Brion Gysin
Encyclopedia
Brion Gysin was a painter
, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow
, Buckinghamshire
.
He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique
, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs
. With the engineer Ian Sommerville
he invented the Dreamachine
, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "grass" script
and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton
, Alberta
where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Graduating at fifteen, Gysin was sent to Downside School
in Stratton-on-the-Fosse
, near Bath, Somerset
in England, a prestigious college known as "the Eton of Catholic public schools" run by the Benedictines.
where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst
's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began frequenting Valentine Hugo
, Leonor Fini
, Salvador Dalí
, Picasso and Dora Maar
. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer
, Victor Brauner
, Giorgio de Chirico
, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp
, René Magritte
, Man Ray
and Yves Tanguy
. On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton
who ordered the poet Paul Éluard
to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world. He gave various explanations for the expulsion, the more elaborate involving 'insubordination' or lèse majesté towards Breton".
titled, To Master, a Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946). A gifted draughtsman, he took an 18-month course learning the Japanese language (including calligraphy) that would greatly influence his artwork. In 1949, he was among the first Fulbright Fellows. His goal: to research the history of slavery at the University of Bordeaux and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain, a project that he later abandoned. He moved to Tangier
, Morocco after visiting the city with novelist and composer Paul Bowles
in 1950.
, who was the cook. Gysin hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the village of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientèle that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958, and the restaurant closed permanently. That same year, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that would become famous as the Beat Hotel
. Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada
technique by accident:
When Burroughs returned from London in September 1959, Gysin not only shared his discovery with his friend but the new techniques he had developed for it. Burroughs then put the techniques to use while completing Naked Lunch
and the experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American literature
. Gysin helped Burroughs with the editing of several of his novels including Interzone
, and wrote a script for a film version of Naked Lunch which was never produced. The pair collaborated on a large manuscript for Grove Press
titled The Third Mind
but it was determined that it would be impractical to publish it as originally envisioned. The book later published under that title incorporates little of this material. Interviewed for The Guardian
in 1997, Burroughs explained that Gysin was "the only man that I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected." In 1969, Gysin completed his finest novel, The Process
, a work judged by critic Robert Palmer as "a classic of 20th century modernism".
A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase was repeated several times with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. An example of this is "I don't dig work, man/Man, work I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville
. Commissioned by the BBC
in 1960 to produce material for broadcast, Gysin's results included "Pistol Poem", which was created by recording a gun firing at different distances and then splicing the sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme for the Paris performance of Le Domaine Poetique, a showcase for experimental works by people like Gysin, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck
, and Henri Chopin
.
With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine
in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", the flicker device uses alpha waves
in the 8-16 Hz
range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.
soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy
.
He recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring himself singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Don Cherry
, Elli Medeiros
, Steve Lacy
, Lizzy Mercier Descloux
and more. The album was reissued on CD in 1993 by Crammed Discs
, under the title Self-Portrait Jumping.
As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana
fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas
; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies.
A heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously in 1986 by Faber & Faber (London) and by Grove Press
(New York).
Made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
in 1985, Gysin died a year later of lung cancer
on July 13, 1986. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times
fittingly described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks".
, as well as for their successors (among them David Bowie
, Mick Jagger
, Keith Haring
, and Laurie Anderson
)". Other artists include Genesis P-Orridge
, and Brian Jones
.
, and Terry Wilson with contributions by Marianne Faithfull
, John Cale
, William S. Burroughs, John Giorno
, Stanley Booth
, Bill Laswell
, Mohamed Hamri
, Keith Haring
and Paul Bowles
. A monograph on Gysin was published in 2003 by Thames and Hudson.
Radio
Cinema
Music
Painting
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow
Taplow
Taplow is a village and civil parish within South Bucks district in Buckinghamshire, England. It sits on the east bank of the River Thames facing Maidenhead on the opposite bank. Taplow railway station is situated near the A4 south of the village....
, Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
.
He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique
Cut-up technique
The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing....
, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
. With the engineer Ian Sommerville
Ian Sommerville (technician)
Ian Sommerville was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called "Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and...
he invented the Dreamachine
Dreamachine
The dreamachine is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain.-History:In the dreamachine's original form, a...
, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "grass" script
Japanese calligraphy
is a form of calligraphy, or artistic writing, of the Japanese language. For a long time, the most esteemed calligrapher in Japan had been Wang Xizhi, a Chinese calligrapher in the 4th century but after the invention of Hiragana and Katakana, the Japanese unique syllabaries, the distinctive...
and Arabic script. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
Early years
John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at Taplow House, England, a Canadian military hospital. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, OntarioDeseronto, Ontario
Deseronto is a town in the Canadian province of Ontario, in Hastings County, located on the shore of the Bay of Quinte. The town had a population of 1,824 in the Canada 2006 Census.The town was named for Capt...
. His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force
Canadian Expeditionary Force
The Canadian Expeditionary Force was the designation of the field force created by Canada for service overseas in the First World War. Units of the C.E.F. were divided into field formation in France, where they were organized first into separate divisions and later joined together into a single...
, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton
Edmonton
Edmonton is the capital of the Canadian province of Alberta and is the province's second-largest city. Edmonton is located on the North Saskatchewan River and is the centre of the Edmonton Capital Region, which is surrounded by the central region of the province.The city and its census...
, Alberta
Alberta
Alberta is a province of Canada. It had an estimated population of 3.7 million in 2010 making it the most populous of Canada's three prairie provinces...
where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Graduating at fifteen, Gysin was sent to Downside School
Downside School
Downside School is a co-educational Catholic independent school for children aged 11 to 18, located in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, between Norton Radstock and Shepton Mallet in Somerset, south west England. It is attached to Downside Abbey...
in Stratton-on-the-Fosse
Stratton-on-the-Fosse
Stratton-on-the-Fosse is a village and civil parish located on the edge of the Mendip Hills, south-west of Westfield, north-east of Shepton Mallet, and from Frome, in Somerset, England. It has a population 1,045, and has a rural agricultural landscape, although it was part of the once-thriving...
, near Bath, Somerset
Somerset
The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...
in England, a prestigious college known as "the Eton of Catholic public schools" run by the Benedictines.
Surrealism
In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the SorbonneSorbonne
The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...
where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began frequenting Valentine Hugo
Valentine Hugo
Valentine Hugo was an artist; she was born Valentine Gross in Boulogne-sur-Mer and died in Paris.Valentine studied painting in Paris, and in 1919 married French artist Jean Hugo , great-grandson of Victor Hugo...
, Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini
Leonor Fini was an Argentine surrealist painter.-Life and work:Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was raised in Trieste, Italy. She moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932...
, Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, Picasso and Dora Maar
Dora Maar
Dora Maar was a French photographer, poet and painter, best known for being a lover and muse of Pablo Picasso.-Life:...
. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer
Hans Bellmer was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.-Biography:...
, Victor Brauner
Victor Brauner
Victor Brauner was a Romanian Jewish painter of surrealistic images.-Early life:He was born in Piatra Neamţ, the son of a timber manufacturer who subsequently settled in Vienna with his family for a few years. It is there that young Victor attended elementary school...
, Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, René Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...
, Man Ray
Man Ray
Man Ray , born Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. Perhaps best described simply as a modernist, he was a significant contributor to both the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal...
and Yves Tanguy
Yves Tanguy
Raymond Georges Yves Tanguy , known as Yves Tanguy, was a French surrealist painter.-Biography:Tanguy was born in Paris, France, the son of a retired navy captain. His parents were both of Breton origin...
. On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
who ordered the poet Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world. He gave various explanations for the expulsion, the more elaborate involving 'insubordination' or lèse majesté towards Breton".
After World War II
After serving in the U.S. army during World War II, Gysin published a biography of Josiah "Uncle Tom" HensonJosiah Henson
Josiah Henson was an author, abolitionist, and minister. Born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland, he escaped to Ontario, Canada in 1830, and founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, near Dresden in Kent County...
titled, To Master, a Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946). A gifted draughtsman, he took an 18-month course learning the Japanese language (including calligraphy) that would greatly influence his artwork. In 1949, he was among the first Fulbright Fellows. His goal: to research the history of slavery at the University of Bordeaux and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain, a project that he later abandoned. He moved to Tangier
Tangier
Tangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...
, Morocco after visiting the city with novelist and composer Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
in 1950.
Morocco and the Beat Hotel
In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called The 1001 Nights, with his friend Mohamed HamriMohamed Hamri
Mohamed Hamri , commonly known as Hamri, was a self-described Painter of Morocco. He was a Moroccan painter and author and one of the few Moroccans to participate in the Tangier Beat scene....
, who was the cook. Gysin hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka from the village of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientèle that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958, and the restaurant closed permanently. That same year, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that would become famous as the Beat Hotel
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century -Overview:...
. Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada
Dada
Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I and peaked from 1916 to 1922. The movement primarily involved visual arts, literature—poetry, art manifestoes, art theory—theatre, and graphic design, and concentrated its anti-war politics through a...
technique by accident:
William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room No. 15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958... Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another, than occupied with editing the monster manuscript... Naked LunchNaked LunchNaked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
appeared and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked his habit with apomorphine and flew off to London to see Dr Dent, who had first turned him on to the cure. While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters' techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups" in Minutes to Go (Two Cities, Paris 1960).
When Burroughs returned from London in September 1959, Gysin not only shared his discovery with his friend but the new techniques he had developed for it. Burroughs then put the techniques to use while completing Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
and the experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American literature
American literature
American literature is the written or literary work produced in the area of the United States and its preceding colonies. For more specific discussions of poetry and theater, see Poetry of the United States and Theater in the United States. During its early history, America was a series of British...
. Gysin helped Burroughs with the editing of several of his novels including Interzone
Interzone
Interzone may refer to:* International zone, such as in Tangiers* Interzone , the title of a short story collection by William Burroughs; it is also a setting in his 1959 novel Naked Lunch...
, and wrote a script for a film version of Naked Lunch which was never produced. The pair collaborated on a large manuscript for Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
titled The Third Mind
The Third Mind
The Third Mind is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs and artist/poet/novelist Brion Gysin. First published in a French-language edition in 1977, it was first published in English in 1978....
but it was determined that it would be impractical to publish it as originally envisioned. The book later published under that title incorporates little of this material. Interviewed for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
in 1997, Burroughs explained that Gysin was "the only man that I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected." In 1969, Gysin completed his finest novel, The Process
The Process (novel)
The Process is a novel by Brion Gysin which was published in 1969. Gysin was a painter and composer, and also collaborated with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs on many occasions...
, a work judged by critic Robert Palmer as "a classic of 20th century modernism".
A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase was repeated several times with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. An example of this is "I don't dig work, man/Man, work I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville
Ian Sommerville (technician)
Ian Sommerville was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called "Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and...
. Commissioned by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
in 1960 to produce material for broadcast, Gysin's results included "Pistol Poem", which was created by recording a gun firing at different distances and then splicing the sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme for the Paris performance of Le Domaine Poetique, a showcase for experimental works by people like Gysin, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck
Bernard Heidsieck
Bernard Heidsieck is a French sound poet.He is the former vice-president of the Banque Française du Commerce Extérieur in Paris and former president of the Commission Poésie at the Centre National du Livre....
, and Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin
Henri Chopin was an avant-garde poet and musician.-Life:Henri Chopin was a French practitioner of concrete and sound poet, well-known throughout the second half of the 20th century...
.
With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine
Dreamachine
The dreamachine is a stroboscopic flicker device that produces visual stimuli. Artist Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs's "systems adviser" Ian Sommerville created the dreamachine after reading William Grey Walter's book, The Living Brain.-History:In the dreamachine's original form, a...
in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", the flicker device uses alpha waves
Alpha Waves
Alpha Waves is an early 3D game that combines labyrinthine exploration with platform gameplay. By most definitions of the genre it could be considered to be the first 3D platform game, released in 1990, 6 years before the genre's seminal classic Super Mario 64...
in the 8-16 Hz
Hertz
The hertz is the SI unit of frequency defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon. One of its most common uses is the description of the sine wave, particularly those used in radio and audio applications....
range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.
Later years
He also worked extensively with noted jazzJazz
Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy , born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone....
.
He recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring himself singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Don Cherry
Don Cherry (jazz)
Donald Eugene Cherry was an innovative African-American jazz cornetist whose career began with a long association with saxophonist Ornette Coleman. He went on to live in many parts of the world and work with a wide variety of musicians.-Biography:Cherry was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and...
, Elli Medeiros
Elli Medeiros
Elli Medeiros is a singer and actress .- The Stinky Toys :Medeiros moved to Paris, France, at the age of 14, dropped out of high school a couple of years later and joined the punk band The Stinky Toys....
, Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy
Steve Lacy , born Steven Norman Lackritz in New York City, was a jazz saxophonist and composer recognized as one of the important players of soprano saxophone....
, Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Lizzy Mercier Descloux
Lizzy Mercier Descloux was a French singer and musician, a pioneer in the worldbeat genre, as well as a writer and painter....
and more. The album was reissued on CD in 1993 by Crammed Discs
Crammed Discs
Crammed Discs is an independent record label whose output blends world music, rock, pop, and electronica. Based in Brussels, Belgium, Crammed was founded in 1980 by Marc Hollander of Aksak Maboul and has since released over 300 albums and 250 singles, working with artists from all over the world...
, under the title Self-Portrait Jumping.
As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana
Cannabis (drug)
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among many other names, refers to any number of preparations of the Cannabis plant intended for use as a psychoactive drug or for medicinal purposes. The English term marijuana comes from the Mexican Spanish word marihuana...
fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas
Alice B. Toklas was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century.-Early life, relationship with Gertrude Stein:...
; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies.
A heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously in 1986 by Faber & Faber (London) and by Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its...
(New York).
Made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres is an Order of France, established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture, and confirmed as part of the Ordre national du Mérite by President Charles de Gaulle in 1963...
in 1985, Gysin died a year later of lung cancer
Lung cancer
Lung cancer is a disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth in tissues of the lung. If left untreated, this growth can spread beyond the lung in a process called metastasis into nearby tissue and, eventually, into other parts of the body. Most cancers that start in lung, known as primary...
on July 13, 1986. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
fittingly described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks".
Burroughs on the Gysin cut-up
In a 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker for The Paris Review, William S. Burroughs explained that Brion Gysin was, to his knowledge, "the first to create cut-ups".
INTERVIEWER: How did you become interested in the cut-up technique?
BURROUGHS: A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by the BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste LandThe Waste LandThe Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in 'The Camera Eye' sequences in USAU.S.A. trilogyThe U.S.A. Trilogy is a major work of American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel ; 1919, also known as Nineteen Nineteen ; and The Big Money . The three books were first published together in a single volume titled U.S.A by Harcourt Brace in January, 1938...
. I felt I had been working toward the same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done.
Influence
According to José Férez Kuri, author of Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age (2003) and co-curator of a major retrospective of the artist's work at The Edmonton Art Gallery in 1998, Gysin's wide range of "radical ideas would become a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat GenerationBeat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
, as well as for their successors (among them David Bowie
David Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
, Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger is an English musician, singer and songwriter, best known as the lead vocalist and a founding member of The Rolling Stones....
, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
, and Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson is an American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s...
)". Other artists include Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
, and Brian Jones
Brian Jones
Lewis Brian Hopkins Jones , known as Brian Jones, was an English musician and a founding member of the Rolling Stones....
.
Quotes
-
- "Writing is fifty years behind painting."
-
- "I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career."
-
- "I view life as a fortuitous collaboration ascribable to the fact that one finds oneself at the right place at the same time.
-
- "The Way Is Nor This Nor That."
-
- "Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?"
-
- - 'Cut-Ups Self-Explained' in Brion Gysin Let the Mice In
-
- "I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am."
-
- - Notes on Painting
-
- "He covered tons of paper with his words and made them his very own words... he branded them like cattle he rustled out there on the free ranges of Literature... Used by another writer who was attempting cut-ups, one single word of Burroughs vocabulary could ruin a whole barrel of good everyday words, run the literary rot right through them. One sniff of that prose and you'd say, 'Why, that's a Burroughs.' "
-
- - on the prose of William S. Burroughs in Here to Go: Planet R-101 (Interviews with Terry Wilson)
-
- "Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!"
-
- - The Process
-
- "Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up."
-
- - Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success
-
- "I Am the Artist when I am Open. When I am closed I am Brion Gysin."
Selected bibliography
Gysin is the subject of John Geiger's biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, and features in Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, also by Geiger. Man From Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, a biographical study of Burroughs and Gysin with a collection of homages to Gysin, was authored by Joe Ambrose, Frank RynneFrank Rynne
Frank Rynne is an Irish-born singer, record producer, art curator, film-maker, writer, and historian. He has played in three bands Those Handsome Devils in 1984, The Baby Snakes and Islamic Diggers . He has produced three CDs of Moroccan folk music by the Master Musicians of Joujouka...
, and Terry Wilson with contributions by Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Evelyn Faithfull is an award-winning English singer, songwriter and actress whose career has spanned five decades....
, John Cale
John Cale
John Davies Cale, OBE is a Welsh musician, composer, singer-songwriter and record producer who was a founding member of the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground....
, William S. Burroughs, John Giorno
John Giorno
John Giorno is an American poet and performance artist. He founded the not-for-profit production company Giorno Poetry Systems and organized a number of early multimedia poetry experiments and events, including Dial-A-Poem. He became prominent as the subject of Andy Warhol's film Sleep...
, Stanley Booth
Stanley Booth
Stanley Booth is an American music journalist. Booth has written extensively about important music figures, including Keith Richards, Otis Redding, Janis Joplin, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Gram Parsons, B.B. King, and Al Green...
, Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell
Bill Laswell is an American bassist, producer and record label owner....
, Mohamed Hamri
Mohamed Hamri
Mohamed Hamri , commonly known as Hamri, was a self-described Painter of Morocco. He was a Moroccan painter and author and one of the few Moroccans to participate in the Tangier Beat scene....
, Keith Haring
Keith Haring
Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s.-Early life:...
and Paul Bowles
Paul Bowles
Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator.Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris...
. A monograph on Gysin was published in 2003 by Thames and Hudson.
Works
Prose- To Master, A Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946)
- Minutes to Go (1960)
- The Exterminator (1960)
- The ProcessThe Process (novel)The Process is a novel by Brion Gysin which was published in 1969. Gysin was a painter and composer, and also collaborated with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs on many occasions...
(1969) - Brion Gysin Let The Mice In (1973)
- The Third Mind (1978)
- Here To Go: Planet R-101 (first published 1982)
- Stories (1984)
- The Last Museum (1985)
Radio
- Pistol Poem (1960)
- Permutations (1960)
- I Am (1960)
- No Poets (1962)
- Junk is No Good Baby (1962)
Cinema
- Scenario to Naked LunchNaked LunchNaked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959. The book is structured as a series of loosely-connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order...
(1973)
Music
- Junk (1985)
- Self-Portrait Jumping(with Ramuntcho Matta, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy) (1993)
Painting
- Les deux faux interlocuteurs, Gradiva Rediviva Zoe Bertgang, and Signe dans le paysage (Surrealist ink drawings, 1935)
- Sahara Sand (1958)
- The Songs of Marrakech (1959)
- Unit II pink, Unit III yellow, Unit IV orange, Unit V blue (1961)
- Francis in the Beat Hotel (1962)
- For a Stained-Glass Window in Rheims (1963)
- Roller Poem (1971)
- Calligraffiti of Fire (1986)
External links
- UBU Sound Article on Brion Gysin
- Extrageographic Magazine article What Does Brion Gysin's Art Mean?
- Cutup The Burroughs & Gysin Non-Linear Adding Machine
- The Master Musicians of Jajouka led by Bachir Attar Official website
- Master Musicians of Joujouka Official website
- Village Voice Review of Back in No Time: A Brion Gysin Reader (2001)
- Perilous Passages Terry Wilson's account of his "lifetime apprenticeship" with Brion Gysin
- William Burroughs's letter on Gysin and Jajouka
- Interzone documentation on the Dream Machine and free Dream Machine plans
- Official website of FLicKeR a film on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine based on Geiger's book
- The Third Mind at Le Palais de Tokyo by Joseph NechvatalJoseph NechvatalJoseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual art digital artist and art theoretician who creates computer-assisted paintings and computer animations, often using custom-created computer viruses.-Life and work:Joseph Nechvatal was born in Chicago...
- A page on the Self-Portrait Jumping album, including audio excerpts
- Authentic Dreamachines
- Brion Gysin Tribute