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The cut-up technique (or ''découpé'' in French) is an
aleatory Aleatoricism or aleatorism, the noun associated with the adjectival aleatory and aleatoric, is a term popularised by the musical composer Pierre Boulez, but also Witold Lutosławski and Franco Evangelisti, for compositions resulting from "action ...
literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to the Dadaists of the 1920s, but it was developed and popularized in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially by writer William S. Burroughs. It has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.


Technique

The cut-up and the closely associated fold-in are the two main techniques: *''Cut-up'' is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text, such as in poems by
Tristan Tzara Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, comp ...
as described in his short text, ''TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM''. *''Fold-in'' is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page, such as in ''
The Third Mind ''The Third Mind'' is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of ...
''. It is a joint development between Burroughs and
Brion Gysin Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
. William Burroughs cited T. S. Eliot's 1922 poem, ''
The Waste Land ''The Waste Land'' is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of Modernist poetry in English, modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434-line poem first appeared in the ...
'', and John Dos Passos' ''U.S.A.'' trilogy, which incorporated newspaper clippings, as early examples of the cut ups he popularized. Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of
divination Divination (from Latin ''divinare'', 'to foresee, to foretell, to predict, to prophesy') is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual. Used in various forms throughout history ...
saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out." Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published ''
The Third Mind ''The Third Mind'' is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs William Seward Burroughs II (; February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997) was an American writer and visual artist, widely considered a primary figure of ...
'', a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form.
Jeff Nuttall Jeffrey Addison Nuttall (8 July 1933 – 4 January 2004) was an English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter, anarchist and social commentator who was a key part of the British 1960s counter-culture. He was the brother of l ...
's publication ''
My Own Mag ''My Own Mag'' was an independent publication, or zine, published by Jeff Nuttall from 1960 to 1967. The influential, but rather unknown, publication is in retrospect most heralded for being a platform for William S. Burroughs William Sewar ...
'' was another important outlet for the then-radical technique. In an interview, Alan Burns noted that for ''Europe After The Rain'' (1965) and subsequent novels he used a version of cut-ups: "I did not actually use scissors, but I folded pages, read across columns, and so on, discovering for myself many of the techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe".


History

Gil J. Wolman developed cut-up techniques as part of his
lettrist Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture ...
practice in the early 1950s.


In literature

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which
Tristan Tzara Tristan Tzara (; ; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; – 25 December 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, comp ...
offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at
random In common usage, randomness is the apparent or actual lack of pattern or predictability in events. A random sequence of events, symbols or steps often has no order and does not follow an intelligible pattern or combination. Individual ran ...
from a hat.
Collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an Assemblage (art), assemblage of different forms, thus creat ...
, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 in the poem by Tzara, ''dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love'' under the sub-title, ''TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM''. In the 1950s, painter and writer
Brion Gysin Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique, alongside his close friend, the ...
more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally rediscovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book ''Minutes to Go'' resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. South African poet
Sinclair Beiles Sinclair Beiles (b. Kampala, Uganda, 1930 - 2000, Johannesburg) was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin the cut-up technique of ...
also used this technique and co-authored ''Minutes To Go''. Argentine writer
Julio Cortázar Julio Florencio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984; ) was an Argentine, nationalized French novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. Known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, Cortázar influenced an ...
used cut ups in his 1963 novel ''
Hopscotch Hopscotch is a popular playground game in which players toss a small object, called a lagger, into numbered triangles or a pattern of rectangles outlined on the ground and then hop or jump through the spaces and retrieve the object. It is a ch ...
''. In 1969, poets
Howard W. Bergerson Howard William Bergerson (July 29, 1922 – February 19, 2011) was an American writer and poet, noted for his mastery of palindromes and other forms of wordplay. Work Bergerson's first volume of poetry, '' The Spirit of Adolescence'', was publ ...
and
J. A. Lindon James Albert Lindon ( – 16 December 1979) was an English puzzle enthusiast and poet specialising in light verse, constrained writing, and children's poetry. Lindon was based in Addlestone and Weybridge. His poems often won weekly newspaper com ...
developed a cut-up technique known as
vocabularyclept poetry A vocabularyclept poem is a poem which is formed by taking the words of an existing poem and rearranging them into a new work of literature. Vocabularyclept poetry was first proposed in 1969 by ''Word Ways'' editor Howard Bergerson. He took his li ...
, in which a poem is formed by taking all the words of an existing poem and rearranging them, often preserving the metre and stanza lengths. A drama scripted for five voices by performance poet
Hedwig Gorski Hedwig Irene Gorski (born July 18, 1949) is an American performance poet and an avant-garde artist who labels her aesthetic as "American futurism." The term "performance poetry," a precursor to slam poetry, is attributed to her. It originated ...
in 1977 originated the idea of creating poetry only for performance instead of for print publication. The "neo-verse drama" titled ''Booby, Mama!'' written for "guerilla theater" performances in public places used a combination of newspaper cut-ups that were edited and choreographed for a troupe of non-professional street actors. Kathy Acker, a literary and intermedia artist, sampled external sources and reconfigured them into the creation of shifting versions of her own constructed identity. In her late 1970s novel ''
Blood and Guts in High School ''Blood and Guts in High School'' is a novel by Kathy Acker. It was written in the late 1970s and copyrighted in 1978. It traveled a complex and circuitous route to publication, before being officially released in 1984. It remains Acker's most p ...
'', Acker explored literary cut-up and appropriation as an integral part of her method.


In film

Antony Balch Antony Balch (10 September 1937 – 6 April 1980) was an English film director and distributor, best known for his screen collaborations with Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs in the 1960s and for the 1970s horror film, '' Horror Hospit ...
and Burroughs created a collaboration film, ''The Cut-Ups'' that opened in London in 1967. This was part of an abandoned project called ''Guerrilla Conditions'' meant as a documentary on Burroughs and filmed throughout 1961–1965. Inspired by Burroughs' and Gysin's technique of cutting up text and rearranging it in random order, Balch had an editor cut his footage for the documentary into little pieces and impose no control over its reassembly. The film opened at Oxford Street's Cinephone cinema and had a disturbing reaction. Many audience members claimed the film made them ill, others demanded their money back, while some just stumbled out of the cinema ranting "it's disgusting". Other cut-up films include ''Ghost at n°9 (Paris)'' (1963–72), a posthumously released short film compiled from reels found at Balch's office after his death, and ''William Buys a Parrott'' (1982), ''Bill and Tony'' (1972), ''Towers Open Fire'' (1963) and ''The Junky's Christmas'' (1966).


In music

From the early 1970s,
David Bowie David Robert Jones (8 January 194710 January 2016), known professionally as David Bowie ( ), was an English singer-songwriter and actor. A leading figure in the music industry, he is regarded as one of the most influential musicians of the ...
used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. In 1995 he worked with Ty Roberts to develop a program called ''Verbasizer'' for his Apple PowerBook that could automatically rearrange multiple sentences written into it. Thom Yorke applied a similar method in
Radiohead Radiohead are an English rock band formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, piano, keyboards); brothers Jonny Greenwood (lead guitar, keyboards, other instruments) and Colin Greenwood (bass ...
's '' Kid A'' (2000) album, writing single lines, putting them into a hat, and drawing them out at random while the band rehearsed the songs. Perhaps indicative of Thom Yorke's influences, instructions for "How to make a Dada poem" appeared on Radiohead's website at this time. Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire reported to ''
Inpress ''Inpress'' was a free weekly tabloid-sized music magazine (street press) that was published in Melbourne, and was released in the Geelong and Mornington Peninsula areas of Victoria, Australia. The magazine was published by Street Press Aust ...
'' magazine's Andrez Bergen that "I do think the manipulation of sound in our early days – the physical act of cutting up tapes, creating tape loops and all that – has a strong reference to Burroughs and Gysin." Another
industrial music Industrial music is a genre of music that draws on harsh, mechanical, transgressive or provocative sounds and themes. AllMusic defines industrial music as the "most abrasive and aggressive fusion of rock and electronic music" that was "initial ...
pioneer, Al Jourgensen of Ministry, named Burroughs and his cut-up technique as the most important influence on how he approached the use of samples.


See also

* Assemblage (composition) *
Cento (poetry) A cento is a poetical work wholly composed of verses or passages taken from other authors, especially the Greek poet Homer and the Roman poet Virgil, disposed in a new form or order. Etymology The Latin term ''cento'' derives from Greek (' ...
*
Dissociated press Dissociated press is a parody generator (a computer program that generates nonsensical text). The generated text is based on another text using the Markov chain technique. The name is a play on " Associated Press" and the psychological term diss ...
* Found poetry * Melitzah * Plunderphonics * Surrealist techniques *
Vocabularyclept poetry A vocabularyclept poem is a poem which is formed by taking the words of an existing poem and rearranging them into a new work of literature. Vocabularyclept poetry was first proposed in 1969 by ''Word Ways'' editor Howard Bergerson. He took his li ...


References


External links


The Ultimate Cut-Up Generator
An online version that cuts-up the Internet, a specific URL, or your own text.
iOS Cut-ups App
An iOS app implementation of cut-ups which mimics the ability to manually rearrange lines of texts as well as input camera-captured, converted text into your cut-ups.

featuring a cut-up, ''K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens'' (1965), made with Ian Sommerville
The Tristan Tzara Arcade
is a collection of Cut-up pieces composed from text found in the public domain. These pieces can be further arranged by the reader using an automated (jQuery script) reTypesetting function (which illustrates how possible variant compositions can be achieved using the Cut-up technique).
This Unruly: a repository of video cut-ups
featuring video cut-up examples with an accompanying literature review about the practice of video re-mixing, re-purposing, video collage and appropriation techniques.
ReorderTV: a critical mixtape of video cut-ups
of historically-ordered, annotated and curated collection designed to play sequentially from current video remixes to early experimental film examples. {{DEFAULTSORT:Cut-Up Technique Book arts Chaos magic Dada Literary concepts Random text generation Surrealist techniques William S. Burroughs