Burroughs's virology - mixed media, William Burroughs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

In a collaborative collage produc around 1965 by the agency of the writer William Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin, sum of two units sets of images--hieroglyphs and photographs--are unevenly distributed within a set free grid. Among the motifs composing the hieroglyphs are a sail, a bird, a snake and a seated figure, while the sum of two units photographs in the work depict the face of a West African and a strange hybrid generated through projecting a masklike visage onto the face of a man (perhaps Gysin himself).(1) This collage, untitled [Projection Performance/, is single of a series Gysin and Burrough created for 7he Third Mind, a volume of text and images which was prepared in the mid-'60s on the other hand only came to be published, in altered form, in 1978

In the course of his lengthy career, the 82-year-old Burroughs has undertaken numerous visual-art throws either collaboratively or independently. Many of these collages, paintings, drawings, scrapbooks and works in other mediums are included in "Ports of ingress William S. Burroughs and the Arts," a lively exhibition organized by dint of Robert A. Sobieszek for the beholds Angeles County Museum of Art. (The present to view is on view until Jan. 5 1997 at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.) Other external realitys in the exhibition explore Burroughs's impact upon contemporary art and culture. The visual-art composing of the show is augmented by means of an intelligent selection of Burroughs's audio and film experiments and collaborations.

Despite its unostentatious presence, untitled [Projection Performance] work fors as an apt introduction to the preoccupations which l a writer like Burrough known for the apocalyptic exigency and polymorphous sexuality of his body s to experiment seriously with visual art. As the couple author and artist, Burroughs exhibits an interest in the figurality of writing, a fascination with the material vicinity or "body" of the word which has gripped in the way that many avant-garde writers before him. (One thinks of Mallarme and Apollinaire, who understood words as visual uncompounded bodys whose placement on the page was a fundamental aspect of their poetic meaning.) by means of its very nature, the hieroglyph exemplifies Burroughs's effort to challenge classical narrative form through the application of visual or figural techniques: as Burrough insisted in an interview first published in 1969 "The investigation 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 the agency of Gysin. An English-born painter who died in 1986 Gysin was briefly associated with Surrealism in the 1930 and lived in Tangiers not upon and on for more than sum of two units decades after World War II. Although he knew Burrough slightly in Morocco, their shut friendship and productive collaborations upon collages and scrapbooks began single after they met again in 1958 in Paris. In his be in possession of painterly idiom of the '50 and '60 where vertical Japanese calligraphy was superimposed upon horizontal Arabic writing, Gysin had demonstrated that an image could be compos of various scripts.(3)

If the hieroglyphs in untitled [Projection Performance] indicate Burroughs's (and Gysin's) fascination with the relationship between image and true copy 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. completely through the mass media, Burroughs grasps such power contributes to the ability of images--and words--to exercise social control

Although this general exhibition, containing many works that display a certain formal clumsiness and naivete, does not show Burroughs to be a master of artistic technique, it certainly establishes him as an innovator whose experiments with true copy and image function not sole as compositional aids in his writing on the other hand as a coherent exploration of the characters photography plays in an advanced media agriculture For this reason, I consider the collages made by means of Gysin and Burroughs for The Third Mind, above 70 of which were newly acquired by LACMA, to be the conceptual core of the exhibition.

single of the most striking aspects of The Third Mind is the use of grids, generated by means of a printer's ink brayer specially modified for the design by Gysin, to simultaneously conjoin and disconnect an array of photographs. These rolled-on rugged grids provide an armature for greatest in quantity of the collages made for The Third Mind, on the contrary even in the absence of this explicit configuration 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, of recent origins fragments and text columns. similar methods are closely related to the famous "cut-up" strategy Burrough used for novels of the like kind as Naked Lunch. Originally discovered when Gysin "accidentally divide [i]or[/i] sever through some pages of the Herald Tribune and other newspapers and rearranged the various strips to create of recent origin and sometimes hilarious forms of textual collage," the cut-up subsequently became one as well as the other the compositional model for the collages and a means for Burrough to interlace discontinuous narrative incidents in his writing.(4)