On 30 January 2014 I attended a private view of Riflemaker gallery’s William Burroughs 100 exhibition, celebrating the centenary of his birth on 5 February 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri.
Burroughs was an innovative writer plus artist in a variety of media. A giant figure of the Beat Generation, he went on to deeply influence a wide swathe of culture plus thought with dozens of books plus hundreds of paintings, essays, spoken word performances plus multi-media collaborations.
A Harvard graduate, Burroughs followed his fascinations through the underworlds plus subcultures of global cities including Tangiers, Paris, New York, London, Chicago, New Orleans, Vienna, Dubrovnik, Budapest, Athens, plus Mexico City. Allen Ginsberg plus Jack Kerouac were key figures in his life plus early literary career. Teaching him to ‘see’ paintings, Brion Gysin was fundamental to Burroughs’ artistic development plus shared with him such techniques as the ‘cut-up’, calligraphy, plus painting with an engraved wallpaper roller. Other important collaborators include Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, George Condo, Philip Taaffe, Antony Balch, Ian Sommerville, Robert Wilson, Tom Waits, plus Kurt Cobain.
Some of the work featured in this show features a wide range of painting techniques, painting the file-folders almost ‘by accident’. The folders were always at hand, being necessary to the profession of writing itself because of the constant need to organize papers plus ideas. The author originally used the folders to mix pigments plus colours before observing that they could be viewed as artworks in themselves. From 1982 onwards Burroughs spent a great deal more of his time making visual art for its own sake including a number of file-folders featuring ‘automatic calligraphy’ partly inspired by his friend Brion Gysin. A large group of works were painted during the period 1990 – 1992, when Burroughs would adorn the folders inside plus out using a mix of ink plus gouache with gestural brushstrokes sometimes mixed with glitter or fluorescent paint plus a line or two of text.