William S. Burroughs, Bunker, New York, May 1981. Foto: © Ulrich Hillebrand.

William S. Burroughs, Untitled (shotgun blast), 1992, © Estate of William S. Burroughs, Foto: ONUK.

William S. Burroughs im Pariser Hotel Montalembert kurz vor der Abreise nach Rom, Mai 1989. Bildreproduktion, Foto: Udo Breger, VG-Bildkunst.

Ausstellungsplakat William S Burroughs – Retrospektive.

Diechtiorhallen Hamburg
Falckenberg Collection
Hamburg-Harburg
Deichtorstrasse 1-2
+ 49 (0)40 32103-0
Hamburg
William S.Burroughs. Retrospective
March 16, 2012-August 18,2013

Works such as Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine made William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) world famous as an author of the Beat generation. As a leading countercultural figure who played a prominent role in the Punk movement down through the decades Burroughs influenced innumerable artists, filmmakers, and musicians, including David Cronenberg, Gus van Sant, Patti Smith, John Cage, Lou Reed, David Bowie, R.E.M., and Kurt Cobain. Numerous bands chose names and song titles from Burroughs’ works, and The Beatles immortalized him on the legendary cover of their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

By contrast, far less well known is the fact that as a multi-media artist Burroughs also produced an extensive, diverse body of work that no less experiments with audio tapes, film and photography, than it does with painting and collages. The extensive exhibition in the Falckenberg Collection – Deichtorhallen Hamburg, which is being organized in collaboration with the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe and the William S. Burroughs Estate, presents the author’s artistic oeuvre, examines the multiple affiliations between literary and experimental / creative output image production, and further expands our image of his oeuvre by presenting “collaborations” Burroughs undertook with other artists. Another highly interesting aspect of the exhibition is the inclusion of a series of works by contemporary international artists, who each make unambiguous reference to Burroughs’ writings and his method of “expanded media” and thus personally explore the creative potential from a present-day perspective.

The exhibition’s aim is to make William S. Burroughs retrospectively tangible as a phenomenon and legend, and at the same time for the first time in Europe to emphatically highlight the impact his ideas had on a worldwide network of authors, musicians and composers, painters, photographers, video artists, and filmmakers. At the beginning of the 21st century Burroughs is more than ever regarded as a pioneer of media art — especially on account of the experiments he conducted in the 1960s with painter, author, and inventor Brion Gysin, mathematician Ian Sommerville, and filmmaker Antony Balch,.

The exhibition showcases the poignant stages and encounters in the life of William S. Burroughs, with handwritten, typed, photo, audio and film documents that in some cases are seldom accessible. The creative oeuvre is documented in the form of more than 150 original exhibits, which to a large extent are on loan from the Estate of William S. Burroughs (in Lawrence, Kansas) managed by James Grauerholz, together with additional loans from public and private collections. Viewers thus get an impressive sense of Burroughs’ pictorial output and how it represents an original contribution to contemporary American art.

The exhibition also features works which, in the spirit of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s joint project The Third Mind, were created in association with outstanding artists, namely Robert auschenberg, Keith Haring, George Condo, Robert Wilson, Francesco Clemente, Philip Taaffe, John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith, and others.

Publication On the occasion of the exhibition at the ZKM Karlsruhe and Deichtorhallen Hamburg a book with an essay by Ian MacFadyen will be published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König. Edited by Axel Heil. 24 Euro.

Peter Hujar: William Burroughs, reclining, 1975. Courtesy The Peter Hujar Archive and Matthew Marks Gallery. Foto: ONUK.

William S. Burroughs in einem Hotel in Rom, Mai 1989 Bildreproduktion, Foto: Udo Breger, VG-Bildkunst.

Gehstock von William S. Burroughs, Rom, Mai 1989. Bildreproduktion, Foto: Udo Breger, VG-Bildkunst.

William S. Burroughs, Untitled, Januar, 1988 © Estate of William S. Burroughs, Foto: ONUK

Brion Gysin and WSB in front of the Pharmaceutical Museum, Basel, 1979. Foto: © Ulrich Hillebrand.

William S. Burroughs zu Besuch bei Brion Gysin, Paris, Oktober 1979. Bildreproduktion, Foto: Udo Breger, VG-Bildkunst.

William S. Burroughs, Helpless Pieces in the Game He Plays, 1989, © Estate of William S. Burroughs, Foto: ONUK.

William S. Burroughs, 45 Long Colt 5 Shots, 1992, Mugrabi Collection, © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Danger, Paris 1959, The Barry Miles Archive.

William S. Burroughs, Collage, 1964, The Barry Miles Archive © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

William S. Burroughs, The Curse of Bast, 1987, Collection of Andrew Renton, London; photo by Ivan Dalla Tana © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

Kunsthalle Vienna
Museumsplatz 1
+ 43-1-52189-33
Vienna
Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs:
The Art of William S. Burroughs
June 15-October 21, 2012

"He’s up there with the Pope."

— Patti Smith

Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs: The Art of William S. Burroughs represents a themed selection of Burroughs’ work in a variety of media. It ranges from cut-up soundworks, visual collages and abstract shotgun paintings to rare books, documentary films, many rare photographs and ephemera. William Burroughs’ work is hard to define as an artist and he offers numerous ways to read and understand his large body of creative work. Particular emphasis is on the collage and cut-up techniques used by Burroughs as an important and influential part of his artistic language and legacy. His early collage experiments and the possibilities they imply have had a wide-ranging impact on the use of tape-collage and lyric forms by artists such as The Beatles, Frank Zappa, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Brian Eno, Patti Smith, Laurie Anderson, and Sonic Youth among many others as well as the technique of digital sampling. Burroughs opened up new methods of writing and creating soundworks inviting a variety of possibilities for future artists. He was central to the Beats with their free-thinking redefinition of the American way of life and made cut-up tapes and audio assemblages before multi-track, sound collage became a veritable mode of artistic expression. The exhibition will showcase many works that have rarely been exhibited and aims to offer new insights into a layered, complex, artistic process and mind.

William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at Harvard University where he graduated in 1936 and briefly attended medical school in Vienna, and later the Harvard graduate school of anthropology. In the 1940s he met a group from Columbia University that included Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Together with other figures such as Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, this group is recogniszed as the core of the Beat movement. He moved to Mexico City in 1947 and, apart from a few brief periods, lived abroad, in Tangier, Paris and London, until 1974. Naked Lunch was published in Paris 1959 and established him as a major literary figure. He made his first cut-up tapes and collages in 1960 and became a well-known figure in the underground scene of the 1960s and 1970s.

A catalogue will be published, both in German and English and will include essays by well known, international cultural historians like Barry Miles and Jon Savage including an in-depth interview with Barry Miles by Colin Fallows.

The exhibition is curated by Colin Fallows and Synne Genzmer.

Exhibition Catalogue Ed. KUNSTHALLE wien, Colin Fallows, Synne Genzmer; with texts by Colin Fallows, Synne Genzmer, Barry Miles, Jon Savage as well as the first and the last interview with William S. Burroughs conducted by Allen Ginsberg and Lee Ranaldo respectively; app. 288 pages; app. 160 colour images; German /English; Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg.

William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Untitled (p. 155), circa 1965, Los Angeles County Museum © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Untitled (p. 157), circa 1965, Los Angeles County Museum © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Untitled (p. 130), circa 1965, Los Angeles County Museum © Estate of William S. Burroughs.

Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, Institut Français, Paris 1959, The Barry Miles Archive.

Targuisti, one of Brion Gysin’s 'Soldiers', Café de Paris, Tanger, January 1987, photo: Udo Breger.

William S. Burroughs at Brion Gysin’s, Paris, October 1979, photo: Udo Breger.

William S. Burroughs at Hôtel Montalembert, Paris, waiting to drive out to Orly, May 1989, photo: Udo Breger.

William S. Burroughs in his Rome hotel, May 1989, photo: Udo Breger.

William S. Burroughs’s walking stick, Rome, May 1989, Iphoto: Udo Breger.

Brion Gysin scanning square in front of Centre Pompidou for beautiful boys, Paris, 1984, photo: Udo Breger.

ZKM
Zentrum für Kunst
and Medientechnologie
Museum of Contemporary Art
Lorenzstrasse 19
+ 49 (0) 721/8100 1200
Karlsruhe
the name is BURROUGHS –
Expanded Media
March 24-August 12, 2012

Such works as Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine are what made William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) world famous as an author. Far less known, by contrast, is that Burroughs, as a cross-media artist, also produced a comprehensive, varied body of work that no less experiments with audio tape, film and photography as it does with painting and collages. The comprehensive exhibition the name is BURROUGHS – expanded media presents the author’s artistic output in Germany for the first time; it examines the multiple affiliations between literary and experimental image production, further augmenting the image by way of the representation of “collaborations” Burroughs produced in association with other artists. The exhibition gains additional appeal thanks to a series of works by contemporary international artists who each make unambiguous reference to Burrough’s writings and his method of “expanded media”, and thus, from a present-day perspective, sound out the individual pictorial potential.

The exhibition’s goal is to make tangible, in review and for the first time within Europe on such a scale, the visionary volatility of William S. Burroughs’ literary output while at the same time showing the impact of his ideas and philosophy on a wider network of authors, musicians, composers, painters, photographers, video artists and filmmakers. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, Burroughs is more than ever considered — especially owing to the experiments he carried out in the 1960s together with painter, author, inventor Brion Gysin, with mathematician Ian Sommerville and filmmaker Antony Balch — as a pioneer of media art. In this respect, with the exhibition the name is BURROUGHS – expanded media, the ZKM also reflects the institution’s unique mandate and its own history — that it was, indeed, Burroughs, who was awarded the first Siemens Media Prize in Karlsruhe, in 1993.

Exhibition curators are Udo Breger, Axel Heil and Peter Weibel with valuable support by James Grauerholz and his staff.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a richly illustrated publication on William S. Burroughs as representative figure of the counterculture is available; the work includes a written contribution by Ian MacFadyen, and is edited by Axel Heil as part of his series Future of the Past (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne). During the exhibition, the ZKM, in cooperation with the Estate of William S. Burroughs, plans a comprehensive publication including numerous essays and over 300 illustrations mostly hitherto unpublished works from the artist’s varied oeuvre.

the name is Burroughs is the title of an essay from the anthology The Adding Machine (1985), which traces Burroughs’ path to becoming a writer: “As a young child I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.”

Though not necessarily in chronological order, the exhibition takes up young Burroughs’ dreamy idea and accompanies the protagonist from his childhood and youth in St. Louis and Los Alamos; via Harvard, trips to Europe and 1940s New York, even as far as Mexico, where he wrote his first novel Junky. Lengthy stays in Tangier, Paris, and London were interspersed with periods back in New York again; locations, in which Burroughs photographed, produced collages, made extensive photographic, audiotape and film experiments, and, with his most important collaborator Brion Gysin, actively pressed ahead with linguistic and visual developments. Burroughs systematically extended medial possibilities already by the close of the 1950s. In hindsight, his work introduced the term “expanded media” almost lexically.

In the mid-1940s Burroughs came into contact with highly addictive narcotics — morphine, heroin and other opiates. On September 6, 1951, in a state of complete intoxication, Burroughs shot his wife, Joan Vollmer in Mexico City. In the estimation of the authorities, the deadly shot was an accident. “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and maneuvered me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out,” wrote Burroughs in 1985, in the preface to his novel Queer (published 1951-53), in which he transgresses social taboos and declares this as his method. The demon of terror became entangled in the stylization of an uncompromising language. Even Burroughs’ first works had success among both American and European youth as well as with the literary “underground”, indebted as it was to the counterculture. Throughout the 1960s he was the icon of the “Beat Generation”, and in the 1970s the “godfather” of punk. With his epic poem HOWL (1956), Allen Ginsberg created a monument to his generation. The first line runs: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked...” It was with Jack Kerouac’s breathless prose in On the Road that the trio Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs (as Old Bull Lee) were to enter the stage of world literature. With Naked Lunch, Burroughs composed the third of those canonical works of Beat literature. The novel, in which he identifies language as a virus, rose to the status of a “cult book” during the second half of the 20th century. Censorship of the publication Naked Lunch in America in 1962 — the book was published in Paris as early as 1959 — ensured Burroughs headlines in the world press. Over the course of the ensuing lawsuit Norman Mailer did not only attest “a certain genius” to him, but the suit also culminated in the abolition of literary censorship in the USA.

After a quarter of a century of self-imposed exile, Burroughs returned to the United States permanently in spring 1974; he lived in New York for several years before spending his final years in the small university city of Lawrence, Kansas, where he, from the mid-1980s as “fine artist of the visual”, increasingly began to critically examine, transgress and consequently extend the limits of the possible — also in the traditional media of panel painting and works on paper.

The exhibition the name is Burroughs – expanded media tracks the most influential stages and encounters in the life of William S. Burroughs, and includes some rarely accessible written, lyric, photographic, audio and film documents. Among these belong approximately 600 various editions of his books, published worldwide, which were loaned by one of the largest private collections on this theme. The paintings and drawings, documented with more than 150 original exhibits the majority of which stem from the Estate of William S. Burroughs (Lawrence, Kansas) as managed by James Grauerholz, are supplemented by additional loans from public and private collections. The exhibition impressively shows to the public that Burrough’s work on “paintings and drawings” represents an original contribution to North American contemporary art.

The exhibition also displays those works – in the spirit of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin collaborative project The Third Mind — that were created in cooperation with other outstanding artists: with Robert Rauschenberg, Keith Haring, George Condo, Robert Wilson, Francesco Clemente, Philip Taaffe, John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, Kurt Cobain, Patti Smith and others.

The significance of the works, as well as William S. Burroughs’ personality as countercultural icon for artists’ production across a number of generations is covered by way of prominent works. The spectrum covers the work of Walter Stöhrer and Rolf-Gunter Dienst or David Wojnarowicz through to Larry Clark and Christoph Lissy. Furthermore, numerous photographic portraits of Burroughs by Gerard Malanga, Charles Gatewood, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Avedon and others are also on show. Among the highlights there are approximately 80 photographic prints of original negatives by Burroughs and Gysin loaned by the Barry Miles Collection, London, as well as a typewriter used by Burroughs in Paris, and the blade with which Brion Gysin discovered the literary method of CUT-UP.

Ian Sommerville at William S. Burroughs’ desk, 8 Duke Street, London, March 1973, photo: Udo Breger.