Memories That Smell Like Gasoline - Paperback

by David Wojnarowicz (Author), Ocean Vuong (Foreword by)

"Wojnarowicz is a spokesman for the unspeakable." --New York Magazine

David Wojnarowicz, one of the most provocative artists of his generation, explores memory, violence, and the erotism of public space--all under the specter of AIDS.

Here are David Wojnarowicz's most intimate stories and sketches, from the full spectrum of his life as an artist and AIDS activist. Four sections--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral," and "Memories that Smell like Gasoline"--are made of images and indictments of a precocious adolescence, and his later adventures in the streets of New York. Combining text and image, tenderness and rage, Wojnarowicz's Memories that Smell like Gasoline is a disavowal of the world that wanted him dead, and a radical insistence on life.

The new and revised edition features a foreword by Ocean Vuong and a note from the editor, Amy Scholder.

Author Biography

David Wojnarowicz was an accomplished artist, writer, and activist, born September 14, 1954. He came to prominence in New York in the 1980s, part of a cohort of East Village artists including Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, and Peter Hujar. His work--from the graffiti that first brought him recognition in his teens to the photography and films produced before his AIDS-related death at the age of thirty-seven--center his experience on the margins of American society. His multi-media artworks and political advocacy were the focus of a Whitney retrospective, which named both as signs of his "radical possibility."