Brion Gysin
The multimedia artist, poet and novelist Brion
Gysin may be the most influential cultural figure of the twentieth century that
most people have never heard of.
Gysin (1916-1986) was an English-born,
Canadian-raised, naturalized American of Swiss descent, who lived most of his
life in Morocco and France Paris in the 1930s, lived in the "interzone" of
Tangier in the 1950s and traveled the Algerian Sahara with Sheltering Sky author Paul Bowles before moving into the legendary
Beat Hotel in Paris
Gysin's ideas influenced generations of
artists, musicians and writers, among them David Bowie, Keith Haring, Patti
Smith, Michael Stipe, Genesis P-Orridge, John Giorno and Brian Jones of the
Rolling Stones. None was touched more profoundly than William S. Burroughs, who
said admiringly of Gysin: "There was something dangerous about what he was
doing."
It was Gysin who introduced the Rolling Stones
to the exotica of Morocco Alice
B. Toklas' cookbook, promising "ecstatic reveries and
extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes." It was
Gysin who introduced Burroughs to an automatic writing method called the
cut-up, a literary progenitor to sampling. And it was Gysin who developed with
Ian Sommerville The Dream Machine, a
device that allowed people, with the flick of a switch, to access altered
states of consciousness without drugs.
Didier Devillez
Galerie Didier
Devillez, Brussels, 2014
GALERIE DIDIER DEVILLEZ
53 rue Emmanuel Van Driessche - 1050 Bruxelles (Belgique)
Tél./Fax +32 (0)475 931 935
