In a collaborative collage produc around 1965 through the writer William Burroughs and the artist Brion Gysin.

In a collaborative collage produc around 1965 through 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 brace photographs in the work depict the face of a West African and a strange hybrid generated on projecting a masklike visage onto the face of a man (perhaps Gysin himself).(1) This collage, untitled [Projection Performance/, is individual of a series Gysin and Burrough created for 7he Third Mind, a part of text and images which was prepared in the mid-'60s moreover only came to be published, in altered form, in 1978

In the course of his in extent career, the 82-year-old Burroughs has undertaken numerous visual-art concocts either collaboratively or independently. Many of these collages, paintings, drawings, scrapbooks and works in other mediums are included in "Ports of minute William S. Burroughs and the Arts," a lively exhibition organized at Robert A. Sobieszek for the sees Angeles County Museum of Art. (The exhibit to is on view until Jan. 5 1997 at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas.) Other thing perceiveds in the exhibition explore Burroughs's impact onward 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 proper presence, untitled [Projection Performance] obeys as an apt introduction to the preoccupations which l a writer like Burrough known for the apocalyptic necessity and polymorphous sexuality of his themes to experiment seriously with visual art. As as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but author and artist, Burroughs exhibits an interest in the figurality of writing, a fascination with the material neighborhood or "body" of the word which has gripped for a like reason many avant-garde writers before him. (One thinks of Mallarme and Apollinaire, who understood words as visual vital airs whose placement on the page was a fundamental aspect of their poetic meaning.) through its very nature, the hieroglyph exemplifies Burroughs's effort to challenge classical narrative edifice through the application of visual or figural techniques: as Burrough insisted in an interview first published in 1969 "The close attention 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 on Gysin. An English-born painter who died in 1986 Gysin was briefly associated with Surrealism in the 1930 and lived in Tangiers against and on for more than couple decades after World War II. Although he knew Burrough slightly in Morocco, their conclude friendship and productive collaborations upon collages and scrapbooks began solitary after they met again in 1958 in Paris. In his allow painterly idiom of the '50 and '60 where vertical Japanese calligraphy was superimposed in succession 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 topic 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. from end to end the mass media, Burroughs keep possession ofs such power contributes to the ability of images--and words--to exercise social control

Although this circulating exhibition, containing many works that display a certain formal clumsiness and naivete, does not evidence Burroughs to be a master of artistic technique, it certainly establishes him as an innovator whose experiments with subject and image function not no other than as compositional aids in his writing nevertheless as a coherent exploration of the characters photography plays in an advanced media agriculture For this reason, I consider the collages made from Gysin and Burroughs for The Third Mind, athwart 70 of which were newly acquired by LACMA, to be the conceptual core of the exhibition.

individual of the most striking aspects of The Third Mind is the use of grids, generated by the agency of a printer's ink brayer specially modified for the intent by Gysin, to simultaneously conjoin and disconnect an array of photographs. These rolled-on jagged grids provide an armature for most numerous of the collages made for The Third Mind, on the other hand even in the absence of this explicit constitution 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, novels fragments and text columns. of that kind methods are closely related to the famous "cut-up" strategy Burrough used for novels as it was as Naked Lunch. Originally discovered when Gysin "accidentally chisel through some pages of the Herald Tribune and other newspapers and rearranged the various strips to create recent and sometimes hilarious forms of textual collage," the cut-up subsequently became the one and the other the compositional model for the collages and a means for Burrough to interlace discontinuous narrative issues in his writing.(4)