Everything I've read, seen or heard by Gysin has been absorbing & very
often funny, Doug. By coincidence, I received a CD yesterday that you
doubtless all know already, on the Other Minds label, 10+2:12 American
Text Sound Pieces, with a great short piece "Come to free the words"
that is actually the soundtrack from a piece he did for the BBC in the
UK in the 60s - you don't miss the images at all, it is so (literally)
graphic - (there are also pieces by Cage, Coolidge, Giono, O'Gallagher -
hilarious - among others). The only Gysin book I own is riveting from
beginning to end, interviews & other documents, a few pictures: *Here to
Go*. Wish I'd seen that exhibition.
PS. After school in Canada, he went to a place called Downside College,
England. I have the feeling I should have gone there too.
mj
Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Gyson grew up in Edmonton Alberta, which he couldn't wait to escape,
> but a few years ago, the (then) Edmonton Art Gallery held an
> exhibition of his works, & it was amazingly wide ranging &
> interesting. His paintings, for example, as well as performances on
> video. There was a sense of artistic control in even the most 'chance'
> works (as there is in Cage [for me], too).
>
> I found a number of his abstract paintings & drawings truly powerful.
>
> Doug
> On 22-Aug-07, at 11:58 AM, Barry Alpert wrote:
>
>> I was obliquely referencing Hugo Ball and other Dadaists, who performed
>> simultaneist and phonetic verse in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire. Brion
>> Gysin,
>> whose father was Swiss, shared innovative formal possibilities he had
>> gleaned in Europe with William S. Burroughs. The range and invention of
>> both BG & WSB make figures like Henry Taylor and Donald Justice seem
>> very
>> minor, even when they surprisingly try out chance methods. You can read
>> WSB's essay "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" here:
>>
>> http://www.ubu.com/papers/burroughs_gysin.html
>>
>>
>> Barry Alpert
>>
>>
>> On Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:43:58 +0100, Lynda Nash <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Wasn't there a famous writer thatused to cut their work up, throw it in
>>> the air and then reassemble it - or have I been dreaming?
>>>
>>> I think I might try this method myself next!
>>
>>
>>
> Douglas Barbour
> 11655 - 72 Avenue NW
> Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
> (780) 436 3320
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest book: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>
>
> Every time Dick Cheney smiles
> an angel in heaven
> gets waterboarded.
>
> Jon Stewart
>
--
We went down to the sea
all the poets together
and gave ourselves up to the waters
in various positions of loss:
Nathaniel Tarn
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