"Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is retiring from touring in any and all bands including TG to concentrate on art, writing and music. Genesis will still consider one-off projects if they are unique, interesting or challenging. S/HE will also continue to work with Tony Conrad occasionally on violin duets and perform expanded poetry projects with Thee Majesty."

The Terrifically Playful Pandrogynous Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

You know you’re at the vernissage of a good English artist when you approach the open bar expecting the usual sawdust wine and instead are offered gin with the instruction “Say when”! I am glad to report that I had the good fortune to view his/her show and finally met Genesis Breyer P-Orridge at “30 Years of Being Cut Up” at the Invisible Exports Gallery on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

 

It has been a few years since I saw him/her perform with Psychic TV at the Bowery Ballroom. S/he sent me a sly note when my review came to his/her attention. S/he remembered sending that note and dated that performance in terms of the death of his/her beloved Lady Jaye whose image on his/her forearm was revealed upon my following his/her instruction to “Push my sleeve up.”

 

 

Those of you who read me regularly know that I am dismissive of approximately 95% of the contents of any given category in this world. Genesis resides in the 5% that I respect. Before attending this event, I had enjoyed only his/her music, but now I am also entirely happy to report that the collaged visual images that comprise this show are intelligent and fascinating.

Those of you who read me regularly also know that I have little patience with trans folk who bristle at the limping of the English language in describing gender assignment, especially those who take up arms whenever they feel that innocently imperfect references disclose a malicious prejudice. Genesis famously plays with gendered words, and has done so for years, and is light years beyond those who harrumph about the indignities of inadequate grammar. On the subject of transgender issues, I’d also call your attention to his/her actions when faced with the prospect of performing at an Arizona venue that badly handled the business of bathrooms. Genesis is so much deeper than some whiney trans folk who seem to be playing in imaginary dollhouses with solipsistic house rules.

At one point in the evening, I whispered to Genesis that the crowd seemed unusually somber. I wondered why. Genesis bristled slightly and began to say that some things are beyond his/her control, but I supplied the answer to my own question. The mostly young crowd who filled the gallery was extremely reverential regarding their Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Eavesdropping while threading through the crowd, I heard many accounts of love for his/her music. I don’t think s/her realizes the extent of his/her following despite the passage of many years of COUM, Throbbing Gristle, TOPI and Psychic TV and all the other fantastic iterations of the mind of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. I don’t think Genesis realizes the durability of what s/he has built. This may be evidenced by th e fact that Psychic TV will be touring exclusively overseas on their next outing. I think their American audience is underestimated.

And now for my focused review: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is terrifically playful and is not afraid of using his/her own body as an expression of the playful exploration of identity. Cutting up everything in one’s life and rearranging the pieces can, with luck and intuition, tell you the truth with which you were born. Genesis tells us not to fear the cutting up. Genesis employs no artifice and hides behind no pretense or stylization. Like all prophets, Genesis tells us things that we appreciate but will never fully follow as we return home to the security of our own wigless, unaltered, unpainted, intact and pedestrian bodies.

S/he told me that this was his/her favorite among the images on display. S/he pointed out the tampon string and proclaimed it beautiful.

 

S/he asked me what I made of an adjacent picture. I told him/her it looked like the photos I received at my last colonoscopy. S/he said that s/he had had a colonoscopy recently and did I know what it disclosed? That s/he was full of shit. Obviously, Genesis had not swallowed the required Fleet products in advance of that scrutiny.

Ultimately, I think Genesis would find me lacking in audaciousness. I who admire him/her and can appreciate his/her voyages into unexplored regions and can only wonder about the strength of one who survives the loss of the beloved, might fail in his/her sight, but that is beyond my control and I am happy to know that somewhere is a creature who is fearless with a silly Psychic TV lyric that we sang together in the course of our encounter.

You’re very nice.
I like you.
You’re very nice.
Your eyes are ice.
I think that I’m in paradise.

Let me stop here. Do your homework, lads. Get to know him/her. I’d have worn the t shirt but it’s in Florida.

 

PS: I have interviewed and photographed several trans people and I have begun to understand something about them . They seem to fear the lens. Where most people see bravado, I see fright. Their agreement to being photographed feels like an act of surrender. In a single instant, when they look from the lens to me, they are saying “I’m going to trust you. I do not know if you are worthy of that trust or if you will abuse it, but I am giving you the gift of trust.” In their photographed face, they convey a complete summary of their inner journey. Their faces seem to say “Look, I’ve taken my own very private road to where I am today. I’ve had to put up with criticism and disapproval and hatred and discrimination along the way. Now I place my creation in your hands. I am proud of what I have become. I trust you with all that I have become. Please be kind.”

 

Genesis, you needn’t worry about my camera. It loves you as do I from the safety of my own less cut up collage.

 

Here you will find a compete set of photos (NSFW) from the show which may be visited through October 18th.

 

posted by Father Tony of the Farmboyz at 9:43 AM 

I Am My Own Wife

As a new generation discovers artist Genesis P-Orridge, he fulfills a quixotic long-term project: turning himself into his late spouse.

• By Erica Orden
• Published Sep 6, 2009

P-Orridge (at right) and his wife, Jacqueline Breyer, in 2007.   (Photo: Laure Leber)

 

‘We are an eccentric English person,” says the artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, greeting me at his apartment, where he’s touching up collages. “You’re okay with that?” I nod. “Good,” he purrs, his voice dropping an octave. “Then we’re going to do just fine.”

 

I’m here to discuss the curatorial interest in his work as of late—his opening at the Lower East Side gallery Invisible-Exports, the films about his life, the Tate’s acquisition of his archives. But what I see, when he sits down on his bed, is that his potbelly props up his C-cup breasts. As we speak, his thick fingers brush away strands of his platinum bob from bloated lips slicked pink with gloss. He looks like a funhouse version of Courtney Love. More accurately, he has refashioned himself to look uncannily like his late wife, the woman with whom he has come to share an identity, a profile, even beauty marks.

 

P-Orridge (he pronounces the initial letter, as in pee-orridge) started out as a relatively conventional fringe provocateur, if there is such a thing. Born under the name Neil Megson, P-Orridge became an icon of the London avant-garde in 1976, when his art collective, COUM Transmissions, staged a retrospective called “Prostitution” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. “Prostitution” aimed to inflame: pornographic photos, sculptures made of used tampons, transvestite security guards. (A Tory member of Parliament seethed to the Daily Mail, “These people are the wreckers of civilisation.”) What followed reads like a Beat almanac of acid-laced Dada aesthetics. He befriended William S. Burroughs (Burroughs campaigned on his behalf for Arts Council grants; P-Orridge co-opted Burroughs’s literary “cut-up” technique for his collages). He birthed the hard-charging genre of industrial-rock music, spearheading the bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. He collaborated with fringe heroes like Timothy Leary and Derek Jarman, championing the tattoo-and-piercing-indulgent “modern primitive” movement.

 

But that was all before 1993, when he met Jacqueline Breyer. Known to friends as Lady Jaye, she was a tall, Twiggy-esque blonde who had dabbled in dominatrix work, and she shared his interest in body modification. P-Orridge fell hard for her, as he tends to do (he can “swallow a lot of you,” a friend notes). He bought a brownstone that had belonged to Breyer’s grandmother, and they moved in. Breyer was equally enthralled, referring to P-Orridge—an occultist with thirteen penis piercings—as Bunny. “We fell in love the minute we saw each other, and as we became more and more obsessively in love, we had that whole feeling of ‘I wish I could eat you up. I wish I could just take you, and I become you and you become me,’ ” he says.

 

So as a tenth-anniversary present to each other, they began to do just that. They called the project “Pandrogeny.” On Valentine’s Day 2003, the two received matching sets of breast implants from Dr. Daniel Baker, a well-known Upper East Side cosmetic surgeon. Eye and nose jobs followed, and in subsequent years the two would receive, altogether, $200,000 worth of cheek and chin implants, lip plumping, liposuction, a tattooed beauty mark, and hormone therapy. They dressed in identical outfits. Each mimicked the other’s mannerisms.

 

And then in 2007, after returning from a tour with Psychic TV’s spinoff, PTV3, they lost half of their unified whole: Breyer died at 38, of stomach cancer. She’d been about to get a set of gold teeth, to match his.

 

“We were getting there, weren’t we?” Sitting in their apartment nearly two years later, P-Orridge refers to himself in the plural: “we,” “us,” “our.” Not on occasion, or when he remembers, but resolutely: in conversation, in e-mail exchanges. (I’m sticking with “he” and “him” here, for clarity’s sake.) He believes that his wife still exists within him. The project, P-Orridge says, has little to do with sex or vanity, and more to do with behavioral science—testing the boundaries of identity, redirecting the way “other people encode their expectations and their needs on you.” It’s like his collage work in that “we’ve always been interested in falling out of the frame.”

 

Breyer’s death has been heartbreaking for all of the obvious reasons, but especially because it has coincided with the greatest acclaim of P-Orridge’s career. A retrospective of his collages, “30 Years of Being Cut Up,” opens September 9 at Invisible- Exports. He’s the subject of two upcoming documentaries. Next March, he’ll lecture at MoMA. And in November, the Tate acquired 40 years’ worth of his art, writing, correspondence, and video and audio. For P-Orridge, the moment is bittersweet: As his life’s work is being celebrated, the project of his life has fallen apart. As his friend Katy Paycheck, a former Christie’s specialist, told him, “To me, performance art is the same as painting. There’s no difference at all. So you’re in the middle of a painting that you’ll never finish … and it’s just this twilight for the rest of your life.”