artQueer
Posts tagged 1980s
Tom Bianchi | Fire Island Pines - Polaroids 1975-1983
“The production began recently by sorting through the thousands of SX-70s I shot in the Pines between 1975 and 1983. Back in the early 80s I produced a dummy of the book. Editors at the biggest publishers loved it.
Their marketing people thought it too risky to produce a book so queer.”
56 notes (via tombianchiphotos)
David Wojnarowicz | Tommy’s Illness/Mexico City | 1987
“David Wojnarowicz died of AIDS-related illness in 1992 at the age of 38. After having run away from home as a teenager, he survived on the streets of New York as a hustler, eventually becoming involved in the East Village art scene as it exploded in the late 1970s and early 80s. Wojnarowicz was a kind of street-smart visionary folk artist, whose paintings, photographs, collages, sculptures, performances, and writings were roiling with his fury at the violence, intolerance, and hypocrisies of Reagan-era America. His voice was distinctive, with a zeal one might associate with a man on a mission. His embrace of collage allowed him to incorporate other voices and sources in his work, opening up his emotional palette to include humor, chance, and contradictory opinions. Tommy’s Illness/Mexico City (1987) is a field of symbols related to Mexican popular culture-the Virgin of Guadalupe, the pierced heart, a cactus transforming into a turtle, and a shattered facade of a building that must certainly reference the recent earthquake in Mexico City. These symbols seem to orbit around a reclining figure painted over a map of Mexico. Collaged into the mix and bleeding through the underpaint are cartoony grotesques, illustrations from a Mexican newspaper story about Hollywood monsters. It is a rich, dreamy, and provocative constellation of images. As with much of his work, the bits and pieces of printed matter that collide and collude with his own images, present a kind of visual diary of the places, people, and issues that were important in his political, artistic, sexual, and emotional life.” - Mark Alice Durant
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