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Burroughs's virology - mixed media, William Burroughs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
Art in America, Nov, 1996 by David Joselit
In a collaborative collage produced around 1965 by the writer William Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin, two sets of images--hieroglyphs and photographs--are unevenly distributed within a loose grid. Among the motifs composing the hieroglyphs are a sail, a bird, a snake and a seated figure, while the two photographs in the work depict the face of a West African and a strange hybrid generated by projecting a masklike visage onto the face of a man (perhaps Gysin himself).(1) This collage, untitled [Projection Performance/, is one of a series Gysin and Burroughs created for 7he Third Mind, a book of text and images which was prepared in the mid-'60s but only came to be published, in altered form, in 1978.
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In the course of his long career, the 82-year-old Burroughs has undertaken numerous visual-art projects, either collaboratively or independently. Many of these collages, paintings, drawings, scrapbooks and works in other mediums are included in "Ports of Entry William S. Burroughs and the Arts," a lively exhibition organized by Robert A. Sobieszek for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (The show is on view until Jan. 5, 1997, at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.) Other objects in the exhibition explore Burroughs's impact on contemporary art and culture. The visual-art component of the show is augmented by an intelligent selection of Burroughs's audio and film experiments and collaborations.
Despite its modest presence, untitled [Projection Performance] serves as an apt introduction to the preoccupations which led a writer like Burroughs, known for the apocalyptic urgency and polymorphous sexuality of his texts, to experiment seriously with visual art. As both author and artist, Burroughs exhibits an interest in the figurality of writing, a fascination with the material presence or "body" of the word which has gripped so many avant-garde writers before him. (One thinks of Mallarme and Apollinaire, who understood words as visual elements whose placement on the page was a fundamental aspect of their poetic meaning.) By its very nature, the hieroglyph exemplifies Burroughs's effort to challenge classical narrative structure through the application of visual or figural techniques: as Burroughs insisted in an interview first published in 1969, "The study of hieroglyphic languages shows us that a word is an image ... the written word is an image."(2) This fascination with the hieroglyphic was shared by Gysin. An English-born painter who died in 1986, Gysin was briefly associated with Surrealism in the 1930s and lived in Tangiers off and on for more than two decades after World War II. Although he knew Burroughs slightly in Morocco, their close friendship and productive collaborations on collages and scrapbooks began only after they met again in 1958 in Paris. In his own painterly idiom of the '50s and '60s, where vertical Japanese calligraphy was superimposed on horizontal Arabic writing, Gysin had demonstrated that an image could be composed of various scripts.(3)
If the hieroglyphs in untitled [Projection Performance] indicate Burroughs's (and Gysin's) fascination with the relationship between image and text, the two photographs in the collage, an unmanipulated and a manipulated "portrait," indicate a preoccupation with the capacity of images to mutate and replicate like viruses within the "social body." This ability to endlessly replicate is, in Burroughs's view, an instance of the falsifying power of images. Throughout the mass media, Burroughs holds, such power contributes to the ability of images--and words--to exercise social control.
Although this current exhibition, containing many works that display a certain formal clumsiness and naivete, does not prove Burroughs to be a master of artistic technique, it certainly establishes him as an innovator whose experiments with text and image function not only as compositional aids in his writing but as a coherent exploration of the roles photography plays in an advanced media culture. For this reason, I consider the collages made by Gysin and Burroughs for The Third Mind, over 70 of which were recently acquired by LACMA, to be the conceptual core of the exhibition.
One of the most striking aspects of The Third Mind is the use of grids, generated by a printer's ink brayer specially modified for the purpose by Gysin, to simultaneously conjoin and disconnect an array of photographs. These rolled-on, uneven grids provide an armature for most of the collages made for The Third Mind, but even in the absence of this explicit structure, Burroughs and Gysin found ways of approximating grids. They sometimes resorted to graph paper or, in their collaborative scrapbooks, retained the rectilinearity of original photographs, news fragments and text columns. Such methods are closely related to the famous "cut-up" strategy Burroughs used for novels such as Naked Lunch. Originally discovered when Gysin "accidentally cut through some pages of the Herald Tribune and other newspapers ... and rearranged the various strips to create new and sometimes hilarious forms of textual collage," the cut-up subsequently became both the compositional model for the collages and a means for Burroughs to interlace discontinuous narrative events in his writing.(4)
