"Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" at the New Museum – artnet Magazine

by Art Fag City on July 25, 2010 · 5 comments Fresh Links!

  • "Brion Gysin: Dream Machine" at the New Museum – artnet Magazine – "…Is [Brion Gysin], as curator Laura Hoptman insists, a role model for today’s artists? This I cannot accept. I’d even say that to pitch him this way does some violence to the fragile, otherworldly weirdness of Gysin’s works, which are relics of a world that no longer exists — for bad and for good." – Ben Davis

{ 5 comments }

tom moody July 26, 2010 at 1:28 pm

Ben Davis’ critical method: (1) attack pompous claims in museum press release; (2) give long history of artist; (3) blame artist for being insufficiently Marxist; (4) suffuse descriptions of work with Davis’ own world-weariness and boredom. Not sure how Davis knows with such certainty that Gysin isn’t a role model for today’s artists. “Mental spelunking” sounds pretty attractive as a refuge from kneejerk leftist academic cant. Solo Gysin may not be as influential as Gysin/Burroughs but the man is not in need of debunking any more than he is in need for posthumous inflation. The jpegs of newspaper cutups with superimposed grid patterns look pretty contemporary to these eyes (I’m gonna, like, post them to my blog!) Internet-friendliness is rather the opposite of what we think of when he hear the phrase a “world that no longer exists.”

tom moody July 26, 2010 at 9:28 am

Ben Davis’ critical method: (1) attack pompous claims in museum press release; (2) give long history of artist; (3) blame artist for being insufficiently Marxist; (4) suffuse descriptions of work with Davis’ own world-weariness and boredom. Not sure how Davis knows with such certainty that Gysin isn’t a role model for today’s artists. “Mental spelunking” sounds pretty attractive as a refuge from kneejerk leftist academic cant. Solo Gysin may not be as influential as Gysin/Burroughs but the man is not in need of debunking any more than he is in need for posthumous inflation. The jpegs of newspaper cutups with superimposed grid patterns look pretty contemporary to these eyes (I’m gonna, like, post them to my blog!) Internet-friendliness is rather the opposite of what we think of when he hear the phrase a “world that no longer exists.”

Colin Roe Ledbetter July 27, 2010 at 6:08 am

I experienced the dream machine once when i fell asleep on my couch watching the 27″ iMac iTunes visualizer and my fireplace was going at night.

Tom Moody, great review.

Colin Roe Ledbetter July 27, 2010 at 2:08 am

I experienced the dream machine once when i fell asleep on my couch watching the 27″ iMac iTunes visualizer and my fireplace was going at night.

Tom Moody, great review.

Dreamachine December 18, 2010 at 8:42 am

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