Obituary: David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz, artist and writer, born 14 September 1954, died New York City 22 July 1992.

THE FIRST time I saw David Wojnarowicz, he was reading a selection of his works to benefit the New York Needle Exchange Programme. I was filming what was to be a documentary, based on his life and work, and I had come to New York to meet him and to hear him read. The gallery was packed to bursting point, with queues around the block, and because of his illness, he was suffering from Aids, everybody inside was wondering aloud whether or not Wojnarowicz would appear. There were other voices that night: the writer Kathy Acker, the performance artist Karen Finley, but none more passionate, more eloquent, more full of rage than Wojnarowicz.

In a city devastated by Aids, but also increasingly worn down by its relentless progress, he had a unique ability to strip away the myths, and give it to you straight. That night in New York, reading from his harrowing account of the epidemic Close To The Knives (1991, which is due to be published in Britain in September), he forced his audience to confront the bare essentials of his (and their) experience: 'My rage is really about the fact that when I was told I'd contracted this virus it didn't take me long to realise that I'd contracted a diseased society as well.'

Wojnarowicz was an important artist, one of the first to deal with issues of sex and sexuality in the context of Aids. Throughout the 1980s he worked in a variety of media, dealing, in his paintings, his photographs, his writings and installation art, not only with personal longing, but also on a political level with a community's collective experience of pain, of terrible suffering, of homophobia, of media indifference and government neglect.

In many ways his life comprised the stuff of which legends are made. The violent family background, the runaway child, the teenage hustler on the mean streets of New York, and later his HIV status. These experiences fuelled his art, producing startling and often disturbing images. Yet he always resisted the 'hustler- turned-artist' tag.

During his lifetime Wojnarowicz was both critically acclaimed and vilified at the hands of US art critics and politicians alike. He was feted as a star of New York's East Village art scene in the early 1980s and later reduced to being a nameless 'Aids victim' in the gutter press.

An exhibition at the Artists Space in New York in 1989 had funds taken away by the National Endowment of the Arts following publication of Wojnarowicz's catalogue essay 'Postcards From America, X-Rays From Hell'. Wojnarowicz successfully challenged the ruling and the funds were reinstated. Newspapers seized on his very critical description of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, Cardinal O'Connor. Wojnarowicz was making 'queer' art before the term became fashionable.

The documentary was never made. David was unhappy with the idea of being interviewed. Instead we talked about the possibility of a narrative film based on his writings Close To The Knives and Memories That Smell Like Gasoline (1992). After several months and a series of re-writes, finally I finished a script he felt happy with.

(Photograph omitted)