George Condo and William BurroughsAuthor(s): George Condo and William BurroughsSource: Art Journal, Vol. 52, No. 4, Interactions between Artists and Writers (Winter, 1993),p. 78Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777635 .

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78

George Condo and William Burroughs Ghost of Chance, 1991, book with offset prints, Whitney Museum of American Art (fig. 8)

This project came about through an offer from the Whitney Museum as a part of their "Artists and Writers" series.

Literary influences have been infinitely valuable in the devel-

opment of my visual vocabulary and formal sense of

composition. I believe that I really began collaborating with William

eighteen years ago when I first read his writing (Junkie, Ticket that Exploded, Wild Boys, etc.). After Surrealism

plucked the visuals out of Lautreamont and Freud, the only bones left to pick were William's. His methods of writing inspire me to think in terms of memory, realism, and artifi- cial stimulation.

Once the narrative of Ghost of Chance was established, the illustration began to evolve from fixed descriptions. I

thought in terms of the baroque artist illustrating Ovid's

Metamorphoses and transcribed the content into full-fledged paintings. I believe that working with William made the realization of my own identity even stronger. This is a great sign of compatibility.

-George Condo

George Condo was invited by May Castleberry of the Whitney to do a book in their artists-and-writers series, and he

suggested he would like to work with me on that. I was happy to do so, as I have known him for many years, beginning with his friendships with Brion Gysin and Keith Haring.

In this case, my work was structurally influenced by George's ideas: he came to Lawrence to visit me, and I turned over to him a sixty-page folder of my work already in progress called "Ghost of Chance." George indicated which passages of the raw manuscript he found most stimulating, and from those I edited and completed the text. His artworks were

begun already from reading his copy of the raw MSS. I have achieved much deeper fusion of my work with

George's work when we have made paintings together, as we have done on several occasions. But for this book, he was

working with a concept that I had already developed. I feel that his visualizations of the scenes and characters in the book did inspire me as I completed my rewrites for the final text, and now I cannot read the text by itself without seeing his extraordinary imagination of Captain Mission, the "Hairs," and the Garden of Extinct Species, and so forth.

-William Burroughs

TK!E9 1 nAthMo r r " from the inciaent with

partin ofBut h Missie4dsnt lce hisp~ ~pre. autions rn<m lik

a Is 04WA, 40 Y'pt tINuKeAhunIftdnxm

Marinotg Mhre4din his~ ti with Mtheraal ehtla paiec

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efie toI IvYe h m- I ho I a rt I Ip tv to aehc-v e I uIftl.(IIIt(1 ablehe asked himt#.- d o L leniu.And 'what Mission uedplefedITh?IirIat

Martin those o Mn the dlerut he d e o he w

h1trmircbd,

li t M ri ll t, w .Z4D-wvm (A 1wd w- 4 N o bhe d n ko on. he h weno wrk Thl woI;dNN

Nih a;MOuNd MA" smfact opnd yeow hawtsh.h ieeswere dullad col d li l ad Missionsaw Mrtze b,. the Ifdir <t Snt Iimeas the cnrv:ed aI

%+herwer ethI4 rr. ndtren w pha hat?w u nt fd nmya

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deadly ip trn lied.t

He s * ees T',1 o tta tefroin as h pa naservat i ofu -;ii tel :cv r thin h zeIda MetInspiOny Aant l EDound it-, a t hat ishaA t?: n d of ad used a '14"P IrI1 e M aiy hla?d i us of South m erica. l Ti herte minthf

he decid4d, be a speciatoe & ITedrg a pec itothe tirm of Th(- mthereowere s m y cvreau e a a nt6n ot o d anl

tw h ir l se. Aftersommp inquiri a h iound thi at ttuch a dugd

cetain py ptak nt band fornotheaingdi regon'Don heotheytk more mdrugw as tx mch lled rit.hc ent"okter"i h lrm, hsa fiedl atv Tora ih t drug tsinhef" fgreih

13Best -.t daw?n nd twiilvght" Missionn calk-ntated an hour till uridown-enoxi-A time to r*,ach his inngll;e camlp.

FIG. 8 William Burroughs and George Condo, Ghost of Chance, 1991, book with offset prints, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

WINTER 1993

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