This conference Beyond the Cut-up: William S. Burroughs and the Image will explore new theoretical interventions and accounts of Burroughs’s ideas of the image, its effects and modes of operation, its impact on human consciousness, its complex embedding within textual and other fields, its psychological and ideological transformations of perception.

William S. Burroughs’s complex and provocative uses of the image challenge critical and theoretical orthodoxies. His works in writing, visual arts, cut-up and collage, painting, assemblage, photography, and in sonic arts, constantly return in multiple ways to a detailed and politically urgent enquiry into the nature and effects of the image, the word-as-image, and beyond.

Critical work on Burroughs’s art has hitherto focused mainly on his uses of cut-up techniques. However, his works offer very diverse responses to the multiple political and emotional functions of images in relation to modern and postmodern societies of control, and enable explorations of the status and potentials of the artist as agent within these contexts. These themes are insistent Burroughsian concerns.

At The Photographers’ Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW.