“If you are famous you can get away with anything!” So declared Allen Ginsberg in a 1991 interview while discussing the artworks of William S. Burroughs. Ginsberg didn’t mean it as an explicit criticism of the work, he was simply marveling at the fact that Burroughs was making more money selling his paintings than he ever had from his groundbreaking writing. (Ginsberg was doing the same thing with the sale of his own photographs.) Nevertheless a lingering suspicion has persisted that Burroughs’s art was simply a cash cow. This show, which included 42 drawings and paintings in a range of mediums, went some way toward overturning that misconception. Although Burroughs did not begin creating artworks until the 1980s, he had been closely involved with artists since the 1950s. Most notable was his relationship with Brion Gysin, who showed Burroughs how the methods of visual art—especially collage—could be used in literature. The result was Burroughs’s famed “cut-up” technique of writing, in which a prose passage was cut up and rearranged to make a coherent new text. This slicing and reorganizing…. (READ MORE, click the top link for full article)
art in and around South Florida
