Even more than William Burroughs’s frequently stated belief in Brion Gysin, Ian MacFadyen’s essay — the depth of it, the weight of it, the insights and style of it — is the truest ballast of the BG sailship.

Many thanks for this monumental essay, which I am still savoring. I spent an uncrowded weekday afternoon at the Gysin show at the New Museum; when I finally left, in a sort of dream machined trance, I walked north toward Houston and I was absolutely blown away to see the graffiti wall at Bowery and Houston–from half a block away it was a veritable calligraffiti of street fire (it can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKoROLfQF28). Up close the wall was hopelessly banal, but at first sight from a distance it spoke in Gysinian tongues, as if the show had drifted out of the building to take over the city.

Such an astounding and captivating presentation of Brion’s legacy, by Ian MacFadyen! Its a great pleasure to read.

Just a fun thought:
Brion seems, to me, to be demonstrating an anticipation of the Visual Morph technique for pictorial use in 1977. The first motion picture Visual Morph that Wikipedia mentions in their morphing essay, occurred in 1986. His 1977 gelatin silver print card,”ThreeMinds” depicts a visual photographic analog transformation of Gysin into Burroughs. The middle frame of the transformation is not a simple double-exposure of the two but instead seems to be composed of carefully crafted segmental(digital-like) cutouts with precisional blending and warping. His analog process seems to be almost algorithmic in nature. It may be seen as the second artwork in this presentation by the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

http://media.lawrence.com/swf/070731burroughs_artwork/index.html