William Burroughs

As William Burroughs (1914–1997) developed from an author of novels and short stories into a “cosmonaut of inner space” and a technician of consciousness, he expanded his experiments beyond the confines of fiction, pursuing the implications of his cut-up technique into film, painting, collage and audio experiments. Many of these investigations, which gained momentum during Burroughs’ Paris and London years in the 1960s, were done as collaborations. Burroughs believed that creative collaboration produced something he called “The Third Mind”--a creative entity or will distinct from that of any single participant, which nonetheless could not exist without them. By the mid 60s, he was treating the method as an occult operation, after prophesying various deaths and disasters by cut-up and collaboration. This volume looks at the collages, scrapbooks, films and audio works made by Burroughs in collaboration with his mentor Brion Gysin (with whom he authored the book The Third Mind), London filmmaker Anthony Balch and electronics technician Ian Sommerville--as well as his later collaborations with writers and artists such as John Giorno and George Condo. An interview with Burroughs conducted by Jean-Jacques Lebel in Paris in 1982 is included, published here for the first time in English.

The influence of William Burroughs on popular culture has been enormous: the Beatles, the Stones, Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Keith Haring, David Cronenberg and Sonic Youth have all paid homage to the Beat writer in various media. While Burroughs’ life story and sexual/narcotic proclivities have had their own legacy, the “cut-up” method that he developed in the 1960s with his friend Brion Gysin has proved his most generative legacy. Writers, musicians and artists of all kinds have adopted this chance procedure, which involves the cutting and splicing of language--or image, or sound--to produce unexpected conjunctions and scramble consensus reality. “The cut-up is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting,” Burroughs wrote of the method. “Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas . . . consciousness is a cut up.” This compendium of Burroughs’ artwork, collages, cut-ups, scrapbooks, photographs, films, ephemera and paintings offers a full overview of his visual output, emphasizing the importance and legacy of the cut-up method. In addition, it examines the significance of his tape cut-up experiments of the 60s and 70s, as well as his practice of collaboration across media. Containing much previously unseen material, Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs: The Art of William Burroughs is a definitive publication on a writer and artist whose influence only increases with time.
William Seward Burroughs (1914–1997) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He studied at Harvard University where he graduated in 1936 and briefly attended medical school in Vienna. In the 1940s he met Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, thus helping to found the Beat movement, of which his novel Naked Lunch is a key text.