Burroughs rot, morgen tot

The exhibition “Cut-ups, Cut-ins, Cut-outs” in Kunsthalle Wien from 15 June – 21 October 2012 might be an opportunity to think over both collage and plasticity – literature relations through Burroughs.

Focusing on William S. Burroughs’ involvement with plastic arts, the exhibition aims to re-evaluate this relatively underestimated representative of the Beat generation through his collages. On the one hand, one can find first editions of his books, photographs and videos from his lifetime, and audio records of Burroughs; creating a memory through documentary. On the other hand, newspaper/journal articles of the artist, collages composed of photographs and attached notes, and paintings which are fired on in the 1990s.

Picasso and Braque set the painter in motion through some kind of vitalism. As this move brought the indispensability of perspective in the art of painting into question, I have previously defined collage as “visibility folded onto itself”. Collage was the only means to catch up with the “velocity” of this last century. That’s why it had to stop explaining things with decorative or sketch-like patterns that are reminiscent of its traditional roots.

The most important feature of Burroughs’ cut ups is what they say about the nature of “visibility”. Those who try to deduce stories from the collages or who narrate stories of various kinds in their catalogues are terribly wrong. I would rather call these cut ups note-taking manners of the eye. At least I believe that it is what Burroughs was pursuing for a while. (But absolutely not for his whole life. I hope I can clarify this point towards the end.)

Curated by Colin Fallows and Synne Genzmer, the exhibition was inaugurated with the position of the Beat Generation in literary history and the avant-gardism of the 1960s. Burroughs’ position in this spectrum was questioned. Although the exhibition was unable to overcome the contrast between the formality of the organization/inauguration and the indifference of its object, it still seemed to pursue a rightful question. Or to put the question simply: where exactly can we place Burroughs between the Dadaists of the 1920s and practices of contemporary art during the 1960s? Does any such place exist? Is this really worth the effort? The question that Benjamin H.D. Buchloch posed in 1977 in the article titled “Formalism and Historicity” was more than feliticious: “Why did Rothko and Newmann, Still and Pollock, Gorki and de Kooning not choose Duchamp and Picabia, Man Ray and Tzara, Arp and Schwitters as source of information at that time?” The answer lies not behind the tension between Paris and New York, but – as emphasized by Peter Bürger – in the different identities that the avant-garde utopia in the postwar era assumed.

When we witness the authenticity of the spirit that Burroughs represents, the question will find its answer. Burroughs chose to live like the alter ego of a real Dadaist, who immensely tried to remain unknown and actually managed to do so. On drugs, his brain ascribes words to images; inadvertently or not, he simultaneously turns the linguistic into the visible. Although somewhat exaggerated, his remark that he was unaware of what he was writing completes this allegory. Not only the themes in his novels, but also the composition of cut-ups enables us to claim that it is impossible to tell whether he writes what he sees or visualizes what he writes.

This scene will achieve its full circle with an elegant quotation from Naked Lunch: “Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. Who can be a cringing pissing coward, yet vicious as a purple-assed mandril, alternating these deplorable conditions like vaudeville skits? Who can shit on a fallen adversary who, dying, eats the shit and screams with joy? Who can hang a weak passive and catch his sperm in mouth like a vicious dog? Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner. Oh Christ what a scene is this! Can tongue or pen accommodate these scandals? A beastly young hooligan has gouged out the eye of his confrere and fuck him in the brain. This brain atrophy already, and dry as grandmother's cunt.”

These collages include news reports, photos taken by Burroughs, scribblings, diagrams, photo romance images, a charcoal drawn man whose mouth is taped with typewritten words. The essence of “cut-ups” might be an angry man by a Heidelberg offset machine and bending on the loop who is trying to hide the cutting lines of a photograph that is stuck between words, but in the meantime anxiously waiting for the end of his shift. Or to put it simply, a photographed sentence. This man’s portrait is important for art history because it belongs to an already-montaged factuality and presents overlapping realities of different ranges.

Along the way avant-garde has taken from Duchamp till Andy Warhol and then to hundreds of paths, experts of plastics arts tend to avoid literature not to harbour the crime of “ekphrasis”. The reason is that one can write the history of style much more easily when the outside of the form is overlooked. This is also where the exhibition stumbles. If we would like to avoid a classic art historical trap, then we need to separate Burroughs’ works from the 1960s from those of the 1990s. But the Kunsthalle exhibition does exactly the opposite. Why “mixed technique” works in the last room of an exhibition which initially seems to have focused on collages? Especially those boards on which pump rifles are fired. Right here, we willy nilly come back to art historiography. This initiative that invites people to understand the artist in his own historical context suddenly loses its whole relation to collage. Effacing the change, the exhibition leaves us with a Burroughs who has given up being Burroughs. As if out of some moral obligation. We are confronted with a derivative who delivers anti-drug speeches, and earn his income by firing on age-old walls with a too familiar rifle. He is either mocking us with something that transcends our understanding, or he has turned into a replica that tries to defend an immemorial past with a shotgun. He is not dangerous since he left his bow and arrow with which he played William Tell. Corridors of art history take us to the absence of the artist.

Art history is an initiative that historicizes and enchains beauty – if we still have the right to talk about it – instead of knowing it in itself. It annihilates the artist by replacing him/her with his/her representation. It never has the guts – at least in “recognized” cases – to assemble itself on an editing bench with itself, as did Burroughs. How will art history position itself? Will it remain within academic circles with a historical documentarian discourse? Or will it stand right on the field and try to orient the living art with the relations it has established through collections and exhibitions? It will either archive Burroughs, or replace his collage with an original product. Although the question and its answer might seem easy enough, art historians as background readers of an era’s understanding of art live at a loss inside a dilemma, unable to find their way, and unaware of other possible horizons.

The denouement of this dark purgatory night is a mishit historiography and market manipulations of various kinds in the name of today’s art.

One last sentence that will complete the collage of words: even if I use the Kunsthalle brochure with the picture of the artist with a black suit and an expressionless face as a drip mat, Burroughs will keep living in Naked Lunch.

Barış Acar

After finishing his secondary education in Izmir in Turkey, he started to study Physics Engineering at university. Being transferred to Hacettepe University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Art History (Ankara), he graduated as an art historian. He wrote his master thesis on the theory of art history at Ankara University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Art History. He lectured on art history and the theory of art in Anadolu University, Faculty of Fine Arts. In the publishing sphere of Turkey, he has been the founder and member of various periodicals; he was the editor of many books, including those of A. Danto, H. Foster, R. Sennet. His articles on theory of art, literature, and the cinema have been published since 1997 in various periodicals such as Sanat Dunyamız, Cogito, Artist, Rh + Sanart, Antik & Dekor, Artam Global Art, and Altyazi. He still makes research on the theory of Art History in the University of Vienna, Faculty of Art History.