Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin: Turning in to the Multimedia Age
by Jose Kuri ReedGysin (1916-1986) was a U.S.-born cultural provocateur whose first 40 years found him, after a Canadian adolescence, flitting from career to career, as poet, painter, set designer (he assisted Irene Sharaff on a sheaf of major Broadway musicals in the 1940s), historian of the system of slavery in Canada and international gadabout in the homosexual coterie of Paul Bowles, Denham Fouts and Cecil Beaton.
When he became involved with William S. Burroughs at the so-called “Beat Hotel” in Paris in 1959, Gysin made a leap into literary and hipster history by inventing the “cut-up,” joining together ripped sections of newspaper to form a nonlinear yet theoretically readable text. (Burroughs used this method, he claimed, in writing his novels The Soft Machine and Nova Express.)
Gysin also invented the “Dream Machine,” a strobe-heavy sort of orgone box designed to drive its users into the systematic derangement of the senses foretold by Rimbaud. The debate about Gysin will always be whether he was a lightweight gadfly or a great Leonardo-type genius with tragically limited appreciation of his accomplishments.
He did everything, and most of it’s here: He showed with Picasso, posed for Carl Van Vechten, led Brian Jones to the Pipes of Boujouka in Morocco, preached the gospel of kif, recorded a kind of spoken-word jazz with Steve Lacy and used the Dream Machine to help design dozens of abstract “calligraphic” pictures.
Jose Kuri Reed, Business Information Inc.
Nothing Is True – Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin
by John GeigerFew of the other figures associated with the Beat movement were smarter or more gifted than Brion Gysin, the vanguard visual artist and writer who died in Paris in 1986. Yet he never attained their level of recognition, partly because he was not skilled at husbanding his c.v.
Here is how his biographer John Geiger describes him in 1950, at the midway point in his life: “In half a lifetime he had accomplished many things, but by any conventional measure he had also accomplished very little. He was a scholar without necessary academic credentials; he was a promising painter who had not exhibited in over a decade; he was a writer whose attempts to get published had met with little success, leaving him in ‘deep chagrined despair.’
For all his intellectual sophistication, personal flamboyance, eminent acquaintances, and radical creative impulses, Gysin had failed to divine a career for himself. At 34, he was ready for something to happen. What happened can be expressed in a word: Tangier.
George Fetherling, Books in Canada
Brion Gysin Links
The Academy of Everything is Possible
October Gallery, London: ‘Brion Gysin: Calligraffiti of Fire’
Interzone.org Brion Gysin and William Burroughs Portal
Official website of FLicKeR A film on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine based on John Geiger’s book
Works by or about Brion Gysin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
UBU Sound Article on Brion Gysin
Onlne Cutup Machine The Burroughs & Gysin Non-Linear Adding Machine
