{"id":5668,"date":"2013-03-16T17:45:55","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T21:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=5668"},"modified":"2019-07-19T09:11:31","modified_gmt":"2019-07-19T13:11:31","slug":"ian-macfadyen-critiques-burroughs-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2013\/03\/ian-macfadyen-critiques-burroughs-retrospective.html","title":{"rendered":"MacFadyen Takes ‘Front Porch’ Look at Burroughs"},"content":{"rendered":"

I knew when RealityStudio<\/a> posted Ian MacFadyen’s review<\/a> of “The Name Is Burroughs: expanded media at the ZKM, Karlsruhe”<\/a> that it would be a major critique. I had already read his “Codename Burroughs,”<\/a> the pamphlet that accompanied the retrospective, which was excerpted from a more complete text in MacFadyen’s book, William S. Burroughs. Cut<\/em><\/a>. With his usual brilliance and lucidity he had made it plain as day what Burroughs was up to, especially in the “third mind” cut-up collaborations with Brion Gysin.<\/p>\n

\"Ian<\/a>


Ian MacFadyen and Dreamachine
[Photo: Jonathan Greet]<\/p><\/div>Furthermore, when I read the complete “Codename Burroughs” text, MacFadyen had me totally convinced that Burroughs’s work as a visual artist in later life was as serious and as meaningful as his writing, contrary to the opinion of some of Burroughs’s most fervent admirers. But I didn’t realize — though I suppose I should have known, given MacFadyen’s thoroughness — that the critique would be such an encyclopedic summary of the show. It comes to almost 30,000 words and is so exhaustive and comprehensive that it could serve as a catalogue raisonn\u00e9 of Burroughs’s career. Titled “This Beautiful Corrosion \u2014 William S. Burroughs at the ZKM,”<\/a> it describes an exhibition curated by Axel Heil, Udo Breger, and Peter Weibel that is likely to be definitive for the foreseeable future, notwithstanding next year’s Burroughs centenary.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt from the critique. There was so much to choose from I could have picked anything at random as representative of its insight. But this selection appealed to me particularly, because it talks about James Agee and Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer of 1915,”<\/a> which happens to be one of my favorite pieces of music. Never in a million years would I have connected it to Burroughs.<\/p>\n

American Flag Porch Sunset<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>


Detail of shot plywood [Photo: Eric Anderson] Click to enlarge<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>
\nThere are photographs in the exhibition of Burroughs with the tools of his trade and significant props. There\u2019s the writer with his wire manuscript trays on the front of Harold Chapman\u2019s Beat Hotel.<\/em> And he\u2019s pictured on the cover of the Sans Soleil edition of Last Words<\/em>, the author writing, pen in hand \u2014 it\u2019s the performance of the act of writing, the very image of the writer\u2019s vocation, the literal signature shot. And there are images of Burroughs with typewriter and with gun \u2014 Burroughs as dedicated writer and enthusiastic shootist, reminders that the gun was in the art before the art came out of the gun. Burroughs is a writer of Westerns, and a painter of Western shoot-outs in space \u2014 the painter as shootist, for real. Bowles recalled Burroughs in Tangier in the \u201950s, and his room in the Medina \u2014 \u201cOne wall of the room, his shooting gallery, was pock-marked with bullet holes. Another wall was completely covered with snapshots, most of which he\u2019d taken on a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon.\u201d Thirty years later, the image wall and the gunshot wall would coalesce. Shoot through the image wall, and make an image of the shooting wall \u2014 see the door to the room as an image and blow it off its hinges. Here\u2019s a photo of Burroughs playing out the character of the old writer on his porch with a shotgun in his lap, on the Penguin cover of The Job<\/em> \u2014 a serendipitous reenactment of Kerouac\u2019s memory of Burroughs in Texas, sitting on his porch with a gun across his lap as the sun was slowly sinking into the blood-red earth. . . An image reminiscent of William Burroughs Jr.\u2019s account of Burroughs on the rooftop in Tangier, watching the sun go down, \u201cright hand holding the perpetual cigarette, lips parting to the sun. . .\u201d Then the rush to the typewriter, to the dark room illuminated by a haunting painting of the moon by Brion Gysin. . . These are moments of illumination, memorable visualizations of Burroughs as witness to the light fading out, the impermanence of all things, like Hokusai\u2019s famous image, Nakamaro Gazing at the Moon From a Terrace<\/em> \u2014 Nakamaro who went to China to discover the measure of time, and was imprisoned on a roof terrace, condemned to watch the moon rise and fall, until his last moon rose and fell. . . Burroughs\u2019 proposed anthology of outstanding passages from literature would have covered love, solitude, old age and death, and would have been illustrated with \u201cpanoramas of sunsets and sunrises. . .,\u201d and Burroughs watching the sun go down, the sun setting north or south of due west, is a synecdoche of Spengler\u2019s The Decline of the West,<\/em> an epoch extinguished like the life of a man at the end of The Place of Dead Roads<\/em> \u2014 \u201c. . . the sky darkens and goes out.\u201d In American music, literature and art, the porch is the site of reminiscence and quiescence, both serenity and acceptance of the ending of a life \u2014 the view of the lawn, the garden, the street, passers-by, the old familiar neighbourhood, the gold light of evening leaving and the night coming on, and you can see it all ending. It\u2019s the sunset porch, epitomised by James Agee and Samuel Barber\u2019s 1947 elegiac, transcendent “Knoxville Summer of 1915,” for soprano and orchestra, the illuminated moment out of time, the world of childhood remembered towards the end of a life, recalling \u201cthat time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street. . .\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n