Brion Gysin at the New Museum

Brion Gysin at the New Museum is amazing.I have been very
disappointed in shows in the past at the New Museum,
sometimes it seems like New just automatically has to equal
annoying and abrasive but this isn't the case here.

Gysin was one of the formative individuals of the beat
generation.He was one of the first people to win a
Fullbright fellowship, and rather than coming up with
some ill conceived plan to save the world, he seems to have
lived his entire life concerned with ideas.

After a stint in Paris(somewhat Fullbright funded),
he spent a lot of time in Morocco with William S.
Burroughs, listening to the spiritual music of the
mystic Sufi master musicians of Joujuokas.His Dream
Machine is inspired by this music of these people.
A rotating cylinder with a lightbulb inside is placed
in the center of a room where you are expected to lounge
around on pillows. It is the only work of art that you are
expected to view with your eyes closed. When you close your
eyes and view it you are supposed to experience visions.

Gysins interest in visions, which are generally in my
understanding narrative experiences, is interesting
given the fact that the art form which he invented seems
in many ways to be completely antithetical to narrative.
With William S. Burroughs Gysin pioneered the cutup in 1959.
What is really notable about the cutup format is its focus on
the moment, the image, rather than the narrative. Watching a
movie which was a companion to Gysin's cutups requires whatever
little meditation training I have acquired in my time of Buddhist
meditation. The film itself is a type of meditation.Each clip
is just short enough to toss you off of various ledges of thought
and story and perception without ever giving you enough material
to form a cohesive narrative.Gysin references a third mind,which
seems to a mind without concrete identity or narrative,it seems to
be a mind of simply perception, of images, of seeing the real.

Curses were something which Burroughs and Gysin experimented
with together. They didn't like a certain magazine seller across
from them in Paris and they uttered a curse which
cause her magazine stand to burn down. She was described as evil,
mostly because I guess she was kinda surly about delivering the
Herald Tribune.After this story is recounted you can hear a
recording of Gysin uttering a curse.

There seemed to be something of a nonchalance about death
running through the beats. Burroughs is famous for shooting and
killing his wife, Joan, in a botched reenactment of William Tell.
The central figure of the beats, Lucien Carr, went to jail for
stabbing his annoying gay friend who made one too many moves on him.
Using magic to destroy or kill someone seems to continue the theme
of death by accident or circumstance rather than in some ways
premeditation. It seems a continuation of the cut up and in a way
lends a sinister yet meaningful underpinning to
the entire show. Speaking of curses Gysin had himself been expelled
from the surrealist group by Andre Breton and had described it as
having "the effect of a curse"; it gave rise to a belief in Gyson, of
conspiracy theories about the art world.

Maybe this experience lead to interest in the tangible.One of the more
tangible things is the written word. Gysin studied calligraphy in the
Japanese and Arabic traditions, and the final or first work on paper in
the exhibition(depending on how you go in) is an extremely long long mural
in canary yellow brush strokes, which seems to be telling some ecstatic
story in a language everyone forgot to read and loves all the more for.