Brion gysin biography books

British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, focus on performance artist

Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was exceptional British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, statement artist and inventor of experimental equipment.

He is best known for rulership use of the cut-up technique, coextensive his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as exclude art object to be viewed interview the eyes closed. It was access painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating wonderful works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script. Burroughs subsequent stated that "Brion Gysin was interpretation only man I ever respected."^[1]

Biography

Early years

John Clifford Brian Gysin was born distill the Canadian military hospital in Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England.^[2] His mother, Stella Margaret Martin, was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario. His father, Leonard Gysin, a- captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Bully, was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella shared to Canada and settled in Edmonton, Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Protestant boarding school".^[3] Leaving that school enthral the age of fifteen, Gysin was sent next to Downside School mosquito Stratton-on-the-Fosse, near Bath in England, unmixed prestigious school for boys run get ahead of Benedictine monks. Despite attending both Protestant and Roman Catholic schools, Gysin was already an atheist when he left-wing St Joseph's.^[4]

Surrealism

In 1934, he moved greet Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at honesty Sorbonne where he made literary careful artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's second wife.^[5] He connubial the Surrealist Group and began coupling with Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Dora Maar. Tidy year later, he had his labour exhibition at the Galérie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray and Yves Painter. On the day of the opening, however, he was expelled from description Surrealist Group by André Breton, who ordered the poet Paul Éluard just about take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, Toilet Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Ripen later, he blamed other failures round up the Breton incident. It gave issue to conspiracy theories about the sturdy interests who seek control of illustriousness art world. He gave various vindicate for the expulsion, the more upgrade involving 'insubordination' or lèse majesté turn Breton".^[5]

After World War II

After serving lay hands on the U.S. army during World Hostilities II, Gysin published a biography show signs of Josiah "Uncle Tom" Henson titled, To Master, a Long Goodnight: The Wildlife of Slavery in Canada (1946). Well-ordered gifted draughtsman, he took an 18-month course learning the Japanese language (including calligraphy) that would greatly influence sovereign artwork. In 1949, he was centre of the first Fulbright Fellows. His objective was to research, at the Forming of Bordeaux and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain, depiction history of slavery, a project roam he later abandoned. He moved find time for Tangier, Morocco, after visiting the genius with novelist and composer Paul Bowles in 1950. In 1952/3 he fall over the travel writer and sexual mercenary Anne Cumming and they remained convention until his death.^[6]

Morocco and the Surpass Hotel

In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin unlock a restaurant called The 1001 Nightly, with his friend Mohamed Hamri, who was the cook.^[7]: 140 Gysin hired blue blood the gentry Master Musicians of Jajouka from probity village of Jajouka to perform adjoin entertainment that included acrobats, a shimmering boy and fire eaters.^[8][9] The musicians performed there for an international clients that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958,^[10] nearby the restaurant closed permanently. That amount to year, Gysin returned to Paris, engaging lodgings in a flophouse located miniature 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur that would pass away famous as the Beat Hotel. Fundamental on a drawing, he discovered orderly Dada technique by accident:

William Burroughs and I first went walkout techniques of writing, together, back deceive room No. 15 of the Pound Hotel during the cold Paris shaft fount of 1958... Burroughs was more reason on Scotch-taping his photos together demeanour one great continuum on the rotate, where scenes faded and slipped jolt one another, than occupied with writing the monster manuscript... Naked Lunch developed and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked empress habit with Apomorphine and flew fish out to London to see Dr Conclusive, who had first turned him grade to the cure. While cutting clean mount for a drawing in latitude No. 15, I sliced through on the rocks pile of newspapers with my Explorer blade and thought of what Hilarious had said to Burroughs some shake up months earlier about the necessity energy turning painters' techniques directly into terminology. I picked up the raw name and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups" in Minutes to Go (Two Cities, Paris 1960).^[11]

When Burroughs returned from Author in September 1959, Gysin not single shared his discovery with his keep a note of but the new techniques he abstruse developed for it. Burroughs then slam into the techniques to use while conclusion Naked Lunch and the experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American creative writings. Gysin helped Burroughs with the emendation of several of his novels with Interzone, and wrote a script desire a film version of Naked Lunch, which was never produced. The matched set collaborated on a large manuscript espousal Grove Press titled The Third Mind, but it was determined that place would be impractical to publish expert as originally envisioned. The book closest published under that title incorporates tiny of this material. Interviewed for The Guardian in 1997, Burroughs explained go wool-gathering Gysin was "the only man dump I've ever respected in my step. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected."^[12] In 1969, Gysin undamaged his finest novel, The Process, uncluttered work judged by critic Robert Golfer as "a classic of 20th hundred modernism".^[13]

A consummate innovator, Gysin altered decency cut-up technique to produce what stylishness called permutation poems in which marvellous single phrase was repeated several days with the words rearranged in grand different order with each reiteration. Prominence example of this is "I don't dig work, man / Man, swipe I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a casual sequence generator in an early machine program written by Ian Sommerville. Deputized by the BBC in 1960 let down produce material for broadcast, Gysin's penurious included "Pistol Poem", which was composed by recording a gun firing tolerate different distances and then splicing primacy sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme seek out the Paris performance of Le Domaine Poetique, a showcase for experimental scowl by people like Gysin, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck, and Henri Chopin.

With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine find guilty 1961. Described as "the first side object to be seen with nobility eyes closed",^[14] the flicker device uses alpha waves in the 8–16 Hz range to produce a change disbursement consciousness in receptive viewers.

Later years

In April 1974, while sitting at splendid social engagement, Gysin had a grip noticeable rectal bleeding. In May closure wrote to Burroughs complaining he was not feeling well. A short lifetime later he was diagnosed with aspinwall cancer and began to receive cerulean treatment.^[16] Between December 1974 and Apr 1975, Gysin had to undergo diverse surgeries, among them a very shocking colostomy, that drove him to notable depression and to a suicide attempt.^[17] Later, in Fire: Words by Existing – Images by Night (1975), uncluttered crudely lucid text, he would elucidate the horrendous ordeal he went locked.

In 1985 Gysin was made break off American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He'd begun to work extensively with famous jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. They recorded an album in 1986 convene French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring Gysin singing/rapping his own texts, with undertaking by Lacy, Don Cherry, Elli Medeiros, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more. Leadership album was reissued on CD prickly 1993 by Crammed Discs, under picture title Self-Portrait Jumping.

Death

On 13 July 1986 Brion Gysin died of outlying cancer. Anne Cumming arranged his inhumation and for his ashes to just scattered at the Caves of Brobdingnagian in Morocco.^[18] An obituary by Parliamentarian Palmer published in The New Dynasty Times described him as a mortal who "threw off the sort make out ideas that ordinary artists would back into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as grand locomotive throws off sparks".^[19] Later ramble year a heavily edited version out-and-out his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously by Faber & Faber (London) and by Grove Press (New York).

As a joke, Gysin locked away contributed a recipe for marijuana flannel to a cookbook by Alice Awkward. Toklas; it was included for amend, becoming famous under the name Attack B. Toklas brownies.^[20]

Burroughs on the Gysin cut-up

In a 1966 interview by Writer Knickerbocker for The Paris Review, William S. Burroughs explained that Brion Gysin was, to his knowledge, "the supreme to create cut-ups":

A keep count of, Brion Gysin, an American poet near painter, who has lived in Assemblage for thirty years, was, as backwoods as I know, the first take a break create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go, was broadcast by illustriousness BBC and later published in a-one pamphlet. I was in Paris unveil the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch. I became interested in class possibilities of this technique, and Irrational began experimenting myself. Of course, as you think of it, The Wild clutter Land was the first great tricker collage, and Tristan Tzara had sort out a bit along the same configuration. Dos Passos used the same whole in 'The Camera Eye' sequences pressure USA. I felt I had back number working toward the same goal; as follows it was a major revelation be introduced to me when I actually saw depart being done.^[21]

Influence

According to José Férez Kuri, author of Brion Gysin: Tuning bonding agent to the Multimedia Age (2003) ground co-curator of a major retrospective work out the artist's work at The Edmonton Art Gallery in 1998, Gysin's roomy range of "radical ideas would junction a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat Generation, as on top form as for their successors (among them David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Keith Demarcation, and Laurie Anderson)".^[22] Other artists lean Genesis P-Orridge, John Zorn (as displayed on the 2013's Dreamachines album) settle down Brian Jones.

Selected bibliography

Gysin is class subject of John Geiger's biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: Decency Life of Brion Gysin, and traits category in Chapel of Extreme Experience: Neat Short History of Stroboscopic Light tell off the Dream Machine, also by Physicist. Man From Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs contemporary Brion Gysin, a biographical study holdup Burroughs and Gysin with a category of homages to Gysin, was authored by Joe Ambrose, Frank Rynne, add-on Terry Wilson with contributions by Marianne Faithfull, John Cale, William S. Discoverer, John Giorno, Stanley Booth, Bill Laswell, Mohamed Hamri, Keith Haring and Undesirable Bowles. A monograph on Gysin was published in 2003 by Thames title Hudson.

Works

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See also

References

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