Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a British-born artist and writer, naturalized as an American citizen, who is best known for his innovative contributions to literature and visual art. After relocating to the United States as a child, he later pursued education in Paris, where he began his artistic career despite lacking formal training. Gysin's work was deeply intertwined with the Beat Generation; he collaborated closely with influential figures such as William Burroughs, whom he met in Tangier. He is particularly known for developing the cut-up technique, which involves rearranging text to create new meanings, a method that significantly impacted the literary landscape of the time.
In addition to his literary pursuits, Gysin created the Dreamachine, an apparatus designed to induce visionary experiences through light stimulation, reflecting his interest in the intersection of art and consciousness. Throughout his life, he explored various media, including painting, writing, and film, leaving a lasting legacy that continues to inspire contemporary artists and musicians. Despite initial obscurity, Gysin's reputation has grown posthumously, with renewed interest in his innovative techniques and ideas. His work offers a unique perspective on the creative process and the blending of different artistic disciplines.
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Brion Gysin
Author
- Born: January 19, 1916
- Birthplace: Taplow, Buckinghamshire, England
- Died: July 13, 1986
- Place of death: Paris, France
Biography
Brion Gysin, a naturalized American citizen of Swiss parentage, was born in Britain. After his father’s death before he was a year old, his mother brought him to New York and then Kansas City. He spent two years at Downside, a distinguished English public school, before going on to Paris and the Sorbonne.
Even though he had no formal training in painting, he had first one-man exhibition in 1939. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he used his time in the service to study Japanese and later reported that it changed his attitude toward surfaces and brush work. After the war, he published To Master: A Long Goodnight (1946) and The History of Slavery in Canada (1946). He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study in France and Spain.
He settled in Tangier where he opened a Moroccan restaurant, The 1,001 Nights of Tangier, a center for ecstatic dancing and psychedelic music. He first encountered William Burroughs in Tangier in 1953 and later moved into the Beat Hotel in Paris near him. Gysin influenced Burroughs’s revisions of Naked Lunch (1959).
Gysin proposed to apply the painter’s techniques of collage and montage to writing by taking any set of words and cutting it up and juxtaposing the texts randomly. His Minutes to Go (1960) and The Exterminator (1960) explain the theory and practice of cut-ups. Gysin also explored the use of tape recorders and video projectors to create light shows. Collaborating with Ian Sommerville, a Cambridge mathematician, Gysin created the Dream Machine. This machine produced light interruptions between eight and thirteen flashes to complement alpha rhythms in the brain and generate dream images in the viewer’s head, but was not produced until the 1980’s.
Another collaborator, Antony Balch, decided to take the theory of cut-ups into film and produced Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, and Guerilla Conditions. Burroughs said that he used this method to produce his trilogy, The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964). In 1965, Gysin and Burroughs collaborated in New York on The Third Mind (first published as Œuvre croisée by Flammarion Paris, 1976), moving from texts and images to hieroglyphic silence.
Gysin returned to Tangier to work on an experimental novel, The Process (1969), reporting the experiences of Thay and Mya Himmer as transcribed from tapes by Ulysses O. Hansan. From 1970 to 1973, Gysin worked with Antony Balch on a film of Naked Lunch. His tape experiments in the 1960’s inspired rock artists in the 1980’s, when, he, along with Burroughs, became a senior statesman to experimental art. The first chapter of an unfinished work was dedicated to Ian Sommerville. It has been printed posthumously as The Last Museum. Burroughs offered a summary of Gysin’s influence on his contemporaries when he said of The Process that “few books have sold fewer copies and been more enthusiastically read.” Gysin’s reputation has steadily grown as more of his work has been reprinted and edited since his death in 1986.