Brion Gysin, Le dernier musée @ Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Brion Gysin, Dreammachine, 1979

In his time, Brion Gysin was vital to the development of mid-century experiments in poetry, painting, and other media. The Musée d'art Moderne has staged a retrospective of Gysin who today looks like a marginal figure, backgrounded by the reputations of his contemporaries such as William Burroughs. It's difficult to know where to start the conversation about Gysin's work because he was so multifaceted as an artist. He worked in painting, photography, music, poetry. But no matter what medium he was working with, conceptually, he was driven by a desire to transcend. Gysin's constant striving for an art to exceed the material and institutional structures is palpable and admirable.

Brion Gysin, Magic Mushrooms, 1961

He had an early fascination with hieroglyphs, particularly in the form of Japanese and Arabic scripts. He saw these scripts, repeated, read from right to left, bottom to top, as a way of breaking out of familiar structures. In addition, he was drawn to their rhythm that he connected to a kind of unconscious expression, otherwise found in LSD tripping. When exploring a script as artistic figure, Gysin would always layer it with a grid, capturing the tension between structure and freedom, the physical and the transcendental. 

Brion Gysin, Naked Lunch, 1959

Another striking tension found in his work is that between the highly conceptual, thus intellectual, and a reach for a beyond. They are also visually abstract, and aesthetically beautiful, often with vibrant colours used to express highly intellectual ideas. Similarly, because there is no more to be seen up close than at a distance, the works tend to have an overall cohesion in spite of the methods of fragmentation that Gysin pursued. The exhibition emphasizes Gysin's contribution to and his work's resonance with Beat Poetry, particularly with the cutting up of written texts to create surrealist visual poetry. That said, rather than admiring his connections to the Beats, I was much more interested in the sheer breadth of his artistic pursuits, his ability to work in many different media, and to incorporate many different traditions and inspirations. Perhaps his interests were too broad and this is why he is posed as attractive for who he knew? 

Brion Gysin, Le dernier Musée, 1973

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Le dernier Musée, a series of photographs presented in thumbnail form taken from his window in rue Saint Martin as he watched the Pompidou Centre being built. The familiar structures and forms of the Pompidou centre echo the grids, squares and lines that preoccupied Gysin across his career. It is as though the architecture was itself influenced by his thinking. There was also something very nostalgic in these colourful contact sheets, as the images witness a moment, not just when the Pompidou was being built, but a turning point in the history and culture of the city. 

Brion Gysin and his Dreammachine, 1961
Perforated metal, electronic motor, light

It is also worth noting that because Brion Gysin is not as well known as some of the artists he influenced and those who were his inspiration, the retrospective at the Musée d'art Moderne was almost empty, while there was a long line to enter the Lee Miller in the adjacent galleries. Given the overcrowding of many of Paris's exhibitions, the slow and relaxed walk through this fascinating exhibition is a welcome respite.