From The TimesDecember 15, 2008
Malcolm McLaren on William Burroughs
The author of Naked Lunch - artist, film-maker, writer, junkie and provocateur - has long been a hero to me
William Burroughs, who died in 1997, was the visionary author of Naked Lunch and a key member of the Beat Generation. Famed as a social critic, film-maker, artist and essayist as well as a novelist, his ideas are celebrated at the Royal Academy in a new exhibition, Burroughs Live. It includes footage of him reading his own works to camera, his paintings, works made in collaboration with other artists and portraits of him by Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibovitz, David Hockney and Damien Hirst. Malcolm McLaren, whose new Burroughs-inspired film Shallow is part of the exhibition, has felt the profound influence of Burroughs all his life.
William Burroughs was iconic as a pop-cultural figure. He was an intellectual, a thinker. He stood for ideas and attitudes, for protest, and truthfully I can say that I have felt a connection with him in a big way all my life. I've lived with this man in my heart and I don't think I could have become the “godfather of punk” without him. He represented something very deep. Even as a teenager, I knew his book Naked Lunch. He was someone who connected all the dots in the disparate muddled world of a teenager.
The name William Burroughs was really imprinted on my consciousness when I went to art school in the latter half of the 1960s. I was at Goldsmiths College, and his name was very much current in the protest movement with which we grew up. He was a part of the zeitgeist because he represented a kind of outlaw spirit. He was a very good protester, and an intriguing one. He didn't produce a lot of products - he didn't write a large number of books, he made some films and sound works, paintings and experimental art - but his influence was more that of an attitude. He was always provocative, and his transformative ideas constantly appeared in your frame of reference if you were an art student at that time.
That is why I think this exhibition is so good, because it is not so much about finished products, about spin paintings or pill boxes; it's more about transformative ideas and debate. There is a brilliant film by Gus Van Sant of Burroughs reading his Thanksgiving Prayer, and it's such a powerful indictment of middle-class values in America. It's so relevant to today, and so potent because it shows how the world has shifted towards Burroughs's ideas.
Burroughs became part of the radical movements that proliferated in the late Sixties in Europe. He was a member of the Situationist International, a group of leftist artists and intellectuals. They were agitators who developed artistic and political avant-garde ideas but were also concerned with the anti-commodification of the planet. Burroughs's work was rooted in literature, but he crossed all spheres, and he was one of the warriors fighting with his mind against this juggernaut that he saw coming at us, representing the commodification of culture. It was the first radical movement to see that the planet could not be sustained with the kind of consumer society that was already growing at that time. It took the rest of us 40 years to see it, but they were banging on about it back in the 1960s. The point was to stand against it and he gave support and passion to that kind of thinking.
I remember 1968 so well. Burroughs was one of the most creative of the subversives and we drank up his ideas. It's funny that I was so involved with Burroughs at this time, whereas Vivienne [Westwood] was at that time still a prim young girl from a Derbyshire village who was attending Sunday school every week and was completely unaware of all this. She was leading a blameless life, while I was getting involved as much as I could in what protest movements there were.
There used to be a little bookshop in Camden called Compendium Books and we'd go there and find the pamphlets and manifestos and dialogues of the Situationists. They were the creative spark that led to the 1968 crisis that spilt over to London. And we as art students gave our response and support.
In those days there were no mobile phones or iPods, none of those sorts of signs and signals for showing who you were, and you used to proclaim your allegiance by having a copy of Naked Lunch or of Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater just sticking out of your pocket. De Quincey was, I think, the 19th-century equivalent of Burroughs, a cultural outlaw who took a lot of drugs and had a mind churning with radical ideas.
The first time I was completely seduced by Burroughs was when I was living in Paris in the 1990s and I heard a tape recording of him reading from Naked Lunch. The book was published in 1958 in Paris because American and British publishers wouldn't touch it. Publishing was more liberal in Paris and he had found an imprint called Olympia Press, run by Maurice Girodias who had also published Lolita and the works of Alexander Trocchi. Burroughs did the reading in a little Paris bookshop. He was a brilliant performer of his own work. His voice was incredibly hypnotic and I remember being particularly struck by a passage called Bradley the Buyer, all about Mexico and narcotics agents. The way he salivates as he reads it is completely gripping.
I never met him, sadly, although I almost did. It was in the 1980s when I was working for Stephen Spielberg in Hollywood. I was dating Lauren Hutton at the time and, through her artist friends and New York friends, she knew Burroughs. There was a plan for me to meet him, and I think he was curious to meet me too. Unfortunately, Hollywood being Hollywood, my work prevented that from happening and I never got another chance.
Burroughs grew up in the Midwest, which was a place where guns were completely normal. It was part of the old frontier idea of protection. Everyone in that part of the world knew how to use a gun, and when he accidentally shot his wife [Joan Vollmer, while playing a game of William Tell] it must have affected him very deeply. It must have affected his whole life and work. It was probably due to his having been out of his head at the time, which was not unusual. His drugtaking was part of some kind of deal with the Devil.
His influence has been profound for artists, writers, musicians and many others. His cut-up technique was particularly influential. This involved cutting up and randomly rearranging words or phrases into new sentences in his books. He employed the same methods with the images and sound bites in his films. David Bowie used Burroughs's methods for the lyrics of his songs. Bowie used to write out his lyrics and then cut up each word individually. He would throw the whole lot up into the air, and then string them together again according to the way they had landed on the floor. Procol Harum did the same with A Whiter Shade of Pale. The lyrics of that song are pretty bizarre, and this is why.
I used his cut-up technique for my film Shallow, Musical Paintings, 1-21, which is showing in this exhibition. It's a personal and subjective history of pop culture. I've grabbed and snatched at verses and a chorus here and there through the decades, and then put them together randomly. The music was done first. I then found those old films made on 8mm of the ordinary folk who played a part in the sex films before sex cinema was turned into an industry. The film clips are from the days when you had preambles before the act, when there was still a naivity and an innocence to them. These are ordinary people, guys struggling to get their ties off and then strutting around like peacocks waiting to perform their act, or hoovering the carpet waiting for a knock on the door. I slowed down the films and I think there are some revealing moments, like portraits, of these ordinary people.
I think all great artists are separated from ordinary artists by one thing. They are magicians. They are people who really change the culture. They have an alchemy that few of us possess and Burroughs was one of these.
As told to Joanna Pitman
Malcolm McLaren's film Shallow will be shown as part of the GSK Contemporary series at the Royal Academy, London W1 (dates and times at www.royalacademy. org.uk), until Jan 19. Life-File: The Private File-Folders of William S Burroughs is at Riflemaker, W1 (www.riflemaker.org), from tomorrow to Jan 17.
