WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS | Billy Parker

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS: an analysis of destruction.

Shotguns, scribbles and apparitions. Billy Parker visits October Gallery to read between the lines of rarely shown visual works by novelist William S. Burroughs.

I’m wiping away the sweat dripping down my forehead from a speed walk on the first sunny day of the year. My nose is pressed against a Plexiglass casing that mimics bullet proof glass. My eyes squint through nasal fog condensation in order to scan swirling pastel red and yellows across an intricately fractured wooden board. It contains Ten Gauge City (1988), one of William S. Burroughs’ notorious shotgun paintings: a series of late-career works which involved the artist lining up spray paint cans in front of wooden boards, shooting, and watching paint explode across ruptured surfaces. It stands proudly as the protagonist of the exhibition, jutting out from one of the walls. I was mystically drawn to the work, as though the ghost of Burroughs cast a spell that caused my zombified body to float towards it. Kathelin Gray, the curator of the exhibition and longtime friend of the artist, explains that after their creation, Burroughs would spend days forensically analysing the shattered boards and shrapnel through a magnifying glass, searching for where the energy of such a violent material interaction was stored, or, where it escaped to.

On September 6th 1951, Burroughs attempted to channel William Tell in a drinking game involving a gun and a glass balanced on his wife, Joan Vollmer’s head. He aimed for the ‘apple’, missed and shot her dead. Despite his innumerable homosexual affairs, “Vollmer was the true love of his life and the only person he ever shared a bed with” (to actually sleep), informs Gray. I found myself taken by the potency of an artist choosing to use such an aggressive and destructive weapon as the main tool of creation, especially when contextualised with the manslaughter of his wife via the exact same process.

The works on show at October Gallery encompass a literary and visual practice that appears to deal with the lifelong repercussions of taking another’s life. The two large spaces of the gallery are hung full of rare visual works made as Burroughs’ approached his own death. Gray explains that the artist was investigating the nature and pattern of thought itself. In Untitled (1990), Helpless Pieces in the Game He Plays (1989), Free Shot (1989), and in his File Folder series, illegible words are crammed onto empty space. I ask what the works spell, and Gray enters into a GCSE drama-esque game of phonetics, twisting her head as she deciphers: fffllllaaaaaannnnn… dddaarrrrddddddd….dessssssss… mmmmaaaannnnnnn… haaaaannnnnnn. She highlights the incantatory nature of Burrough’s work and triggers memories of the infamous time travel episode of SpongeBob SquarePants where Squidward becomes lost in a void space of thought and the word ‘alone’ is stretched and pulled until it suffocates the screen [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ac97zkyu4]. A visual relic that continues to haunt me to this day.

The series of works entitled File Folder look like children’s drawings: I’ve seen almost identical iterations in the supermarket bags stuffed full of paper-based childhood paraphernalia that parents keep under beds and in sheds. But, when you contextualise it as the work of a 78-year-old man who had written 28 literary works – someone who had stared at the aesthetic structure of words every day of his life – they become visual artefacts of Burroughs’ analysis and experimentation of the shape of words; language itself is bent before your eyes. Although I had read much of Burroughs’ writing, I was completely unaware of his visual art practice, and as with many of Burroughs’ literary works I can barely cling on. In Western Lands, each paragraph whisks you into one realm of thought then spits you out lost into the next. In the exhibition, each work guides you into a new investigation.

I flicked through some of Western Lands, his 1987 novel inspired by the ancient Egyptian book of the dead that completed a trilogy including Cities of the Red Night (1981) and The Place of Dead Roads (1983). It was written during the same period as many of the works on show and explores the ‘after-death state’. Burroughs is an artist of nuanced focus: the structure of Western Lands mimics the splintering of wood by splintering the brain. There is an incessant attempt to discover the unknown by fracturing the fabric of whichever medium he utilises. “Burroughs was obsessed with intelligence, of humans, of animals, of objects” [Gray]. The works were unplanned and autonomous, not descriptions, but investigations . He made the works and then hunted through their fabric, searching for portals, doors and wormholes into other energy planes, for evidence of something else. The works ooze with attempt-incantation, hands and skeletons reaching out of flattened dimensions in Burn Unit (1987) and The Furnace (1989). Within you can locate Burroughs obsession with mysticism, the occult and magic.“He wanted to know what you don’t know that you know”[Gray].

The exhibition offers a new insight into the intricacies of one of the best literary minds of the 20th century. I wish the works could float in empty bleached nothingness, appearing and disappearing episodically, questioning and bending the nature of reality.

PLASTER MAGAZINE

April 2025