Chichester exhibition celebrates the Beat Generation’s legacy
Chichester’s Oxmarket Contemporary celebrates the impact and importance of the Beat Generation with a special exhibition entitled Burn, Burn, Burn – The Beats light up the Ox (from Tuesday, April 2-Sunday, April 14).
The exhibition has been curated by Beat Generation fans and experts: University of Chichester professors Dick Ellis and Hugo Frey and by Martyn Bell, a trustee of Oxmarket Contemporary. whilst most famous for their writing–H owl, On The Road, Naked Lunch, Gasoline–all en gins berg, jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, along with Gregory Corso, experimentedwith other creative forms such as drawing, art, performance,music, photography and film. The results were“experimental, colourful, incandescent, riotous, unpredictable and often seen as scandalous”, as will be explored in the exhibition.
The exhibition takes its name from a quote fromkerouac,o ne of the movement’ s leading figures :“Burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the sky.” As Martyn explains: “Burn, burn, burn is not about burning things down. it is not a negative thing. It is about burn, burn, burn as individuals as brightly as a candle. It is not about destroying things. You have to remember it was a period when things were pretty dismal immediately after World War Two. People celebratedwhen the war ended but then we went through a period which was pretty difficult.”
And it's against that background that the Beat Generation emerged: “It was a revolution but an academic revolution against pre-war thinking and during-the-war thinking. Quite a few of them served in the military and they just took a look everything anew. They stood for freedom. They stood for freedom of thought and they stood for freedom of expression. They stood for throwing over the old values and saying ‘This is a new world now.’ They had a different take on everything that was going on and there was a lot of cynicism but there was also a great positivity and there was some great poetry.
“They did explore drugs for the first time and I'm not condoning it but they were quite open about it and there was quite a bit of controversy. But for me they were peaceful revolution aries .”
And their influence was profound – an influence going through to Andy Warhol and The Beatles and most importantly for us in this area, The Rolling Stones, subjects of the famous drugs bust in 1967 at Keith Richards’ home nearby at Redlands. For Martyn, that’s one of the many coincidences about the whole project.
“Marianne Faithful was at Redlands and then in later life she had a close relationship with Gregory Corso, who was one of the leading Beat poets. And then we discovered that the Festival Theatre are putting on a play called Redlands this summer about the drugs bust there, and again the coincidence is pretty amazing.”
There are further links, Marty nb eli eves. chi chester poetwilliam collins was baptised in Saint Andrew’s, Oxmarket, the church which is now Oxmarket Contemporary. “I believe there's a direct line there from William Collins to Keats and then from Keats to Corso and the Beat poets.”