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So when the Sun in bed, Curtain'd with cloudy red, Pillows his chin upon an Orient
wave. The flocking shadows pale Troop to th' infernall jail, Each fetter'd Ghost slips to
his severall grave, And the yellow-skirted Fayes Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their
Moon-lov'd maze.
But see the Virgin blest, Hath laid her Babe to rest. Time is our tedious Song should here
have ending, Heav'ns youngest-teemed Star Hath fixt her polisht Car, Her sleeping Lord
with Handmaid Lamp attending. And all about the Courtly Stable, Bright-harnest Angels
sit in order serviceable (Lewalski
1966
).
Burroughs takes the intentionally humorous overly literal step of asserting that
this happened on Christmas Day AD 1, in a sort of homage to Eusebius' overly
literal treatment of the story related in Plutarch. The primal age of savage mystery
and wonder is replaced with an age of orderly science and reason as one world view
is enclosed and subdued by a new one, drawing its imagery and metaphors from the
stories of a passage of a Greek dominated world to a Roman dominated one. Each
world building itself out of the pieces of the previous one most useful to it, and then
carefully discarding the remaining bits lest they clog up the machinery of power
and explanation. A new world has been created on the ruins of the old. A place for
everything and everything in its place.
18.4
Off the Canvas, Out of the Galleries and into the Streets
Unsurprisingly queer artists whose work defied easy categorization such as Bur-
roughs and Haring didn't feel that they fit into this neatly ordered world and were
rooting for the opposition. After laying out the old stories, a new way out of this
maze is presented:
But art is spilling out of its frames into subway graffiti. Will it stop there? Consider an
apocalyptic statement: 'Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.' - Hassan i Sabbah. Not
to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of restrained and destructive behavior; that
would be a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because
nothing is true. It is all make-believe, illusion, dream
:::
ART. When art leaves the frame
and the written word leaves the page - not merely the physical frame and page, but
the frames and pages of assigned categories - a basic disruption of reality itself occurs:
the literal realization of art. This is a very different direction from Duchamp, Klein and
Manzoni, of appropriating everything in sight by signing it or putting it on a pedestal.
Instead of appropriating by framing and signing, remove the frames and the pedestals,
yes, even the signatures. Every dedicated artist attempts the impossible, Success will
write APOCALYPSE across the sky. The artist aims for a miracle. The painter wills his
picture to move off the canvas with a separate life, movement outside of the picture, and
one rent in the fabric is all it takes for pandemonium to sluice through (Burroughs and
Haring
1988
).
Burroughs correctly identifies the graffiti inspired street art that Haring and others
are developing as an escape hatch from the controlled galleries and dead museums
into the streets and beyond. Enabled by the relatively humble technology of the
spray can artists were able to juxtapose their creations with the real world. A form
of the cut-up techniques Burroughs and Gysin had perfected with words could now
be practiced upon the world itself. It was a narrow crack but one that could spread
