A Streaming Dream

Abstract

By Brion Gysin New Museum New York City July 7-October 3, 2010 In 1924 Brion Gysin moved from Alberta, Canada, to Paris, where he launched an extensive artistic career that was both geographically and materially complex. The New Museum's Dream Machine was the first retrospective in the United States of this innovative and influential artist. New Museum curator Laura Hoptman describes Gysin as, true subversive. Gay, stateless, polyglot, he had no family, no clique, no fixed profession, and, often, no fixed address. (1) Having lost his father to World War I, Gysin joined the artists of old Europe in a frantic search for new meaning that included questioning the very viability of art. The ideals of the fin-de-siecle had been shattered by an arms race that upheld the beast of humanity over its virtue. Figurative painting was gradually losing ground as the significance of metaphor began to slip away. The surrealists, whom Gysin admired early on, continued their focus on object-based work expressing facets of individual consciousness. Following World War II, Gysin's muse was the ephemeral experience that had not yet been considered significant within the practices of postwar art. His collaborations with William S. Burroughs, beginning in Tangier in 1954 and continuing in Paris and New York, paralleled the emergence of Fluxus in both Europe and New York. Dream Machine featured a significant display of Gysin's paintings, photographs, sculpture, filmed performances, collage, and writing--each reflecting Gysin's preoccupation with the ways in which various meanings emerge from the immediate moment. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Inspired primarily by Japanese and Moroccan script, Gysin discovered a connection between the flow of consciousness and the dynamic moving line that has coursed historically throughout Oriental calligraphy. During the late 1950s and early '60s, he created a series of untitled drawings and paintings portraying repetitive hand gestures. Hypnotic while modular, this aesthetic rendered a single feeling that was sustained by visual and aural perception. Gysin explored sound technology in combination with photo-based media so as to create a pause for thought, one that critiqued the relationship between words, action, and meaning. Moreover, by documenting himself and his own actions, Gysin examined the construct of individual agency. Gysin also created a sculpture titled Dreamachine (1960 61), consisting of a rotating metal screen spinning around a soft light. To experience this piece, viewers sit or stand near the light with their eyes closed, thus generating an independent image within the mind's eye. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 1959, the same year that Burroughs published Naked Lunch, Gysin developed the Cut-Up, which re-organized images and word sequences. Gysin's poem that I am (1960) was combined with a series of double-exposed self-portraits from 1961 projected on 35mm slides. …