The Order Imposed — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ART-RB-BUR-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

The Order Imposed Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

In Minutes to Go, from 1960, Burroughs and Gysin published texts cut up and recomposed at random to see what the material said underneath the order it had been written in. The print is a page with the cut and its pieces reordered.

A Author

William Burroughs

B Subject

Cut-Up

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

The method is material and can be described in a line: take a printed page, cut it in four, rearrange the pieces and read what comes out. Gysin found it cutting cardboard with a blade over some newspapers and reading by accident what was left either side of the cut.

Burroughs used it for years as a systematic procedure, on his own manuscripts and on other people's, and on recordings too.

There is a concrete idea behind it: that the order a sentence is written in carries an intention that is not the writer's but the language's and that of whoever administers it. Cutting is the way to find out what was underneath the order.

It has become a workshop cliché, taught as a creative exercise, and that stripped it of what it had of sabotage.

He held that the cuts sometimes predicted events. That is another argument and there is no need to enter it.

Details