# William S Burroughs’s art: ‘He said, I killed the only woman I loved. Then broke down sobbing’

Notorious for his drug-fuelled literary experiments and the fact that he shot his partner, beat writer Burroughs also made art inspired by the climate crisis

One day 51 years ago, out in the wilds of New Mexico,  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  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.




“Because of that, I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty. I was a radical, a non-conformist, a rebel,” says Gray. “I was on the right side of things, because of my love of Burroughs.”

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 , 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  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.”




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 , 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  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.”




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 , 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  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.”







I tell Gray this reminds me of the  of  who in 1959 launched this art movement by throwing , 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.”

“By the grace of the universe,” wrote  in his novel , “I could see that as in the last days of the world the great disaster might be the sacrifice of man. And I could see that man might have a price to pay. And I could see that if it be not the price of his own life, then the price of his soul. So I could see that the world was not the world to all men but the world to some men, to those who lived in the world or who did not live in the world at all.”

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.”

* William S Burroughs is at the , until 5 April
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