Nature, Death, and Spirituality in the Work of David Wojnarowicz

A collage aesthetic dominated Wojnarowicz's fifteen-year career. He developed it, as a formal strategy, into an astonishing diversity of manifestations, with varying media, contexts, and a range of overall effects. Through collage, he depicted the collision between the personal and the social, between the margins and the mainstream, between a disappeared past and an apocalyptic present, while conveying the intensity of our age's information overload. His use of pre-printed materials alluded to the insidious pervasiveness of the pre-invented world, able to coat all available surfaces and infect every aspect of being. The amalgamated bodies of his cyborg protagonists evoked key elements of the postmodern condition: a fragmented sense of identity, an alienating loss of organic coherence, and an irrevocable disconnectedness from prior history.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Art History

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Rizk, Mysoon

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fineberg, Jonathan

• Biography

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI9812754

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/87384