Radical Point of View

William Burroughs has been called many things during the course of his remarkable life, but Renaissance man has never ranked high on the list of superlatives. That may change this week with the opening of the exhibition “Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Visual Arts” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The author of “Naked Lunch,” a wildly scatological novel that won a landmark anti-censorship Supreme Court decision in 1959, has long been recognized as one of the most radical minds of the 20th century. Burroughs, born in St. Louis in 1914, was openly homosexual long before that choice was tolerated by society, spent several decades as a heroin addict and accidentally killed his wife with a gunshot wound to the head. These are things most people know about him. His output as a visual artist, however, has thus far gone largely uncommented upon.

And as will be seen in Burroughs’ first museum retrospective, opening Thursday, his creative output is surprisingly substantial. An accomplished photographer, he has produced a voluminous body of visual art that includes drawings, paintings, sculpture, action pieces, collages and scrapbooks, along with collaborative works with artists Andy Warhol, Jean Michel-Basquiat, Robert Wilson and Keith Haring, among others.

“Ports of Entry,” assembled by LACMA’s curator of photography, Robert Sobieszek, attempts to give a comprehensive view of Burroughs’ artistic practice, presenting 153 works along with contributions from 43 artists and filmmakers who have worked with the author or been influenced by him.

As in his writing, Burroughs’ loosely figurative abstractions employ the element of chance in an attempt to create an environment in which magic can enter (hence the title “Ports of Entry”). This is particularly true of the “shotgun paintings” begun in 1982, wherein he positions cans of paint in front of a wooden surface, then blasts them with a shotgun.

“The shotgun blast releases the little spirits compacted into the wood,” explains the 82-year-old artist, speaking by phone from the Lawrence, Kan., home he has shared for 15 years with his longtime friend and assistant, James Grauerholz.

Explaining the genesis of the show, Sobieszek says: “In 1978, I curated an exhibition on photomontage dating from 1851 through Dada and Surrealism. I ended there, because at that point, I saw a big change in how artists approached montage, and in thinking about this change I kept going back to six pages in a book called ‘The Burroughs File’ that depicted images from the scrapbooks Burroughs completed in the ‘50s and ‘60s with the late Brion Gysin.”

(Many of the 20 or so scrapbooks completed by Burroughs and Gysin, a legendary underground figure who died in 1986, have disappeared, but three will be on view at LACMA.)

“The scrapbooks introduced a radically new approach to montage,” Sobieszek says. “Whereas Dada took an iconic approach to picture making, and Surrealism intermingled pictures and words to create narratives, these montages exploded iconicity and narration and pivoted on indeterminacy and open-endedness.”

Central to the innovation Sobieszek refers to is the cutup, a creative methodology Burroughs and Gysin devised when they were sharing quarters at the Beat Hotel in Paris. Cutting a mat for a drawing in September 1959, Gysin was working on top of a stack of newspapers and accidentally cut through several layers of newsprint. He realized that he could shuffle the layers of newsprint and read three different stories simultaneously, and thus was born the cutup.

“William always credits Brion with the cutup method and says he’s responsible for any power in the visual art he’s made,” Sobieszek says. “In France, Gysin is well known as an artist, but he’s virtually unheard of here, and one of our intentions with this show is to introduce him to people who don’t know him.”

New York poet John Giorno (who performs at LACMA on Sept. 1 in conjunction with “Ports of Entry”) met Burroughs and Gysin in 1964 shortly after they arrived in Manhattan to work on their collaborative novel “The Third Mind.” He recalls that “Brion had a great talent for making people dislike him, and consequently many people with vastly less talent are more successful than he was.

“He and William had a very strong connection, though--the devotion they felt for each other was stronger than any reason, and it was almost as if they were lovers, though they never were,” says Giorno, who himself was in a romantic relationship with Gysin at the time.

In any conversation about his visual art, Burroughs is quick to bring up Gysin, whom he describes as “a most extraordinary character--I’ve never known anyone as brilliant as he was.”

“He was a dazzling conversationalist who spoke several languages, and he taught me what I know about painting,” Burroughs says.

For his part, Gysin once described Burroughs as having “enormous powers of concentration”: “When William concentrates on something, he burns a hole in it, like someone concentrating light through a magnifying glass. He is corrosive.”

Burroughs has no explanation for the affinity he felt for Gysin and his work.

“I wasn’t exposed to art as I was growing up, and can’t recall the first time I saw a work of art,” the author says. “However, I remember very clearly a vision I had of a little green reindeer when I was a child, and visions emanate from the same mythical area where painting resides. Whatever the reason, I immediately felt comfortable working with visual materials.

“When Brion and I worked together, we were trying to find a synthesis of writing and painting--people forget that for centuries the two were one and that they didn’t break apart until alphabetical writing was invented. The cutups were based on my belief that any creative act must include a random factor, because without that you get stale repetition.

“This idea has been central to everything I’ve done, although I haven’t done much actual cutting up of my paintings--if I’ve got a good painting I’m not gonna cut it up,” he says with a laugh.

“The cutup method works on the same principle operating in John Cage’s ideas about randomness and chance, and I was aware of Cage when I began working with Brion--in fact, I knew Cage, who was a very charming man.

“I didn’t show my work until Brion died, because he was touchy and I didn’t want to intrude on him in that way. He was a neglected painter, and understandably that was a sensitive point with him. He was a very great painter, though, and while I’ve been more financially successful, I could never compete with him in terms of the quality of my work. I don’t worry this exhibition will suggest he was part of some school led by me--I expect it will be the contrary.”

Asked how his practice as a visual artist relates to his writing, Burroughs says: “Visual art and writing don’t exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other, because each is capable of things the other can’t do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.

“Speaking for myself, art differs from writing in that I never know what I’m going to paint until I paint it, so it’s almost like automatic writing. A writer, on the other hand, can’t help but know what he’s going to write, because the activity demands a degree of premeditation,” says Burroughs, who is currently working on a collection of previously unpublished autobiographical writings titled “Evil River” (the title is from a poem by Paul Verlaine that includes the line “My past was an evil river”).

Interpretations of Burroughs’ art differ among longtime friends familiar with it.

“I see significant differences in how he operates as a visual artist and as a writer,” Giorno says. “There’s an intellectual precision in the books that’s relaxed a bit in his art. The books are intensely complicated, while the paintings are subjective, visceral and more direct.”

Writer Nelson Lyon, who befriended Burroughs in 1981 when he was working for “Saturday Night Live” and Burroughs appeared on the show, believes that “he explores the same territory as a writer and an artist--it’s all part of the same artistic pilgrimage.

“As to whether William would be having this exhibition if he didn’t have the literary reputation he has--you gotta be a star to get access to this kind of forum,” says Lyon, who has lent three Burroughs works to the show. “I would add, however, that his voice is very much needed right now, because we’re living in an oppressive decade alarmingly similar to the ‘50s.”

Collector Stanley Grinstein, who has also lent several works to LACMA, agrees that the exhibition is timely: “Because the subject matter of William’s work is so controversial, America spent years trying to sweep him under the rug. As it turns out, he was simply ahead of his time, and he’s lived long enough that the world is finally catching up with him.

“He’s always played with visuals. In that regard he reminds me of William Blake, who was a painter before he was a poet,” adds Grinstein, who co-owns the graphics workshop Gemini G.E.L. with Sidney Felsen and met Burroughs in the mid-’70s when the author collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg on a series of lithographs made at Gemini. “William stayed with us while he was in town working with Bob, and we had a party for him that attracted the wildest mixture of people. He’s touched people from many different creative disciplines.”

Among those affected by Burroughs is notorious underground cartoonist S. Clay Wilson, who met him in Berkeley in the ‘70s and subsequently did illustrations for three Burroughs books (“The Wild Boys,” “Cities of the Red Night” and “Tornado Alley”).

“I was well on my way to developing my own style by the time I discovered Burroughs, but when I read him I thought, ‘Here’s a guy who writes like I want to draw,’ ” recalls the Bay Area artist, whose work is included in the LACMA show. “The idea of mad doctors, various subcultures having at each other, his distillation of the rotten world we live in, his personal experiences, nightmares, dreams and visions--put it all in a blender and you have a Burroughs book. His writing is very pictorial, so it’s fun to illustrate, and I like his paintings too--they remind me of a hybrid of Mark Tobey, Zen Buddhism and Abstract Expressionism.”

Measured against the outrageous work of many artists who cite him as an influence, Burroughs has surprisingly conservative taste in art.

“I like Picasso and the French Impressionists,” he says. “As to what I have on the walls of my home, I have works by Brion, some of my own and a drawing by Ralph Steadman of people sailing around the sky in gliders and balloons that exudes an odd nostalgia for the future.”

The future, of course, is something he has warned about for years:

“Practically everything about the future as I envision it alarms me. Runaway inflation, drugs used as a pretext to further empower the police--it’s all very ominous. They can take away your property without your having been convicted of any crime! The depletion of natural resources--it’s just one thing after another,” says Burroughs, who makes a point of identifying himself as an animal-rights activist and conservationist and has six greatly beloved cats. (He and Gysin collaborated on the book “The Cat Inside,” a homage to cats published in 1986.)

If Burroughs looks to the future with dread, he is none too starry-eyed about the past either.

“The world wasn’t a more tolerant place when I was a young man. Rather, they simply sidestepped all the issues,” he recalls. “Homosexuality and drugs weren’t spoken of, and nobody wanted to know that the two chaps who ran the antique store were, you know, strange, so they just put it out of their minds.

“Things are different now, of course, and I’ve witnessed vast changes over the course of my life. The most significant change I’ve seen was a very dark moment in human history: Hiroshima. When you put pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki beside images from the ‘20s, you can see how we’ve shifted as a people from security to complete insecurity. I hold the scientific community largely responsible for this too--I’m not partial to scientists at all.”

Burroughs once commented that “my entire life has been a struggle to resist the dark force.”

Asked to explain precisely what the dark force is, he says: “It changes from day to day, but basically it’s just the worst aspects of myself or of any phenomena, either inner and outer--and this force has played a role in my work. I would add, however, that there’s great joy in my work too, in characters like Dr. Benway, for instance. I was living in Tangier when I was working on the manuscript where he first appeared, and the people next door used to tell me they could hear me through the walls, laughing as I worked.”

Burroughs never expected Dr. Benway, or any of his myriad renegade creations, to take up residence in the hallowed halls of a county museum, but John Giorno says: “I’m sure he’s happy about this exhibition. We’ve yet to see what it will be to have all his work together, but I’m sure he’ll be quite moved.”

Any pleasure Burroughs takes in visiting Los Angeles to see his retrospective will be tempered by the recent loss of his longtime friend Timothy Leary, who died here on May 31.

“I spoke to Timothy on the phone a few hours before he died,” Burroughs reports. “He said, ‘Is it true?’ then he told me he loved me. I said, ‘I love you too,’ and he lapsed back into a coma, then died a short time later. I’m told it was peaceful and know he approached his death without fear, because he believed in an afterlife, as do I. I believe in God too.”

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“Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Visual Arts,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. On view Thursday through Oct. 6. Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (213) 857-6000.