Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw, The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., New York 2012, page 662
William Burroughs sees the relationship between visual art and writing in the following way: “Visual art and writing don’t exist on an aesthetic hierarchy that positions one above the other because each is capable of things the other can’t do at all. Sometimes one picture is equal to 30 pages of discourse, just as there are things images are completely incapable of communicating.”
Aside from writing, Burroughs was also a prolific visual artist creating thousands of artworks, including his famed “Shotgun Paintings”. He was a primary figure of the Beat Generation, most notably known as the author of Naked Lunch in which he used the “cut up” writing technique popularized by the Dadaists in the 1920s.
Ted Morgan writes about Burroughs the visual artist, “Even though he had come to painting late and without training, he was using techniques that he had developed in the cut-ups many years ago.” The same can be said of RX Morphine Dawn as having the feeling of being “cut up” and put back in a structured composition within the limitations of the size of the screen; here he has brought together of a jumble of objects, some recognizable others distorted like would be seen in a dream or hallucination.
William Seward Burroughs - RX Morphine Dawn | Cowley Abbott
