The New Museum hosts two consecutive lectures on topics related to the exhibition “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine.” Emphasizing interdisciplinary, they link Brion Gysin’s work and legacy to contemporary systems and practices that are constantly rethinking and redeploying the contexts in which they are operating. All of the participants, in their specific ways, see Gysin as a model for rethinking the driving ideas of their practices. The New Museum’s Kraus Family Senior Curator Laura Hoptman discusses aspects of the exhibition “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine,” and addresses Gysin’s work in the framework of drawing as an expanded field. Anthropologist Michael Taussig discusses Gysin’s techniques and ideas in connection with the work of William S. Burroughs, with focus on notions of field notation and their relationship to ideas of drawing, synesthesia, and communication.

Michael Taussig, Columbia University Professor, is one of the most innovative, distinguished, and socially engaged voices in cultural anthropology. An interdisciplinary thinker and engaging writer, Taussig’s work combines aspects of ethnography, storytelling, and social theory. His publications include two Spanish-language books on the history of slavery and its aftermath, and eight English-language books on issues of slavery, hunger, commercialization of agriculture, Marxist economic theory, popular culture, folk healing, colonialisms, theories of ritual, cultural productions of terror, the state and public secrecy, museums and memory, and poor communities in Colombia. Taussig has lectured at universities, conferences, and cultural institutions around the world and has received numerous honors, including a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

Jesse Bransford is a Brooklyn/Queens-based artist whose drawings and wall works have been exhibited at venues including the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Miami Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, White Columns and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, the and the CCA Wattis Museum in San Francisco. His work has been included in many periodicals and publications, including the book Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. Teaching since 2001, Bransford is currently the Director of Undergraduate Study in the Studio Art department at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. His work can be viewed through the Web site sevenseven.com, which he has maintained since 1997.
A subsequent panel with Gean Moreno, Maika Pollack, Dan Torop, and Jesse Bransford on topics related to “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” will take place on Thursday, September 30, at 6:30 p.m. at the Einstein Auditorium at 34 Stuyvesant Street, hosted by the Department of Art and Art Professions at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.

Notations in the Flicker: Brion Gysin’s Text and Image Now is organized by Jesse Bransford in conjunction and with support from the New Museum and the Department of Art and Art Professions at the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.