The visionary author and artist William S. Burroughs (1914?1997) has been admired by generations as a revolutionary intellectual with a radical popular image. He established a new form of writing: the cut-up method – whereby text and image fragments are intuitively pieced together to form open associative narrative structures in order to expand the boundaries of language and describe human consciousness. He extended this method into the visual arts and the cut-ups in their various forms are the focus of this exhibition.
William Burroughs wrote about the ?Electronic Revolution? as early as 1970 and he influenced countercultures from the Beats to the Hippies to Punk, achieving late popularity in the young New York art world and No Wave scene of the 1980s. Assembling Burroughs?s cut-ups in such different media as text-image collages, photo-montages, audio-tape experiments and film, together with the legendary shotgun paintings, this exhibition highlights the cross-over character of his oeuvre, which has influenced wide areas of pop culture, art, music, and techniques of digital sampling. Beyond that, the show presents a portrait of a great author and artist who was the inspiring personality for the Beats with their freethinking redefinition of the American way of life.
Curators: Colin Fallows (Professor of Sound and Visual Arts at Liverpool John Moores University), Synne Genzmer (KUNSTHALLE wien)
Catalogue (Out of Stock):
The German and English catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition includes new research, interviews and essays by contributors including: Colin Fallows, Synne Genzmer, Barry Miles and Jon Savage together with the first and the last interview with William S. Burroughs by Gregory Corso/Allen Ginsberg and Lee Ranaldo respectively. The interviews and essays by renowned international cultural historians and Burroughs scholars are complemented with a wealth of black-and-white and colour-plates of key works, and by numerous additional images of William S. Burroughs.
Guided Tour in German
every Sunday 4 pm