“It’s about twenty minutes later. I just can’t stand my self-consciousness when talking into this thing,” says David Wojnarowicz, speaking into an audio recorder in November/December 1988. One of his eleven tape journals he made from 1981 to 1989, he later admits on the same tape: “I don’t know. I really can’t get at this … Continue reading
“Maybe I can’t find you, Peter,” darkly exclaims David Wojnarowicz, walking through a cemetery in his essay “Living Close To The Knives” (100). While detailing his harrowing and nerve-wracking attempt to find the grave of photographer Peter Hujar, who Wojnarowicz later describes as “my friend…my brother my father my emotional link to the world,” Wojnarowicz’s … Continue reading
I’m not used to suffering from invasive flashbacks inside a major museum. But, pulling back the heavy curtain, leading into Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Closet, a cozy yet mind-altering intergalactic Day-Glo-painted trash utopia, I was immediately sent through a time warp to June 2011, boogying to The B-52s “Planet Claire” and Martha and the Vandellas “Jimmy … Continue reading
“Over the past year four more of my most beloved friends have died of AIDS. Two were artists I had selected for this exhibit. One of the writers for this catalogue has become too sick to write. And so the tone of the exhibition has become less theoretical and more personal, from a show about … Continue reading
Underneath the 1980s nostalgia of Netflix’s drama Stranger Things, the sleepy Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana becomes a porous portal into an alternate dimension that the kids on the show call “The Upside Down.” Continue reading
“My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you,” warns Audre Lorde in her paper The Transformation of Silence Into Language And Action. In this essay, Lorde argues for speaking–the voice–as an essential, if not the most essential, activist tool. She concludes, “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break the silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken” (44). Continue reading
At a panel last July entitled IV Embrace: On Caregiving and Creativity, organized by Visual AIDS in conjunction with the show In The Power Of Your Care at The 8th Floor, Ted Kerr observed that we are in “the revisitation phase” of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. And Kerr is right. While smaller exhibitions have been mounted … Continue reading
Christ has died! Christ has risen! Christ will…come again? Why hello there, dearest Filthy Dreams readers! Welcome! Would you like a glass of Sacramental wine? Hey! I know in church they only let you have a sip but Jesus wouldn’t want us to be cheap now would he? I know what you’re thinking, faithful Filthy … Continue reading
Samuel Beckett seems like a good place to start. After election night on Tuesday, it feels like we’re living in one of his plays. I didn’t really want to write this piece–or any election-related “think piece.” It always seems egomaniacal and self-indulgent. But, I couldn’t find a way to avoid writing about our ominous election of Donald Trump. Continue reading
I don’t know about you, dearest Filthy Dreams readers, but the past couple weeks (ok, year) have felt like civilization failed us. Between the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the shootings in Dallas, the shootings at Pulse in Orlando, the Brexit vote, the attack in Nice, the failed coup attempt in Turkey and … Continue reading