Author Charlie Fox’s disorientating new zine celebrates the life and the work of David Wojnarowicz

Date
3 August 2018

Last year Charlie Fox released This Young Monster, a dazzling series of essays that concerned themselves with the idea of the interplay between culture and the idea of monstrosity. Honing in on the likes of Leigh Bowery, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Harmony Korine, it presented an alternative kind of art history, one in which the outsider, the Other, is seen and understood. John Waters loved it, Chris Kraus loved it, and we loved it too.

So when it was brought to It’s Nice That’s attention that Charlie had been working on a free to download publication about the American artist David Wojnarowicz, we celebrated like we’d just got our hands on the World Cup.

Produced ostensibly to commemorate an event held at Dalston’s Burley Fisher Books to celebrate the relaunch of The Waterfront Journals, a collection of David’s early autobiographical writings, the strange, scattershot, digitally DIY result is Heavy Metal Dog 2.

Featuring a list of David’s favourite albums – which include Throbbing Gristle’s Heathen Earth – extracts from David’s body of written work, stock images of children in werewolf costumes, absurdly graphic stills from Hellraiser, an Edward Scissorhands headshot, and Peter Gabriel lyrics. The result is as disorientating but ultimately human as David Wojnarowicz’s work was, and the intentionally super-slapped together design adds to the sense of unease that radiates from every page of Heavy Metal Dog 2.

If you want to delve into Charlie and David’s odd and uncomfortable world, you’ve got to be quick – the folder containing Heavy Metal Dog 2 will, as Charlie tells us, “self-destruct” in a week, so grab it here.

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About the Author

Josh Baines

Josh Baines joined It's Nice That from July 2018 to July 2019 as News Editor, covering new high-profile projects, awards announcements, and everything else in between.

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