Content area
Full Text
Fiona Anderson, Cruising the Dead River - David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront, University of Chicago Press, 2019, 204pp, £19.99, 978 0 226603 75 9.
Jonathan Weinberg, Art and Sex Along the New York Waterfront, Penn State University Press, 2019, 232pp, 27.95, 978 0 27102 17 2.
As epic architectural symbols of New York's 20th century boom and bust, the vacant, ruined Manhattan piers offered an unforeseen 'sexual theatre' for cruising gay men in the years immediately before and the decades after the Stonewall Riots, the 1969 demonstrations which catalysed modern gay liberation. Through the post-gay liberation period to the early years of the AIDS crisis, the act of cruising and the implicit risk factors - arrest for trespassing the piers and prohibitions against sex work and public sex, or mugging and queer bashing from teenage gangs, notwithstanding the structural dangers of the piers themselves - all added a frisson of fear and violence to outlaw acts as denizens of the newly visible gay bars, sex clubs and bath houses of the Village spilled onto the truck parks and abandoned piers at night. At the same time, New York's Downtown area became a beacon for new kinds of radical art and exhibition-making by artists who took advantage of the piers as creative sites to expand their practices beyond studios and galleries to forge new audiences.
Cruising The Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York's Ruined Waterfront by Newcastle University art historian Fiona Anderson sets out to establish a queer feminist cultural, critical and art-historical survey of cruising on the New York piers and cruising as artistic and literary methods. Anderson focuses her thematic study on a critical purview 'around' artist, writer, photographer, curator and would-be activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992), who acutely chronicled Reagan-era US life before he died of an AIDS-related illness at the age of 37. Adopting Wojnarowicz's queer temporal literary style and the erotic and aesthetic Zeitgeist of post-Stonewall, pre-HIV public sex as a 'demonstration', Anderson echoes Mark W Turner's Backwards Glances. Turner's study of cruising in cultural modernity expounds upon Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's thesis of the ephemeral, contingent and fragmented nature of modernity, adding Arthur Rimbaud's 'disintegration of the senses' and Jacques Derrida's 'hauntology' to an aggregate philosophy and...