"But during a ferociously productive, wildly eclectic career in painting, writing and performance that lasted half a century, it often seemed as if Gysin, who died in poverty in 1986, had too great a facility for disappearance, at least as far as his reputation in the art world was concerned. Despite a longing for recognition, he was generally known less for his own work than for his associations with a prodigious number of more famous artists for whom he was, by turns, a teacher, friend and all-around guru: Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst, Alice B. Toklas, Keith Haring, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, among others."
'Another probable reason for Gysin’s failure to achieve fame was the one he grudgingly acknowledged toward the end of his life, his restless zinging from one discipline to another, a disregard of boundaries that resonates strongly today with young “I’m in a band; I paint; I design clothes; I’m an actor” artists.'
'“This will be one version of him,” she said. “And maybe someday all the musicians he knew or all the people he slept with or all the people he has influenced so deeply will end up giving us their own Brion Gysins.”'
All quotes from "The Unknown Loved by the Knowns" by RANDY KENNEDY ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/arts/design/27gysin.html )
After reading about this man in the NYTimes I was kind of smitten at how he erases the lines between mediums of art and simplifying them. I don’t think we should destroy order within parachutes of ideas, but just don’t take them too seriously.
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