Article about a Burroughs portrait of Crowley on display in Chicago at “Eye Exam: Perverted Tactics”

William S. Burroughs, ‘Portrait of Aleister Crowley,’ 1988.

“William S. Burroughs, beat poet and author of Naked Lunch, picked up on Crowley’s philosophy with zeal, distorting its lessons to accommodate his own blatant drug use and sexuality demonized by mid-century American morality. In a 1978 interview, Burroughs misquoted Crowley, effectively reversing the dictum: ‘What you want to do is, of course, eventually what you will do anyway. Sooner or Later.’ His interviewer accused him of being ‘amoral.’

Burroughs’ ‘Portrait of Aleister Crowley,’ a painting on paper from 1988, is now on view at Th!nkArt Salon, in Wicker Park, along with a dozen or so of his other works. Burroughs’ palette tends toward the visceral tones: dried-blood crimson, shocks of red, vomitus green. The acrylic paint was applied energetically with a painter’s knife, sometimes accumulating into a crusty mass and sometimes taking on an ethereal air behind swaths of frenzied spray paint. No human face emerges from the portrait of Crowley, but a portal to some grim ghost-land sits front and center.” [via]