In Praise of Deviant Uselessness
10th December 2010
The Washington Post, of course.
But some, like David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti. In 1987, his former lover and best friend, Peter Hujar, died of complications from AIDS, and Wojnarowicz learned that he, too, was infected with HIV.
In other words, a bum who lived as a parasite on society and his fellow man. The saddest thing about his story is the willingness of the Crust to consider this abject failure to be, in their eyes, some sort of success.