Finding the best history keeps me awake at night suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Best history keeps me awake at night
1. David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night
Description
This engaging and richly illustrated book comprehensively examines the life and art of David Wojnarowicz (19541992), who came to prominence in New Yorks East Village art world of the 1980s, actively embracing all media and forging an expansive range of work both fiercely political and highly personal. First displayed in raw storefront galleries, his work achieved national attention at the same moment that the AIDS epidemic was affecting a generation of artists, himself included.
In a thoughtful overview essay, David Breslin looks at the breadth of the artists work as well as Wojnarowiczs broad range of interests and influences, situating the artist in the art-historical canon and pushing beyond the biographical focus that has characterized much of the scholarship on Wojnarowicz to fully assess his paintings, photographs, installations, performances, and writing. A close examination of groups of works by David Kiehl sheds new light on the artists process and the context in which the works were created. Essays by Julie Ault, Gregg Bordowitz, C. Carr, Marvin Taylor, and National Book Award finalist Hanya Yanagihara investigate the relationship between artistic production and cultural activism during the AIDS crisis, as well as provide a necessary accounting and close evaluation of divergent practices that have frequently been subsumed under broad labels like East Village, queer, postmodern, and neo-expressionist.
2. David Wojnarowicz: Brush Fires in the Social Landscape: Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Feature
ApertureDescription
David Wojnarowicz's use of photography, often done in conjunction with writing or painting, was extraordinaryas was his way of addressing the AIDS crisis and issues of censorship and homophobia. Brush Fires in the Social Landscape, begun in collaboration with the artist before his death in 1992 and first published in 1994, engaged what Wojnarowicz would refer to as histribeor community. Contributorsfrom artist and writer friends such as Karen Finley, Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Vince Aletti, C. Carr and Lucy R. Lippard, to David Cole, the lawyer who represented him in his case against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Associationtogether offer a compelling, provocative understanding of the artist and his work. Brush Fires is also the only book that features the breadth of Wojnarowicz's work with photography. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of Brush Fires, when interest in the artist's work has increased exponentially, this expanded and redesigned edition of this seminal publication puts the work in front of an audience all over again while maintaining the integrity of the original. Through the lens of various contributors, the book addresses Wojnarowicz's profound legacy: the relentless censorship and ethical issues, alongside his aesthetic brilliance, courage and influence.
3. David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame
4. Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Description
Audio journals that document Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these moments I hate language. I hate what words are like, I hate the idea of putting these preformed gestures on the tip of my tongue, or through my lips, or through the inside of my mouth, forming sounds to approximate something that's like a cyclone, or something that's like a flood, or something that's like a weather system that's out of control, that's dangerous, or alarming.... It just seems like sounds that have been uttered back and forth maybe now over centuries. And it always boils down to the same meaning within those sounds, unless you're more intense uttering them, or you precede them or accompany them with certain forms of violence.
from The Weight of the Earth
Artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (19541992) was an important figure in the downtown New York art scene. His art was preoccupied with sex, death, violence,and the limitations of language. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Wojnarowicz began keeping audio journals, returning to a practice he'd begun in his youth.The Weight of the Earthpresents transcripts of these tapes, documenting Wojnarowicz's turbulent attempts to understand his anxieties and passions, and tracking his thoughts as they develop in real time.
In these taped diaries, Wojnarowicz talks about his frustrations with the art world, recounts his dreams, and describes his rage, fear, and confusion about his HIV diagnosis. Primarily spanning the years 1987 and 1989, recorded as Wojnarowicz took solitary road trips around the United States or ruminated in his New York loft,the audio journals are an intimate and affecting record of an artist facing death. By turns despairing, funny, exalted, and angry, this volume covers a period largely missing from Wojnarowicz's written journals, providing us with an essential new record of a singular American voice.
5. The Waterfront Journals
Description
6. In the Shadow of the American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz
Feature
Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
7. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz (New Museum Books, 2)
Description
A central figure in New York's East Village art scene of the 1980s, Wojnarowicz was a painter, sculptor, photographer, writer, installation artist, musician, and video- and filmmaker. After being diagnosed as HIV-positive in the late 1980s, Wojnarowicz engaged in widely publicized debates over medical research and funding, censorship in the arts, and politically-sanctioned homophobia, lending his art a sharply political edge. The last few years of his life were an intense flurry of activity in a variety of mediums, fueled by rage and alienation that helped set the tone for contemporary art's exploration of social and private identities.8. David Wojnarowicz: A Definitive History of Five or Six Years on the Lower East Side (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)
Description
Artist David Wojnarowicz on his work, his aspirations, his personal history, his political views; Wojnarowicz in dialogue with Sylvre Lotringer, along with personal accounts from friends and fellow artists collected after Wojnarowicz's death.
In February 1991, the artist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) and the philosopher Sylvre Lotringer met in a borrowed East Village apartment to conduct a long-awaited dialogue on Wojnarowicz's work. Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helmsa notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him bestthe friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.
9. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
Feature
Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
Not content to be a tremendous photographer, painter, filmmaker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-92) was also the author of three classic books: Close to the Knives, The Waterfront Journals and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, now back in print from Artspace. This volume collects four tales--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral" and the title story--interspersed with ink drawings by the artist. "Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream. The highway at night in the headlights of this speeding car speeding is the only motion that lets the heart unravel and in the wind of the road the two story framed houses appear one after the other like some cinematic stage set..." From these opening sentences of the book (in "Into the Drift and Sway"), Wojnarowicz lets loose a salvo of explicit gay sexual reverie harshly lit by the New York cityscape.10. Winning the Battle for the Night
Description
Win the Battle for Sleep: God's Plan for Rest, Rejuvenation, and RevelationIn our fast-paced world, we see sleep as "wasted time," or else we lie awake as anxiety, fear, or distractions run through our minds. That was never God's intent for the night. Without realizing it, we've handed this sacred time over to the enemy.
With warmth, compassion, and keen biblical insight, counselor and speaker Faith Blatchford reveals that it's during this precious time that God imparts everything necessary for us to be equipped for the day. Without peaceful sleep at night, we are robbed mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually of the resources we need.
God created the night and the dark--and he called it good. He dwells in it. The dark does not belong to the devil, so don't let the enemy steal it from you. Here are the tools you need to take back your night, to encounter the God of rest, and to sleep peacefully the whole night through.
Includes a chapter on how to help your children overcome nightmares and fear of the dark.