The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin (William S. Burroughs)

Barry gave us this reading for our Process and Evidence class by William S. Burroughs who speaks about painter and writer, Brion Gyson's "Cut-Up Method" where you take a piece of writing you like and you cut it up (however you like, he suggests into four pieces) and then you pull words and arrange them at random to create a new piece of writing. Burroughs argues that "all writing is in fact cut-ups." He would probably laugh at me for using quotes. Ironically, this is sort of the point that I've gotten to, that I just want to be able to use someone else's words as my own, because I've begun to live them already (see my post on Terry Tempest Williams).

This method is a "surrealist" way to come up with new meanings out of the same material. I must agree with Burroughs and argue that it's not "surreal." It's simply what we do on a day-to day basis, only in doing physical cut-ups, we are doing it more directly.

Ironically, Terry Tempest Williams (the writer whose words I've begun to live in) quotes so many people, making their words her own, more or less, cutting their words into her writing. In our day and age, we must cite all these quotations, or else it is considered plagiarism, stealing, so that is what she does. But Burroughs is right, at what point do "someone else's words" become our own? At what point are we able to take that on as a part of ourselves?

Jay echos this mentality pretty clearly when he says that "great artists steal." And this is true, we are always learning from those we are influenced by--here I note that several of my last posts have been about artists whose work I like, from whom I'm "stealing" a visual language and ideas. I prefer to say that I'm relating my work to theirs or that their work resonates with me, but at what point is it relating or stealing?

In contemporary art there are individuals who have photographed others' photographs and called them their own work, arguing that the copying and difference in time and space and context changed the photograph's meaning. It is so easy today to reproduce another's work and so the copy has become the norm, but should homage be payed to those who gave us the idea or material to work from? To steal, word for word, someone else's writing or someone else's artwork, and not show thanks or gratitude for those thoughts, that is a wrong against that person. It's like gaining supernatural powers through ancestor worship, then claiming you have no ancestors. Or learning yoga and becoming a yogi then claiming that no one ever showed you a single pose or meditation practice. Not that you don't learn somethings by your own practice, but not honoring outside influence seems dishonest somehow.

I guess I'm wondering, how do I show those thanks? Do I make citations, like Terry Tempest Williams? Do I simply mention writers and artists in my statements? How do we mediate the line between stealing another's work and giving someone else all the credit for something we've added to? How do I make those connections known in a graceful yet unobtrusive way?

I don't really know the answers to these questions, but will continue to think about them and work them out within my work, of course. And for fun, here's my cut-up of Terry Tempest William's writings I quoted earlier:

(cut into eight)

Jump-started by beauty, rising and falling beauty, fallen trees. We too can dance on the floors of wide-open joy singing on the sage flats, faith of falcons, peregrine falcons appear indifference, the greatest sin is the sin of it can be hidden, all this is hidden, until the midair, drop and break through a haze of indifference, and I will balance this die on my head and say to Hell right here on earth and yes there are times you hear, I hear that fresh, fertile cadence. Dive past our sluggish hearts and we are our native pulse restored, coming out of the forest, dancing on trees, decaying wood. Can you hear, I hear, that meadow lark, meadow vole, hidden. The inquisitors, yes there are times I inhabit, I inhabit Heaven right here on earth. Can.




(cut into phrases and then edited to be made somewhat sensical.)

Why or whereabouts? No one would know the world where we are one. We are going. We come from the color of perhaps the most emotion inside.

I am certain, I do not I walk. My identity is afforded no movement. The buildings are grey. I honestly don't know is seeping Hell again. The sky is grey is the place if I were to die, I don't know how to percieve beauty. To feel the Great Forgetting where are can no longer meaning...attached to no one. outside.

Say to remember. Nothing makes motion.

Dissolve. El Bosco's Hell, the mood is grey.

Profound, what moves us: anonymous, faceless, misery boundaries. Retreat is grey. Nothing has meaning.

I honestly--
These streets. Teachings. We cast a shadow. I can find no barometer for beauty. Hell is dissolve--is when and where we did sense.



(cut into nine)

The ladder. I want out. I want down. Strangler, our own. I cannot breathe, noxious smells must surely--
they do. Hell, all of them in Hell, my mind is in go aware, go away.

Of strings, in my head I feel a tightening of strings, strings of a harp like a crucifix. I have to wait my turn. Turn. The millstone turns...The tightening there, a woman hangs from the Father forgive them for they do not know what--
Leave me in peace with my own contemplations. It is Hell to know the devil is the intimate family.

I do not know what to do.

They are standing in Hell, they are tromping all over this landscape of the dark near faraway stranger anxiety I embody when feats, feet, these--
There are others climbing, this is clear.

This nausea I am feeling is the I cannot breathe in this crowd of too many passing.