully beautiful book, telling the short, harsh, and defiant story of a very complex man. The best contemporary artist’s biography I know, it reads like a novel, with the brief, crazy Lower East Side art scene and the AIDS crisis as leading characters, revealed through extensive interviews with Wojnarowicz and his friends. Carr does an extraordinary job of exposing the depths of David’s amazing life and art." —Lucy R. Lippard, author of Get the Message? A Decade of Art for Social Change

"This is a biography of the American Rimbaud: just as flamboyant, just as self-destructive, just as creative. It is the best portrait I've read of the gritty East Village art scene, of the poverty and drugs and unexpected successes. Cynthia Carr deserves a prize for her heroic research." —Edmund White, author of Jack Holmes and his Friend and City Boy