“The paintings were shite, basically, any old junkie with a shotgun could’ve pulled it off…”
Hot Press‘s Peter Murphy drags Will Self along to the William Burroughs / Hans Christian Anderson exhibition that was on in Dublin a while back:
“I had an introduction to go out and meet him the year he died, but I wasn’t really too bothered about it to tell you the truth,” Self admits as we step into the exhibition. “We wouldn’t have got on: he hated women and loved guns and I hate guns and love women. My interest in Burroughs declined when he stopped doing smack, amazingly. He was a problematic man.”
He halts at a spray-paint-on-acrylic piece that looks a bit like a Satanic Christmas tree.
“Yeah, I dunno, what do you think?” he considers. “It’s a bit what’s the point, isn’t it? Nah, I’m sorry Bill, I’m not really digging it, man. It’s difficult to think that he’d get an exhibition in an Irish Modern Art gallery if he wasn’t a writer.”
Self reconsiders when his eye snags on an impressionistic work entitled ‘Silent Film’.
“This one’s a bit better isn’t it?” he says. “What’s he done? Oh, I see, he’s put down stencils and sprayed over them. Now that’s the first one that has any oomph to it at all really. Did you read his Ghost Of Chance and the dream diary? They’re very much in the same spirit as that. I mean, you gotta admire the man’s commitment for using his psyche as a test bed for the imagination, letting stuff come. It’s kind of a commitment to the surrealist project really, just being open in that way. I think that creativity is very close to dream. I mean, I keep dream diaries and leave on voice activated tape recorders when I’m sleeping.”
What’s Self’s position on contentious cut-up works such as The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded?
“I think they have a legitimacy actually, but they’re not very readable. I kind of like that side of Burroughs, I think that he’d be nothing without it.”
