Scope and Contents

The books exhibited were part of the collection of Arthur and Elaine Cohen, owners of Ex Libris, NYC. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This catalogue, edited by Robert A. Sobieszek, curator of photography at LACMA, was issued for an exhibition in 1996. It emphasizes the importance and influence of the painted and poetic works as well as the life of William Burroughs and his collaborator, Brion Gysin. In his preface Sobieszek writes that "Burroughs is far more than a writer of imaginative prose and speculative fiction. His revolutionary literary tactics have led him to margins of activity where genres cease to matter, where the distinctions between words and images blend together, where paragraphs become filmic montage, and where a shotgun blast is the same as a painting. At the core of Burroughs's art is the 'cut-up' technique that he and Brion Gysin developed following the appearance of Naked Lunch. While loosely related to the more traditional techniques of collage, photomontage, and text-image experiments used by modern artists, Burroughs's cut- up strategy inaugurated an essentially postmodern shift in the...

Scope and Contents

The book consists of an long essay on the history of word-image works begining with Mallarme's "Un Coup de Des..." to Concrete Poetry by A. Schug. The folding of the book is similar to Cendrars and Delauney's "Transsiberian Railway." The latter is reproduced in color as a facsimile in the same dimensions when this catalogue is fully opened. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.