Description
Brion Gysin (1916–1986) was one of the great interdisciplinary innovators of the 20th century—painter, poet, inventor, and cultural provocateur. His “Dream Machine,” created with Ian Sommerville, became both an artwork and a tool for altered perception: a kinetic sculpture designed to stimulate the mind through flickering light. This lavishly illustrated catalog, Brion Gysin: Dream Machine, was published to accompany the landmark 2010 exhibition at the New Museum, tracing Gysin’s influence on visual art, sound, and countercultural practice. Essays and plates bring his collage work, calligraphic painting, and light experiments into sharp focus, situating him firmly as a key figure in postwar avant-garde art.
Gysin’s relationship with William S. Burroughs is central to his legend and to this volume. Together they developed the “cut-up” technique—an aleatory method of slicing and reassembling text that destabilized linear narrative and reshaped literary modernism. The book reproduces collaborative works like The Third Mind and presents their shared visual experiments in photography, collage, and typewritten manipulation. For Burroughs, Gysin was the great catalyst: “Brion Gysin is the only man I’ve ever respected.” This catalog captures the artistic dialogue between the two, showing how Gysin’s restless creativity reverberated through Burroughs’ writing and the broader counterculture.
A must for collectors of Gysin, Burroughs, and postwar avant-garde art—an essential document of the Dream Machine and the cut-up legacy.
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