Download the iPhone App »

Participate online »

Brion Gysin was a subversive. Gay, stateless, polyglot, he had no family, no clique, no fixed profession, and often, no fixed address. He claimed no religion, and no credo, save that humans were put on this earth with the ultimate goal of leaving it. Working simultaneously with painting, drawing, collage, sound, literature, performance, and something more ineffable that can be called perception, he created a body of artwork that was wildly uneven, radically interdisciplinary, and virally influential.

Gysin has been called an “idea machine,” and he made pioneering discoveries in painting, poetry, sound, performance, and kinetic art over a period of less than a decade at the beginning of the 1960s that continue to have significance today. He was generous, almost carelessly so, with his innovations, investigating some—like the disentanglement of the symbol from its received meanings—for his entire artistic life—and gifting others, like the Cut-Up Method, to his friend the writer William S. Burroughs, who used it with inspiration in his most famous literary and visual arts efforts. Although painting and drawing were his first, and throughout his life, preferred, means of expression, Gysin wrote both prose and poetry as well as at least one screenplay, and performed and composed song lyrics. To him, the disciplines of painting, drawing, writing, and performance were equal as means of expression, if not interchangeable.

Gysin’s visual art production from 1958 until his death in 1986 can be divided chronologically and formally into four bodies of work, which include his calligraphic paintings and drawings; Permutations of words in written form, sound, and performance, which developed simultaneously with the practice of the closely related Cut-Up Method that culminated in The Third Mind, a book-length collage collaboration with William S. Burroughs; the Dreamachine, a work of kinetic art meant to be apprehended with closed eyes; and photo-based collage and montage created in the last decade of his life. Most of his works, though, integrate elements of more than one of these individual periods: calligraphic paintings in 1961, painted in the hot oranges and yellows familiar to Dreamachine users, also might include permutated poems; performances of permutated poems might include the projection of slides hand-painted with Gysin’s personal calligraphic mark; and photo-collages from the late 1970s feature Gysin’s signature grid pattern, applied by a roller the artist modified in 1961. Gysin was born in London in 1916, and spent his childhood in Edmondton, Alberta. At the age of eighteen, after English boarding school, he moved to Paris, a city to which he would return to for extended periods throughout his life. Spending the 1940s in New York City, he crossed paths with Surrealist artist exiles like Roberto Matta and Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock. In 1950, Gysin moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he spent almost a decade, painting, writing, running a restaurant, and listening to the incantatory music of the pipe players from the village of Jajouka.

This exhibition starts in 1958, when, at age forty-two, Gysin relocated to Paris and began a sustained period of discovery and artistic production. It was also the year that he moved into a cheap residence hotel on the Left Bank, at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, and became close friends with William S. Burroughs, who was living there along with other Beat generation literary lights like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Gysin’s four years at the so-called “Beat Hotel” would be the most productive of his entire career. All of Gysin’s subsequent work until his death from cancer in 1986 has its roots in the innovations of these years in Paris.

This reassessment of Gysin’s all-but-forgotten body of artwork is an exercise not only of recuperation into art history, but equally importantly, of recontextualization into the discourse of contemporary art. Twenty years after his death, the depths of his discoveries, and the strangeness of the journey that led to them, have found new significance among contemporary artists who are seeking multidisciplinary models of inquiry, and roadmaps out of the merely everyday and into a more metaphysical realm. The Dreamachine, with its promise to make all who use it visionaries, and the Cut-Up, a perfect visualization of the remixing and re-presentation of information on the Web, are as provocative and relevant as they were when they were created fifty years ago.

This exhibition is curated by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator.