{"id":10625,"date":"2025-06-05T15:51:31","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T15:51:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/?p=10625"},"modified":"2025-06-05T15:51:31","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T15:51:31","slug":"mohr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/2025\/06\/05\/mohr\/","title":{"rendered":"Brion Gysin Out of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

Claude Mohr is an art history Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia studying the histories of modern and contemporary art. Currently, he is interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, focusing in particular on the relationship between transgender studies and Surrealism. Claude was a recipient of a 2024 Rose Library Short-Term Award Fellowship.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Claude Mohr<\/p><\/div>\n

Brion Gysin (1916\u20131986) was a prolific painter, performance artist, writer, and sound poet, perhaps best known for his work with his friend and frequent collaborator, William S. Burroughs. Though Burroughs and Gysin\u2019s \u201ccut-up technique\u201d (the cutting up of a text and the rearrangement of its constitutive parts to create a new text) has certainly had an outsized influence on generations of artists (including David Bowie and Kathy Acker), Gysin\u2019s Dreamachine<\/em> (1959) also plays a significant role in his oeuvre. This invention, a cylindrical device that utilizes flickering light in order to induce hypnagogic states in the viewer, was inspired by his own hallucinogenic experience while travelling en route to an artist\u2019s colony in the Mediterranean in 1958. For me, the most interesting part of this Dreamachine<\/em> lore was not just the fact that the flickering light in Gysin\u2019s bus brought on this psychedelic state, but rather his subsequent claim that he felt he was \u201cswept out of time\u201d by the experience.[1]<\/a> This makes sense given that altered senses of time are frequently cited in relation to experiences with strobing light, but Gysin\u2019s statement about his own feelings of temporal asynchrony seemed particularly significant to me.<\/p>\n

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Dreamachine elements in Room #25, Beat Hotel, 9me Rue G\u00eet-le-C\u0153ur, Paris 1962, Brion Gysin Collection, Box 6, Folder 18<\/p><\/div>\n

At the same time, I was interested in Gysin\u2019s relationship to queerness\u2014an underdiscussed facet of his life and work. In fact, a central event in the early stages of his artistic career was the removal of his painting from the 1935 Surrealist group exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins, spurred on by Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s homophobic intolerance.[2]<\/a> Though the writings of his collaborator, William S. Burroughs, have been interpreted in relation to queerness in books like Jamie Russell\u2019s Queer Burroughs<\/em> (2001), the same cannot be said for Gysin. In light of this, I wanted to think about the role of hallucinogenic temporalities in Gysin\u2019s art vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> notions of queer time. In doing so, I didn\u2019t want to simply reduce his oeuvre to his sexual identity but rather explore the queer capacities of his radical innovations.<\/p>\n

This is the project that initially drew me to the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory, which houses a robust collection of Gysin\u2019s correspondences, poems, photographs, and paintings on paper. While visiting these archives, I did not want to spend my five days combing through documents, attempting to excavate signs of Gysin\u2019s queerness from this collection. Rather, I wanted to get a better sense of the role of time within the context of his multifaceted oeuvre, which exceeds any particular genre or medium. In this sense, I believe my week working with these archives was incredibly fruitful and illuminating, bringing to my attention many aspects of his work that I had not previously considered. I wanted to share a couple of my archival encounters in this blog post.<\/p>\n

On my first day, I found a short story written by Gysin titled \u201cTime and Brother Griphen\u201d in some torn-out pages of the November 1947 issue of Town & Country<\/em> (a lifestyle magazine by and for the wealthy elites of American society.) This tale follows the exploits of a monk after he discovers that the average day, contrary to popular belief, does not consist of 24 hours.[3]<\/a> As the narrative progresses, Brother Griphen becomes increasingly obsessed with this observation, gradually falling out of sync with his monastic peers to the point where he eats his meals at midnight and sleeps during the day.[4]<\/a> In short, the Brother Griphen\u2019s adherence to an alternate schema of time isolates him from the social life of the monastery, becoming so estranged that he eventually appears to his fellow monks as an \u201cawesome creature\u201d or \u201cman from another planet.\u201d[5]<\/a> This story struck me as significant in a couple of ways. First, it served as evidence that Gysin had been thinking about time for a while, over a decade before the invention of the Dreamachine<\/em>. Secondly, it gestured toward a certain kind of tension between the social and the temporal in Gysin\u2019s thought, something that resonates with later notions of queer time as resisting regulatory structures for the conventional timing of labor, life events, and relationships.[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

I also found a small photograph of a deconstructed Dreamachine<\/em> from 1962, splayed out on a bed in the Beat Hotel (where Gysin stayed with figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Ian Sommerville, and Burroughs.) What was most interesting to me about this image was the fact that on the outstretched interior of the device was a clear repetition of calligraphic glyphs\u2014marks influenced by Japanese and Arabic scripts that Gysin often utilized in his paintings. This was not something I had seen in subsequent reproductions of the Dreamachine<\/em>. The repeated glyphs appeared again while I was perusing his personal papers relating to the Dreamachine<\/em>, where I found an index card roughly sketching out the mechanics of the invention. On the righthand side of this card was a column of similar (but not wholly identical) marks under the heading \u201cGRAPHIQUE.\u201d In light of this, I have also been thinking about the temporality of repetition and seriality in Gysin\u2019s art, something that I would not have considered if I had not undertaken this research at Emory.<\/p>\n

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Untitled notecard, Brion Gysin Collection, Box 4, Folder 4: Personal Papers \u2013 Dreamachine<\/p><\/div>\n

Though I am still in the early stages of this project, my archival encounters during my five days at Emory have been invaluable to my thinking about Gysin\u2019s oeuvre. I am endlessly grateful to the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library for allowing me the opportunity to see Gysin\u2019s art in a new light.<\/p>\n

Citations:<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> John Geiger, Chapel of Extreme Experience : A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine<\/em> (New York: Soft Skull ; London, 2004), 11.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> G\u00e9rard Audinet, \u201cThe Wounded Man: Brion Gysin, Unhung Surrealist,\u201d in Brion Gysin: Dream Machine<\/em>, 2010, 27.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Gysin, Brion. \u201cTime and Brother Griphen.\u201d Town and Country<\/em>, November 1947. Box 7, Folder 12. Brion Gysin Collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, 97.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Gysin. \u201cTime and Brother Griphen,\u201d 139.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Gysin. \u201cTime and Brother Griphen,\u201d 139.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Homay King, \u201cStroboscopic: Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable,\u201d Criticism<\/em> 56, no. 3 (2014): 475.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Claude Mohr is an art history Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia studying the histories of modern and contemporary art. Currently, he is interested in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, focusing in particular on the relationship between transgender studies and Surrealism. Claude was a recipient of a 2024 Rose Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8287,"featured_media":10627,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[430,508],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-following-the-fellows","category-lgbtq"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/files\/2025\/04\/Picture1-claude.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10630,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10625\/revisions\/10630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/marbl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}