`ENTRY'-LEVEL BURROUGHS : LACMA EXHIBIT OF WHIMSICAL ARTIST'S WORKS OFFERS INSIDE-OUT TAKE ON POSTMODERN AGE.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

The answer was: Ex-junkies with an attitude. Anyone interested in the '50s or '60s. Everyone with a passion for modern art and literature. And every vaguely bohemian, Melrose-schlepping kid in Doc Martens.

The question was: Who on earth would be interested in a career retrospective on the visual artistry of William S. Burroughs?

As curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Robert Sobieszek had to make the case to his bosses, the museum's trustees, that the author of ``Naked Lunch'' was more than just the author of ``Naked Lunch.''

Sure, Burroughs already had a natural following. He's practically required reading for the chemically dependent, the sexually confused and the culturally outcast.

But Sobieszek's agenda goes beyond these core Burroughs constituencies.

``Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts,'' which opened at LACMA last month and is on view through Oct. 6, proposes that the 82-year-old artist is nothing less than a mixed-media smoking gun for the second half of the 20th century - the Elvis of American letters, as filmmaker Gus Van Sant memorably has anointed him.

That may well surprise the aging beatniks who'd lost track of Burroughs sometime around when they gave up hallucinogens and mothballed their black turtlenecks.

Never mind. LACMA's show sets out to persuade us that the scrapbooks, photo collages and abstract paintings that Burroughs and partner Brion Gysin produced in the '60s and early '70s are more than a dilettante's dabblings.

Rather, Sobieszek says, they're key documents of the fractured, image-saturated, semi-coherent reality in which we currently find ourselves. On first peering into one of Burroughs' whimsical scrapbooks, some three or four years ago, the curator was sure he'd struck post-modern gold.

``Here was a treasure trove of imagery, experience, ramblings, an explosive cacophony of image and text that really was the purest distillation of the way we live,'' says Sobieszek, thumbing another cigarette as he hunches over a table in LACMA's airy courtyard cafe.

And how, exactly, do we live?

Well, Sobieszek says, we surf cable TV. We scan a magazine. We flip through the newspaper. We glimpse a billboard off the San Diego Freeway. We keep one ear tuned to Howard Stern as we throw a CD on the car stereo. We cruise the Internet.

In sum, we absorb, filter and otherwise try to make sense of what amounts to 24-hour-a-day sensory overkill. The genius of Burroughs, Sobieszek argues, was to anticipate this chaotic buzz of momentary meanings and bizarre contrasts, both in his visual works and in his ``cut-up'' novels, with their shifting points-of-view and wry, scatological riffs.

Created literally by cutting up type-written text, photos, newspaper illustrations, movie stills, cartoon strips or whatever else gripped his fancy, then reassembling the scraps, Burroughs' ``cut-ups'' went a step beyond the dadaist and surrealist montages of the '20s and '30s.

Where Burroughs tellingly breaks from his predecessors is in abandoning the idea that a work of art can follow a single, linear story line. The 153 works at LACMA pull viewers into a vortex of random images and free association - a totally fluid, almost trance-like realm of perception, brought about by a combination of chance, inspiration and whatever substance Burroughs happened to be abusing at the time.

The effect leaves viewers such as Sobieszek well-nigh giddy.

``It's just the accidental collision of things that produces unintended meaning, that we call post-modernism,'' he enthuses.

Burroughs' technique reaches its zenith or, if you like, nadir - the artist probably wouldn't bother to argue the point - with the series of ``shotgun blast'' paintings, which are exactly what they sound like. Shotgun technique, Burroughs says, ``releases the little spirits compacted in the layers of wood, causing the colors of the paints to splash out in unforeseeable, unpredictable images and patterns.''

It would be wrong, however, to equate Burroughs' cut-and-paste arbitrariness with moral indifference. Scratch his glib, hedonistic surfaces and you'll find a steadfast foe of all forms of human enslavement, whatever the source, says Sobieszek.

``If you read everything he's written and consider it carefully, it's all about freedom, total freedom. And what limits us? Well, the state does, religion does, corporations, the military does, drugs do. What else controls us? The media controls us, the media tells us what we know. Everything is second-hand, pre-digested - what William would call pre-recorded.''

Sobieszek admits it's tough to isolate Burroughs' influence on any particular artist. But it doesn't take a leap of imagination to spot his affinity for techno-chanteusse Laurie Anderson, avant-garde dramatist Robert Wilson or troubadour Tom Waits, all of them current or former Burroughs collaborators.

If not the father of post-World War II pop culture, Burroughs emerges from the LACMA show as its funny uncle, a shabby-genteel Midwesterner pushing the forbidden fruit of radical individualism on everyone from cyberpunk authors to garage rockers, to faux-naif artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to such highly personalized film stylists as Jim Jarmusch (``Down by Law''), Van Sant (in whose ``Drugstore Cowboy'' Burroughs appeared) and David Cronenberg (``The Fly,'' ``Naked Lunch'').

``Ports of Entry'' doesn't end its hero-worship there. By including an image of Burroughs in an ad for the Gap, the show helps establish his credentials as a unique crossover figure spanning Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Greenwich Village and the Skid Row of Anytown, U.S.A.

(Burroughs himself once wrote that he saw ``no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue,'' a thought that would absolutely horrify less street-toughened hearts.)

The show even goes so far as to suggest that the fractured, geometric patterns of one Burroughs collage prefigure ``chaos theory.'' That's sort of like claiming that ``Naked Lunch'' is a tract on astrophysics.

Even if you don't buy LACMA's argument all the way, if you've always cringed slightly at Burroughs' sophomoric asides and Mailer-esque gift for self-promotion, you're likely to leave the show convinced of his singular impact as an underground prophet.

Sobieszek, who five years ago fled the upstate New York winters (where he worked at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, in Rochester), thinks Burroughs could be a kind of patron saint for Angelenos.

``This is a Burroughs city,'' he says. ``I think this show is perfect for L.A. L.A. is a cut-up: random juxtapositions of languages, ethnic groups, etc. And it has no center. It's very post-modern. Which is why I love it.''

CAPTION(S):

6 Photos

Photo: (1) Included in ``Ports of Entry: William S. Burr oughs and the Arts'' is the paint-on-cardboard ``Crazy Man.''

(2) ``William Burroughs'' is artist Annie Leibovitz's gelatin-silver print of Burroughs in profile.

(3) For his 1954 ``Untitled,'' Burroughs opted for gelatin-silver prints and cellophane tape on board.

(4) Loomis Dean's gelatin-silver print ``William Burroughs at the Beat Hotel,'' circa 1959, shows another side of Burroughs.

(5) Burroughs' 1965 ``Untitled (Plan Drug Addiction)'' is from ``The Third Mind.''

(6) Also from ``The Third Mind'' is Burroughs' 1965 ``Untitled (William Vacates Rooms).''