Un Millennial from the short century
More than a century has passed since the birth of one of the most influential, controversial and iconic writers of the short century: William S. Burroughs. Given the freshness of his work, one would give him 25 years. A Millennial which, however, comes from the short century and its cultural and costume revolutions.
The great writer and artist of the beat generation was one of the most exaggerated experimenters and multimedia artists of the twentieth century. His search for new modes of expression has been relentless, far beyond paranoia. He has left an indelible mark on the formation of contemporary culture so much so that today the greatest expression of contemporaneity, the web, could only simply collect and complete.
In fact, the dominant artistic and expressive mode of the web is the mash-up, a blend of visual, textual and iconic materials, with not always logical links between them. Something more than a technique that the great writer had experimented with the media and tools available at his time.
Cursed artist, restless writer, with a life lived in the name of unbridledness and freedom of passions, Burroughs has developed a type of all-encompassing creative thinking, In which life e artthey are inextricably related, so strongly that they crush each other.
Precisely from this vision of indissolubility between art and life, the generation beat to which he belongs and of which he is rightly considered one of the fathers and tutelary deities, in fact takes up the surrealist collage technique where the images are not prescriptive or realistic, but work for assonances of the soul, evocative e alienating, and operate ungovernable advances or retreats on the space-time line similar to what happens in Naked meal, whose chapters <br> Beds in any order and the book seems to work too abandoning our reader code”left-right-up-down” to dive into the kaleidoscope of images.
What does Burroughs have to do with photography?
ÒIn addition to being one of the most influential, controversial and iconic writers of the short century, Burroughs was a photographer and a visual artist who was also honored by an exhibition set up in London, in 2014, for the centenary of his birth.
One of the photos exhibited at the time portrays Burroughs with an intense and at the same time bewildered gaze while, for a moment, lowering the camera, he looks beyond whoever is immortalizing him, beyond the frame of the photo, beyond that day flooded with light in a garden of Tangier
Burroughs' overland journey begins as the son of a wealthy Saint Louis family, whose progenitor was the inventor of a mechanical calculating machine. On closer inspection, his eccentric photographic collages perhaps also come a little from there, from the eagerness to add, shot after shot, points of view that the eyes clouded by drugs were no longer able to see, but the lens of the camera could . He writes about it, Burroughs himself:
Walk through a city block with a camera and record what you notice, moving the camera as close to the direction of your eyes as possible. The point is to make the camera your eyes and to photograph what they can capture of the overall picture. At the same time, he takes wide-angle images of the street from a series of fixed positions. The road of the operator is, of course, the road as seen by the operator. It is different from the road seen from a wide angle. In fact, much is lost [...] In this way one destroys one's automatic visual patterns. (from taking Shots. The Photography of William S. Burroughs, edited by Patricia Allmer and John Sears, Prestel, Munich London-New York 2014, p. 30)
It is clear that photography and photographic collage are not for Burroughs just a side dish to the main course of writing, but a means with autonomous expressive dignity, which comes from the literature of the avant-gardes and which falls within the great river of literature, giving meaning to the method of cut-up of BrionGysin, which he uses as a shamanic compositional technique, in a state of lysergic trance.
The beat generation to which he belongs and of which he is rightly considered one of the fathers and tutelary deities, in fact takes up the surrealist matrix collage technique in which the images are not prescriptive or realistic, but work by assonances of the soul, evocative and alienating, and operate ungovernable advances or retreats on the space-time line similar to what happens in Naked meal, whose chapters can be read in any order and the book seems to work even by abandoning our "left-right-up-down" reader code to dive into the kaleidoscope of images.
To the mash-up
His intent, however, was not in the least artistic. While knowing Robert's work Rauschenberg, that ofassemblyhad made an innovative use, Burroughs' images are yet another method of traveling in multiple dimensions: “The photocollage it is a means that must be used with skill and precision, if we want to reach our destination.” (p. 23)
David Cronenberg himself, when he first had the courage to attempt a film adaptation of the book in the film NakedLunch , 1991, ended up treading his hand on these space-time leaps, mixing scenes from the book with facts from the writer's life and thus adding another level, this time personal and therefore external to Burroughs' visions, to tell the mechanism of writing
The 2014 exhibition included photographs and collages, portraits and self-portraits, images of museums, rooms, corridors, hotel rooms, cinema screens, urban environments, sometimes interspersed with cut-out images from books, magazines or advertisements, which Burroughs spontaneously embraced in his archive as if they were emanations of his creativity.
As told by the curators in the introduction to the excellent catalog published by Prestel, Burroughs clipped, without any preference, any newspaper that passed his hands: from the "Saturday EveningPost" to "Time", to literature magazines of various kinds.
At the same time, he retyped texts, for example by Rimbaud or Shakespeare and, cutting them up and rearranging them the order, waited for them to generate new images and authentically poetic visions, since they came from the great literary tradition. He also began to follow precise cutting methods, almost following imaginary mandalas, which increased the sense of writing by following invisible hyperbole.
These works by the visionary writer remained unknown to photography enthusiasts and scholars until the 1982s, when Burroughs became a legendary figure for his generation and for those to come, and this secret production was exhibited in 2 at the BXNUMX gallery in London.
As it is easy to imagine, Burroughs did not usually date or classify his images in any way, arranging and using them according to his momentary inspiration and juxtaposing photos of past and present boyfriends, photos of his family members in various stages of their life and rephotographing them, almost as if to stare at an eternal naked meal, defined by Jack Kerouac as that moment in which you see the dishes crystallized and motionless that the guests of a dinner have slipped on the tip of their fork
The computer art by Burroughs
The most disturbing images of this intriguing body of photography are certainly the series based on the process of A small abyss, made on mini photographic sets, produced in collaboration with Ian summerville. The latter, an unknown computer technician, became one of Burroughs' many lovers, and around 1960 programmed a random sequence generator used by Gysin for his technique of cut-up. Later, always with Gysin, Burroughs worked on the Dreamachine, a machine for influencing the alpha waves of the brain thus producing images in it, while keeping the eyes closed.
Here's how Burroughs describes this technique:
In my spare time I did a little experiment with collage. Make a collage of photographs, drawings, newspapers, etc. Now make a photo of this collage. Now make a collage of the pictures. Photograph — cut — photograph — cut, got it? (p. 59).
A collage to the nth degree, a stretching of the mind and of the vision: the process of implementation abyss literally "put into the abyss", it is perhaps one of the greatest moments of visual wonder, when one places oneself between two mirrors and sees one's own image that multiplies to infinity, giving shape to an abyss.
The photos of these mini-sets tear apart time, catapulting us into the existential abyss of minds that no longer exist, of vanished moments, stolen from the flow of creative time in a vertigo that makes present and tangible what is irretrievably lost, naked lunch, where the space-time continuum short-circuits and the mind can see with infinite clarity a moment that lasts forever.
End of first part Image on the cover: William Burroughs in Tangier portrayed by his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin inside a construction site that is forbidden to the public, in which it is forbidden to stop or smoke.
