Queer in Normal: Reading of Wojnarwicz biography

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Adams Charlotte

spacer University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to announce the event Queer in Normal: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 29.

The program will feature Wojnarowicz biographer, Cynthia Carr, who will read excerpts from the newly released Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, her definitive biography of the controversial artist and writer. Director of University Galleries Barry Blinderman, who curated the controversial artist’s first museum exhibition, will also make a presentation.

Sponsored by University Galleries, MECCPAC, Dean of Students’ Diversity Initiative and Women’s and Gender Studies at Illinois State University, the event is free and open to the public.

Self-taught in the arts and letters, Wojnarowicz used any mode of communication at his disposal to fight for visibility in what he termed “the pre-invented world.” He developed a stirring and concise lexicon of sounds and images, looking to visionary discontents like Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud and William Burroughs for inspiration. Following his diagnosis with AIDS in the late 1980s, Wojnarowicz delivered soul-piercing diatribes to audiences throughout the U.S. until his death in 1992.

spacer Carr’s book Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz has special resonance for Illinois State University, where in January 1990, Tongues of Flame, the retrospective of the artist’s paintings, photographs and sculptures opened with a performance witnessed by an enthusiastic crowd of 700 people. Amidst four of his videos running simultaneously, Wojnarowicz passionately addressed safe sex, lack of AIDS funding and the death of queer rights in our “one-tribe nation.”

One of the final chapters in Carr’s 600-plus-page book contains an account of Wojnarowicz’s experience in Bloomington-Normal and the media response to his exhibition. He stayed in Bloomington-Normal for several weeks between 1989 and his death in 1992. He published three prints with Illinois State University’s Normal Editions Workshop, and created some of his last major paintings and photographs in a studio he rented at Front and Center streets in Bloomington.

Following Carr’s reading, Barry Blinderman will recount the impassioned reactions to the Tongues of Flame exhibition and catalogue, presenting images of artwork, audio and video clips featuring the artist, and slides of national news headlines and the aforementioned propaganda leaflets.

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.

For special accommodations to participate in any event, contact University Galleries at 438-5487 or gallery@ilstu.edu.

Retrieved from: mediarelations.illinoisstate.edu/identity/1213/nov/queer.asp

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