He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed.
It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "gras" script and Arabic writing. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began frequenting Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Dora Maar. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy.
On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton who ordered the poet Paul Éluard to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world.
In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called "The 1001 Nights", with his friend Mohamed Hamri, who was the cook. Gysin hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientèle that included Burroughs. Losing the business in 1958, the restaurant closed permanently and Gysin returned to live in Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that would become famous as the Beat Hotel.
Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada technique by accident. This initially evolved from some discussions with Burroughs about techniques of writing and from the 'tape to the wall' approach Burroughs used for writing/editing "Naked Lunch." Gysin, always intent on turning painter's techniques directly into writing, brought the "cut-up" technique into being and this experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American literature.
With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", the flicker device uses alpha waves in the 8-16 Hz range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.
In Later years...
He also worked extensively with noted jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy.
He recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring himself singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Don Cherry, Elli Medeiros, Steve Lacy, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more.
As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies.
A heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously in 1986.
Made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985, Gysin died a year later of lung cancer. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times fittingly described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks"
(Illustration: TimN)
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