REVIEW - Andy Warhol / William Burroughs / David Lynch - Photographer's Gallery

And so to the Photographer’s Gallery on the 100th anniversary of William S. Burroughs’ birth for an exhibition of the extracurricular flirtations from a triptych of counter-cultural icons – Andy Warhol, David Lynch and Burroughs himself.

Warhol’s shots document the perfunctory and the mundane in everyday commercialised life, the solidifying of the liquid societal ‘spectacle’. By stitching together multiple identical prints he aims to emphasise the limitless replication potential of the image, the assembly line manufacture of the artistic object.

The whole raison d’etre of Warhol’s work is the inherently shallow superficiality of the image, the exploding of the ponderous cosmology of art itself to revel in the pure artifice, the surface of things. A worthy manifesto, albeit one explored to far greater effect with his artworks, and there is little here to merit renewed observation of the Warholian credo.

Burroughs, along with Joyce and Hemingway perhaps one of the most important 20th century writers, viewed photography as an extension of his cut-up techniques, coagulating images together into bizarre collages. Again though, in light of Burroughs’ exemplary prose, the exhibited photographs seem, at best, incidental, and at worst, a plangent exercise in self-indulgence. There is nothing that might purport to offer an alternate insight into Burroughs ‘the man’ or ‘the myth’. Putting it simply, the photographs elicit nothing more than dull disaffection.

The surrealist auteur David Lynch’s photographs, quite refreshingly, do at least attempt to demonstrate some measure of artistic skill. His images capture shadowy and inorganic industrial landscapes, wastelands of chuffing smoke chimneys, rusty pipework, cracked windows and abandoned factories.

Whilst many of the shots are, stylistically-speaking, well-achieved, one can’t help but feel that this is imagistic terrain that Lynch already colonised to masterful effect in ‘Eraserhead’, some 37 years ago, and hence comes across as little more than a tired exercise in nostalgia.

Not only this, but in the wake of the burgeoning ‘urban exploration’ scene and the de rigeur proliferation of what has been dubbed ‘ruin porn’, Lynch’s efforts seem uncharacteristically conformist and, one could argue, scarcely more accomplished than any undergraduate photography student.

The central problem with an exhibition of this sort is that by now, Burroughs, Warhol and Lynch have all been well-and-truly absorbed into the cultural landscape of the mainstream; any subversive or renegade cachet they undoubtedly all once embodied has been long since diluted by the wholesale packaging of their mythologies to become commodities, recycled and traded for as long as market forces dictate.

It is yet further evidence of the 21st century ‘cultural cannibalism’ syndrome, in which any tried-and-tested artistic force is endlessly regurgitated as a means of offsetting the risk of time or money investiture in anything new. My problem with an exhibition such as this – a focus on the indulgent, extracurricular activities of three figures firmly embedded in the mainstream cement of their own iconography – is that I can't help but wonder, why couldn’t new, younger artists be afforded such a valuable platform of exposure instead?