William S. Burroughs: an analysis of destruction

I am standing in the middle of ‘William S. Burroughs’ in October Gallery, wiping away the sweat dripping down my forehead from my speed walk on the first sunny day of the year. My nasal fog clouds the glass that protects Ten Gauge City (1988) and my eyes scan across the fractured wooden board coloured with pastel red and yellow swirls. It stands proudly as the protagonist of the exhibition, jutting out from one of the walls in a Plexiglass casing that mimics bullet proof glass. I was mystically drawn to the work, as though the ghost of Burroughs cast a spell that caused my zombified body to float towards it. This is one example of Burroughs’ notorious shotgun paintings, a series of late-career works which involved him lining up spray paint cans in front of wooden boards, firing guns at them and watching paint explode across their ruptured surfaces. Kathelin Gray, the curator of the exhibition and a longtime friend of Burroughs, explains that he would then spend days forensically analysing the shattered boards and shrapnel through a magnifying glass to discover where the energy of such a violent material interaction was stored, or, where it escaped to.

On September 6th 1951, William S. Burroughs was channeling William Tell in a drinking game involving a gun and a glass balanced on his wife, Joan Vollmer’s head. He missed and accidentally shot her, resulting in her death. Gray informs me Vollmer was the true love of his life (despite his innumerable homosexual affairs) and the only person he ever shared a bed with (to actually sleep). Burroughs was burdened with a deep regret for the rest of his life.

Perhaps it’s because we live in the UK, where we are relatively shielded from daily exposure to guns, but I found myself taken by the potency of Burroughs using such an aggressive and destructive weapon as his main tool of creation. It becomes both haunting and sorrowful when put in the context of his wife’s tragic death. On show in this exhibition is a literary and visual practice that appears to deal with the lifelong repercussions of taking life. The two large spaces in the October gallery are hung full of rare visual works made towards the end of Burroughs’ life. Gray explains that the artist was investigating the nature and pattern of thought itself. In Untitled (1990), Helpless Pieces in the Game He Plays (1989), Free Shot (1989), and in his File Folder series, illegible words are crammed onto empty space. I ask Gray if she knows what the works spell, and she enters into a GCSE drama-esque game of phonetics, twisting her head as she deciphers: fffllllaaaaaannnnn… dddaarrrrddddddd….dessssssss… mmmmaaaannnnnnn… haaaaannnnnnn. She highlights the incantatory nature of Burrough’s work and reminds me of the infamous time travel episode of SpongeBob SquarePants when Squidward becomes lost in a void space of thought and the word ‘alone’ is stretched and pulled until it suffocates the screen. A visual relic that continues to haunt me today.

I’m not going to say that the works entitled File Folder do not look like child’s drawings. In fact, I think I saw something almost identical in the box of paper-based childhood paraphernalia that my parents kept in their attic. Although I had read much of Burroughs’ writing, I was completely unaware of his visual art practice until seeing this exhibition. One of the things that most excited me about the show was analysing the differences and parallels between his visual and literary art. When you contextualise it as the work of a 78-year-old man who had written 28 literary works – someone who had stared at the aesthetic structure of words each day of his life – Burroughs’ interest in experimenting with the visual construction of words makes sense; language itself bends before your very eyes. With many of Burroughs’ literary works I can barely cling on. Just like in Western Lands where each paragraph whisks you into one realm of thought, then spits you out into the next, each work in the show guides you into a new investigation.

I flicked through some of Western Lands, his 1987 novel inspired by the ancient Egyptian book of the dead that completed a trilogy that includes Cities of the Red Night (1981) and The Place of Dead Roads (1983). It was written during the same period as many of the works on show and explores the ‘after-death state’. Burroughs is an artist of nuanced focus, and the very structure of Western Lands mimics the splintering of wood by splintering the brain. In both his literary and visual works there is an incessant attempt to discover the unknown by manipulating the fabric of the medium he utilises. “Burroughs was obsessed with intelligence, of humans, of animals, of objects”, says Gray. The works were unplanned and autonomous, not made to describe something, but used as a tool for investigation. He supposedly made the works and then hunted through their fabric, searching for portals, doors and wormholes into other energy planes, or for evidence of ‘something else’. The works ooze with attempted incantation, with hands and skeletons reaching out of flattened dimensions for example in Burn Unit (1987) and The Furnace (1989) – you can plainly see Burroughs obsession with mysticism, the occult and magic. Gray explains that “he wanted to know what you don’t know that you know”.

Strangely, the first question that slipped from my lips was “was he comfortable with his sexuality? I don’t sense any sexual discomfort in the works”. Gray explains that he was, that his sexuality never came into question throughout his life. I found this surprising. For his queer contemporaries, for example Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), homosexual discomfort is encoded within every line, every word. I became jealous of Burroughs’ freedom of sexual expression, its lack of requirement.

These paintings offer a new insight into the intricacies of one of the best literary minds of the 20th century and hold such vastness within them. I’m left wishing the works could float in empty bleached nothingness, appearing and disappearing episodically, questioning and bending the nature of reality for, they live beyond, in the realm of thought.