One day 51 years ago, out in the wilds of New Mexico, Kathelin Gray asked a question of her hero, the writer and artist William S Burroughs, whom she had just met. “William, I have read your books and I must know: what is your attitude to women?”
The question had been eating away at Gray for the best part of a decade. As a teenage babysitter, she read Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch and was blown away by it. “The very yuckiness of the imagery, the critique of predatory capitalism, the degrading sex and violence – all that spoke to me,” she says.
A few years later she invited her hero to give a lecture at a ranch near Santa Fe where she and some like-minded souls had established the countercultural Institute for Ecotechnics, and he had accepted. But how could she square this inspirational writer with the man who killed his partner Joan Vollmer during a party at a friend’s Mexico City apartment in 1951?
“Put that glass on your head, Joanie,” Burroughs is reported to have said at the time. “Let me show the boys what a great shot old Bill is.” Burroughs fired one shot from a Czech-made Star .380 pistol, missed the glass and killed her. The local papers wrote up the tragedy as a William Tell prank gone wrong. He was never prosecuted.
And yet, even today, at a time when the late writer and artist is coming to the attention of a new generation thanks to the film adaptation of his story Queer starring Daniel Craig, the suggestion that he was a lowlife heroin- and-booze addicted woman-hater who intended to shoot his common-law wife (the pair were not married) won’t go away. A recent profile, for instance, described him as Joan Vollmer’s murderer. “It was an accident,” counters Gray. “Of course he didn’t intend to kill her.”
How did Burroughs answer your question, I ask Gray? “He stood stock still, looked into my eyes and said ‘I killed the only woman I ever loved’. Then he broke down sobbing.” That evening, Burroughs entranced Gray and her compadres with a lecture given inside the Institute’s geodesic dome on the theme of lingua-technis.
Gray is recalling her meeting with Burroughs to me over coffee at the October Gallery in London, where she has curated an exhibition of rarely seen Burroughs artworks, made in the last decade of his life, from spray paint, acrylics – and gunshot. Until his death in 1997, she and Burroughs were close friends and she has spent much of her life since curating his art. “There was nothing misogynistic about him at all,” he says. “As a straight woman” – Burroughs was gay – “I felt nothing but comfortable with him. He was a very sensitive soul, and that comes out in all his art, literary and visual.”
Indeed, in a catalogue essay, Gray wrote. “Burroughs could not bear the idea that anyone would suffer pain. He identified with patients of burn units, he identified with the endangered lemurs of Madagascar.” On the walls above us as we chat is his 1987 painting Burn Unit, a howl of red paint overlaid with crudely daubed human faces evidently in pain; above my head is his photomontage of lemurs in a flaming hellscape, expressing Burroughs’s outrage at how slash-and-burn agriculture was destroying the animals’ Malagasy habitat and driving them to extinction.
Gray reminds me that in his 1991 novella Ghost of Chance, Burroughs meditated on whether our species could ever live in harmony with other life forms. For Gray, this compassionate late text poses a question that obsessed him: “What is a human destiny that would be life-enhancing, not destructive to other beings? Perhaps,” Gray reflects, “clues to that destiny will be found in dreams, in what’s called subconscious, in altered states.”
What Gray loves about Burroughs’ art is how it always involves an element of chance, which she recognises as one of his manifold tactics for exploring the subconscious, entering transcendental realms or simply overcoming societal conditioning and egotistical control. That’s why, she explains, when his artist friend Brion Gysin showed Burroughs his textual cut-up method in the late 1950s, he decided to adopt the practice in his writing – in turn inspiring David Bowie to randomise his lyrics.
It’s why too that, far from eschewing guns after Vollmer’s death, Burroughs turned his studio into something akin to a rifle range, peppering paper, wood and canvases with bullets. Here at the October Gallery, several artworks betray his continued fascination with firepower. There is a free-standing plexiglass vitrine holding the bullet-ridden wreckage of a piece of painted wood. “The shotgun blast,” wrote one critic, “releases the little spirits compacted into the layers of wood, releases the colours of the paints to splash out in unforeseeable and unpredictable images and patterns.”
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I tell Gray this reminds me of the auto-destructive art of Gustav Metzger who in 1959 launched this art movement by throwing hydrochloric acid at a nylon sheet on London’s South Bank, thus creating voids in the surface akin to Burroughs’ bullet holes. Metzger and Burroughs were friends, Gray tells me, and no wonder: the former was a Holocaust survivor, CND activist and lifelong foe of human destructive power; the latter, Gray reckons, was deranged into artistic expression by the advent of the atomic age, whereby humans finally had the power finally destroy themselves and their planet, fulfilling the logic of what Burroughs once called “the death trap of the industrial revolution”.
“In thrall to the world market,” wrote Gray in a catalogue essay, “humanity accelerates its rapacious behaviour using rationalisation … to justify the ravages of predatory capitalism. In his life and work, Burroughs deconstructed logic and rationalism to pursue other strategies of thought.”
Fair enough, but the gun thing still troubles me. A 1992 work hanging nearby is called Brion’s Birthday and consists of a marker sketch of his friend, his midriff riddled with bullet holes. Nearby, Warhol: A Portrait in TV Dots from the same year looks like a perforated rifle range target that, by happenstance, depicts the eponymous artist nearly shot dead in 1968 by Valerie Solanas. “Europeans,” says Gray, “always have a trouble with Americans and their guns. William was a very ordinary American in that sense.”
Why is she putting on this show of Burroughs right now? “Because he was on the money,” she replies. “As someone else said of him, he was a Nostradamus – certainly when it came to climate catastrophe, which he foresaw clearly. He imagined, too, that anyone could achieve inner and outer liberation from the ravages being inflicted on the world. That’s why his art matters to me – and why it’s worth seeing right now.”
