special edition accompanying the exhibition: "The name is Burroughs, expanded media"

ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art March 24 - August 12, 2012
Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Sammlung Falckenberg, March 16 - August 18, 2013

ISBN: 978-3-86335-229-5

Axel Heil, Ian MacFadyen

Publisher: König, Köln, 2013

Text: English
190 pages : Ill.

Works such as Naked Lunch or The Soft Machine have made William Seward Burroughs (1917–1997) a world-renowned author. He further developed Brion Gysin’s method of “cut-up” and therewith was a driving force for the literature of the second half of the twentieth century. It is far less known that Burroughs also worked as a multimedia artist for many decades and created an extensive and polymorphic œuvre consisting of experiments with audio tape, film, and photography, as well as painting, collages, and the legendary “shotgun paintings”.

It is the intention of this book, and the exhibitions in Karlsruhe and Hamburg, to give the opportunity of experiencing the visionary explosiveness of the literary œuvre of William S. Burroughs but also to demonstrate the impact of his ideas and experiments on a world-wide network of artists in the diverse areas of literature, music, painting, photography, video, and film.