Mc Neill & Burroughs: Art Meets Occult

Hieronymous Bosch has nothing on Malcolm Mc Neill. And that’s not even counting the underlying theories Mc Neill has about time travel, biological mutation, and evolutionary transition that he and William Burroughs worked on together in Ah Pook Is Here, a failed word-and-image collaboration that led nearly 40 years later to Mc Neill’s memoir Observed While Falling.

I’ve written about the memoir before, pointing out that it “brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, control systems” and so forth — as well as offering “an indelible word portrait” of Burroughs. I noted, too, that Mc Neill’s drawings “went much further than mere illustration,” because Burroughs began drawing ideas from them, “including compositional details of plot and structure.” Unfortunately “the artwork also became an obstacle to the completion of the project, due to the X-rated nature of the imagery.” No publisher had “the courage or the commercial foresight to take it on.” Thus the project went unfinished.

Now you can get the short version of the theories at IT: The International Times and, later this week, a complete academic exploration at a symposium in London, Psychoanalysis, Art & the Occult (May 6-8) with an accompanying “End of Days” gallery show (May 5 opening reception).

Although Mc Neill won’t be there, he tells me the symposium means that the memoir “finally gets seen in the right context.” He also notes that “showing the image” — 10 feet from a continuous sequence 25 feet long — “also gives me a chance to explain a few more things about it — and me and Bill.”

Click to enlarge.