Review: Brion Gysin artworks at Electric Dreams, Tate Modern
Ciarán Ryan, Jan 2025
Brion Gysin’s artworks have their own room in Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams exhibition, London, UK. The exhibition celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art.
Pictured: A Dreamachine on display at the Electric Dreams exhibition
The fifteen sections in the Electric Dreams exhibition are dedicated to big themes in pre-internet art and technology, and individual artists. The themes include cybernetics, materialising the invisible, dialogues with the machines and electronic DIY.
Artists with their own rooms include: Atsuko Tanaka, Carlos Cruz-Diez and Otto Piene.
Brion Gysin’s works are in room four.
A circuit map is used to visualise the connections between the artists in the exhibition. On the map, Gysin’s component is surrounded by activity, but isolated.
Video: Brion Gysin’s artworks at the Electric Dreams exhibition
Video: Brion Gysin, Room 4, Electric Dreams exhibition, Tate Modern, London
Gysin’s room is multimedia. The space is dominated by a Dreamachine, there is an audio/visual display of some of his poems and statements, a few of his books in a glass case and a slide projection.
The projected 35mm performance slides span 1961-1982 and include various self portraits, ‘Art is the tail of a comma’ and ‘Am I that I am?’ permutations.
The glass case contains the 1960 book ‘Minutes to Go’, ‘Olympia: A Monthly review from Paris, No. 2 (1962), a copy of 1979’s The Third Mind and other documents.
Poems that can be listened to via headphones include: ‘Cut-ups self-explained’, ‘I am this painter Brion Gysin’, ‘Pistol poem‘, ‘I’ve come to free the words’ and others.
Pictured: A display of Gysin books and slides
The Dreamachine
The Dreamachine on display is no.9, 1961. On loan from the Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris.
It is described as a ‘meditative rotating light sculpture’. The text on the gallery wall suggests looking at it with eyes closed.
Gysin is also quoted:
“The Dream Machine may bring about a change of consciousness inasmuch as it throws back the limits of the visible world and may, indeed, prove there are no limits.”
Setting Gysin’s stories aside, with my eyes open, I attempted to look at the device anew.
It reminds me of a 1950s space ship, a sci-fi power pack, an electric light bulb advertisement.
Look closer and it churns, like throwing art and tech into a food mixer.
Apply imagination and the mixer is a chamber holding a fiery spark of creation.
Pictured: Brion Gysin’s room at the Tate Modern
An obvious thing to report but: I was impressed by the Dreamachine’s kinetic motion. With every glance it’s a new artwork, something new is cut up.
While I was in the gallery, people didn’t sit with the machine for too long. Some sat next to it scrolling on their phones.
Pictured: ‘a spark of creation’ – the Dreamachine at the Tate Modern
Gysin’s room is not a sense-overload ‘Chapel of extreme experience’, but it is an accessible introduction. I enjoyed the opportunity to spend some more time with his art and ideas, and to see his work in a context.
One criticism of the wider exhibition is that it is muddled. This feels a little unfair as surely any structure will struggle to contain artists that, as the notes put it, were attempting to “visualise what was barely thinkable”.