Cut-up

"Interested in free trade aryou. You never were anything but a hard-no reason to colonize all the rest of them. I'm one dollar an hour, adolescent boys in single mother households. Ho you're going to stop waiting for me to bring delinquency and drug/alcohol use in single mother."

A cut-up is taking written work and changing, cutting, adapting, moving and/or replacing pieces within it. The cut-up above is from many different texts put together. From reading it one can interpret a lot. Without knowing its a cut-up it may seem like the narration of a deranged drug addict. A cut-up is supposedly a way to make something new out of the old. A way to make your own story out of another's. Is this really what it is? Is anything not a cut-up?

Is taking the text of another author and cutting it into parts and putting it back together changing what that author wrote and making it new? The answer is yes. The words are down on paper but the moment that paper is cut and destroyed the words are released from their confines and allowed to go where they please. The art of writing is putting words in a specific order that creates a picture, emotion or event. The specific order is what makes it literature or text. Once this order is destroyed or disrupted the literature or text is new. By cutting a page, one can control the words and the pictures. Is it different from creating your own story from a blank page?

Everything we say, do and write is a cut-up. We take words that we were taught, actions that we've seen and write in ways we were told to. A cut-up is dependent on the person cutting. If the person decides to cut it down to words or letters to have total control, as oppose to paragraphs or sections, it is synonymous to creating a new story. Is it possible to create something completely new? I believe it is very hard but possible. The problem is that a truly "new" piece of work must be for the artist him/herself because new does not sit well with others. Look at the book The Ticket that Exploded. The entire text is written without punctuation and with very little sense. It is confusing and hard to understand. This is because it is new. This is also why we are amused by cut-ups.

Although cut-ups may not be exactly "original" seeing as all our actions are technically cut-ups of our life experience, they are amusing to us. This is because we did not create the original structure or text. We like chaos and lack of structure because we are not use to it. A cut-up is both original and lacking originality.