AustLit

'It's 1978-79 and in an abandoned warehouse in New York City, at a diner slightly out-of-focus, on a crowded subway pistoling through Brooklyn, seen pissing in a toilet in a dilapidated cubicle is Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud's in Coney Island and at the Hudson River sex piers. He's shooting up heroin. He is masturbating. He is pointing at Jesus graffitied on a wall. He is holding a gun to his head. Says multi-form visual artist David Wojnarowicz of the more than 200 photographs he took of his friends - and possibly himself - wearing a cut-out photocopied Rimbaud mask, 'I had Rimbaud come through a vague biographic& outline of what my past had been—the places I had hung out in as a kid, the places I starved in or haunted on sonic level.'