“I enjoy inventing things out of fun. After all, life is a game, not a career.”
Out of all things, one can call Brion Gysin, “inventor” is perhaps the best possible term. Another one that comes close is “pioneer”. Gysin was a painter, sound poet, lyricist, performance artist, and writer as well, which only comes to testify to his immense contributions to the arts and culture of his time, and beyond. His influence too stretched generations, reaching as far as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Laurie Anderson.
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Despite such a rich and varied resume, and even William S. Burrough’s admission that “Gysin was the only man he ever respected”, more than twenty years after his death this figure is still far from being notable. To say that his life and work are undervalued, or that he simply slipped through the cracks of the 20th-century history, truly is an understatement.
Brion Gysin, The (Surrealist) Beginnings
John Clifford Brian Gysin was born in 1916 in England to Canadian parents. After the death of his father, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, his mother took him back to her native Canada. In 1930, at fifteen years old, Gysin returned to the UK and in 1934 he moved again, this time to France. In Paris, he studied at Sorbonne no less, and here the first door to the artistic circles opened up to him. It was Marie Berthe Aurenche, the second wife of the famous artist Max Ernst, who introduced him to the Surrealist Group, at the time counting Leonor Fini, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Dora Maar as its members. Things were going well for young Gysin, a mysterious, yet intriguing 19-year-old atheist hungry for knowledge and experimentation. He was also a gay man, a fact that seems to have ultimately come to overshadow all the rest in this moment in time in the French capital.
Perhaps the events at the Galerie Aux Quatres Chemins in 1935 were the breaking point in what was going to be a more successful career in art, or at least Gysin himself seemed to think so. His drawings were to be exhibited in a group show, alongside those by the aforementioned Surrealists, but also those by Magritte, Mirò, Tanguy and Man Ray. It would have been an honor, a privilege, and an incredible opportunity for Gysin, hadn’t Paul Éluard removed his pictures from the exhibition, as per André Breton’s instructions. Breton allegedly did not approve of Gysin’s homosexuality, and even felt offended and personally attacked by some of his drawings. Gysin was then expelled from the Surrealist Group as well, leaving a traumatic scar that would be brought up and analyzed for the rest of his life.
After spending much of World War II serving in the US Army, Brion Gysin was able to get back to his creative life. His innate curiosity and a gift for draughtsmanship led him to study the Japanese language and calligraphy, something that would have a great role in his oeuvre. The experiments with language would soon continue in Morocco, where he stayed on the intimation of his friend Paul Bowles.
The Friendship with William S. Burroughs, The Cut-Up Technique
In the Moroccan city of Tangier, Gysin met the Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs, who used to attend musical and theatrical performances at Gysin’s restaurant called The 1001 Nights. The 1950s were the beginning of a very fruitful period in Gysin’s life - his paintings of the North African desert are among his more notable works, What is maybe more important to accentuate in this part of our article is that, while in Morocco, Gysin discovered Islamic art in all its patterns and tessellations, which he used to develop script-like canvases and drawings. The writings in Arabic, but also Japanese (Gysin was fluent in both), became a sort of a visual stamp and a mark-maker, moving in different directions and creating a unique abstract language.
In 1958, Gysin’s restaurant closed for good and he returned to Paris, settling at number 9 of rue Gît-le-Coeur - now known as the address of the infamous Beat Hotel. In room no. 15, he and Burroughs would experiment with the cut-up technique, one that continues to influence artists and writers even today. In it, phrases and words are physically cut up into pieces and rearranged to be attributed with brand new meanings and concepts. About this process, Gysin himself said:
While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters' techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups”. (Brion Gysin: Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success, published in Evergreen Review)
Burroughs was delighted to use the cut-up technique in his novel “Naked Lunch”, the seminal and iconic publication that changed the American literature, as well as his other later books such as “Interzone”. The couple also worked together on a large manuscript titled “The Third Mind”, a collage manifesto explaining the possibilities of the technique.
Independently from Burroughs, Gysin used the cut-up technique to produce what he called “permutation poems”, works in which a random sequence generator was used to repeat a single phrase numerous times, with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration - an example being a line such as “I Am That I Am”. The generator was part of an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville, a scientist and mathematician at Oxford, with whom Gysin collaborated to create the very first works of sound poetry. They experimented with magnetic tape, computers and printed words, creating artworks which Gysin would then perform around Europe, using hand-made slide projections and music as well.
Gysin’s permutation poems might have roots in the Dada poetry, but they are without a doubt the very first examples of art of this kind, one that used a computer so early on in the history of contemporary art. Their originality lies not only in their randomness, but also in the fact that they spanned media, from writings to recordings and live performances, ultimately paving way for what is perhaps Gysin’s most famous invention ever - The Dreamachine.
The Dreamachine, 1961
Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed”, The Dreamachine (or Dream Machine) was a piece conceived and made by Gysin and Sommerville in 1961, after reading William Grey Walter’s book “The Living Brain”. In was a rather peculiar object, allowing the viewers to enter mystic worlds and states of hallucination, according to Gysin.
Gysin’s Dreamachine was a tall cylinder with slits cut in the sides, placed on a record turntable which would rotate at 78 or 45 revolutions per minute. Rotating inside the cylinder was a suspended light bulb as well, at a constant frequency of 8 to 13 pulses per second. These numbers are certainly not accidental” they correspond to the number of alpha waves, electrical oscillations in the human brain present during wakeful relaxation.
The Dreamachine was to be experienced with eyes closed, standing a few inches from the cylinder. The rotating device would produce intense flickering patterns which would stimulate the optical nerve and thus influence the brain’s electrical oscillations. The viewer would “see” shapes and traces of light on the back of their eyelids, possibly entering a hallucinatory state. And so, The Dreamachine would create a genuine kind of ephemeral, unseen imagery unique to each person who witnesses it, always new and always different. For Gysin, The Dreamachine represented a revelation, both in painting and in life, and promised to be one of the greatest inventions of the past century.
The Dreamachine was first presented in March 1962, in “The Object” exhibition at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It was also featured in the 1996 “Ports of Entry” show dedicated to William S. Burroughs at LACMA in Los Angeles. Though it did catch attention of the critics and the public on both occasions, its success was far beyond that which Gysin had hoped for - perhaps due to the fact that his interest in trance and the reactions of the brain to art were condescending to the current trend in art in the 1960s, much more focused on the abstract and the material.
How Does it End?
The first half of the 1970s was very traumatic for Brion Gysin. He was diagnosed with colon cancer, for which he had to undergo several surgeries. Once he was cured, he started suffering from depression, which he described in his 1975 text “Fire: Words by Day - Images by Night”. By the 1980s however, Gysin was back in the game, recording an album with jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy in 1986. During this time, he spent time with artists like Keith Haring and George Condo, as well as those belonging to the Beat Generation, and was a well-respected figure within the artistic circles. Unfortunately, this didn’t last long either, as he died of lung cancer that same year. His long-term friend Anne Cumming arranged for his ashes to be scattered at the Caves of Hercules in Morocco.
Gysin’s influence, however, did not yield completely. In 1998, The Edmonton Art Gallery staged a major retrospective of his work. More recently, in 2010, it was New York’s New Museum, that featured many of the works including The Dreamachine (the show then also travelled to France). Will it all stop here for someone like Brion Gysin? The man who was never rich, never famous, and never really recognized for his art? None of Gysin’s innovations brought him the glory or the fortune he so desired all his life. Were they just not good enough, or were they made at a wrong moment in time? Perhaps, like his predecessors, Brion Gysin will be recognized posthumously, although at this point it’s already been more than two decades since his death…
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