Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts

William S. Burroughs, the Beat iconoclast turned cultural icon, has been practicing a postmodern voodoo alchemy, via his cut-up and fold-in techniques, that accurately reflects our fragmented, discontinuous experience of a universe that is fluid, undetermined, tangential, and absurd. His novels, once banned and condemned, have over the years earned him membership in the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters and the title Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France.
Now Robert A. Sobieszek, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s curator of photography, demonstrates how Burroughs’s creative practice extends to and permeates most of the arts, how his work has paralleled and in some cases anticipated significant developments in painting, assemblage, music, sculpture, video, and film. Sobieszek discusses and offers illustrations of Burroughs’s extensive body of visual art – including his collages, photomontages, sculptural assemblages, shotgunned paintings, and text-image works – as well as the work of artists with whom Burroughs has either collaborated or had an affinity, including Brion Gysin, Keith Haring, Philip Taaffe, and Robert Rauschenberg.