A HITMAN for the Apocalypse, J. G. Ballard once called William S. Burroughs: a writer who, in his trench coat and fedora, stepped “out of life and into his fiction, like a secret agent charged with the demolition of all bourgeois values”.
Now, in a forthcoming London show, the gun-toting godfather of Beat sets his sights on the figures of authority that he so hated — on the policemen, the professionals and church figures who, to his outlaw’s way of looking, enshrined all that was stifling about the Establishment.
For the first time, a series of shotgun targets depicting the people he detested goes on show. Goggle-eyed, snaggle-grinned and shock-haired, these cartoonish scribbles gazed into the barrel of his rifle as he peppered them with bullets that left shadowy powder marks. As artworks, they hit straight to the heart of a revolutionary message.
The gunshot works form merely the first part of The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs, a three-part retrospective surveying Burrough’s art and his associations with other artists. It will open at the central London gallery Riflemaker on September 14, the first show of its kind since the artist’s death of a heart attack in 1997 at the age of 83.
Burroughs’s visual works — his beguilingly artless line drawings and target sketches, plyboard spray-canned with pigments and mangled by bullets, canvases in which paint spurts and splatters around stencilled shapes — will go on display, alongside pages from his scrapbooks: a hotchpotch of newspaper photographs and text cut-ups. It will include photographs of the artist, capturing that inimitable stylishness that bordered on the naff, recording that iconic face with its narrow mouth and its reptilian stare. The gallery will also offer the opportunity to listen to a recording of one of his sound cut-ups — a daunting 13-hour aural collage called Interrupting the Space-Time Continuum.
The morbidly atonal recitation by the artist is persistently interrupted by the noises of everyday urban life. Rare items, including a first edition of Naked Lunch typed up by Jack Kerouac, will also be on display, alongside memorabilia of the artist’s circle.
This illuminating project took shape after last year’s Frieze Art Fair, at which Burroughs’s executors approached Riflemaker. They had been attracted by the name of the show space. From 1793 until two years ago, the gallery’s wood-panelled Soho premises had served as the workshop of a master gunsmith.
Inspired, brilliant, decadent, sad and a little bit sinister, Burroughs was an icon of international counterculture. When young people were told to think, people meant “learn to think as we do,” he once said. He sought to rewire perception and attack the systems of belief which cramp the free spirit in latent mediocrity. “Socially I am a cripple,” he once said, “therefore all my thinking life I have decided not to belong.”
Burroughs attacked the world on his own uncompromising terms. This was the madman who cut off a joint of his own finger to impress a lover. This was the outsider who turned his back on the privileges of his St Louis upbringing and his Harvard education to become a psychic explorer, to plumb the depths of addiction and experiment with the entire psychoanalytic panoply. This was the misogynistic homosexual who nonetheless married and had a son — though later, in a modern-day version of a William Tell antic gone awry, he shot his wife.
His achievements as an author are his main legacy. His friendship with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg lay at the heart of the Beat movement, and Burroughs became one of the most influential figures of the avant-garde.
In 1962 Norman Mailer declared Burroughs to be “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius”. The spare, clear-eyed precision of Junkie (1953) gave an unprecedented insight into the life of the addict. The outlandish dream sequences and mad monologues of his 1959 Naked Lunch (a restored text of which is shortly to be published by HarperCollins) have an eerie prescience. Inventing the cut-up technique of randomising work, he revelled in the insights that could arise from chaos.
However, Burroughs mixed as much with painters as writers. He counted Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg among his friends. He liked to say that fiction lagged behind painting by about 50 years. As far back as the 1960s he was working on montages and scrapbooks (made in collaboration with Brion Gysin). But his paintings proper began some 20 years later when, retiring to Kansas, his writing was winding down.
Guns lie at the core of Burroughs’s creative vision. His gunshot works could express what he would describe as a “war universe”, a universe that operated on the same principles as “war and games”. And “all games are basically hostile”, he said. Through destructive processes he sought ways to create.
It began by chance. The self-proclaimed “gun nut” was engaged in his favourite pastime of shooting practice when he picked up a piece of plywood and blasted it. “Then I looked at the broken plywood where the shots came out and in these striations I saw all sorts of things — little villages, streets — I said, ‘My God, this is a work of art’.” Just as the cut-up method had attempted to assault the word, now the shotgun assaulted the conventional picture plane.
He developed the method, spraying the plywood with splodges of paint, shooting it again and again until he had all but destroyed it but, in so doing, had also made something new. “The shotgun blast releases the little spirits compacted in the layers of wood, releases the colours of the paints to splash them out in unforeseen images and patterns,” Burroughs explained. They released the aura of “evocative magic” that he sought.
These are the only visual works he ever did, Burroughs later said, in which he thought he had succeeded. They have an unnerving, visceral energy. They disturb dark, vital levels of the viewer’s imagination. Perhaps they even stir something of Burroughs’s powerful spirit back to life.
- The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs (Part One) is at Riflemaker, W1 (020-7439 0000), from Sept 14
