"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."

Friday, Sept. 25: Nancy, France – Souterain Porte V Festival

Tuesday, Nov. 3: London, UK – Tabernacle
Thursday, Nov. 5: Colmar, France – Grillen
Friday, Nov. 6: Berlin, Germany – Festsaal Kreuzberg
Saturday, Nov. 7: Wroclaw, Poland – Industrial Festival
Monday, Nov 9: Praha, Czech Republic – Futurum
Tuesday, Nov. 10: Halle, germany – Tanzbar Palette
Thursday, Nov 12: Moscow, Russia – Ikra Club

DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE

CLICK HERE FOR SELECT IMAGES

 

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to announce 30 YEARS OF BEING CUT UP, a retrospective spanning three decades of collage work by Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

* * *

As it is, so be it. Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is a true legend of the Anglo-American underground, an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of work reminds us that what is dangerous and what is important are never far apart—and that, when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too. “30 Years of Being Cut Up” draws on collage work from throughout P-Orridge’s remarkable career, demonstrating both the breadth and scope of h/er engagement with a medium that has remained constant throughout h/er life.

P-Orridge first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performance collective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. (P-Orridge would, in 1981, found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV.) By the time COUM disbanded in 1976, it had helped push the boundaries and shatter the definitions of performance and contemporary art, paving the way for later transgressive work. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper, used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators “Wreckers of Civilization”—a history documented in a book of the same name by Simon Ford, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship. Burroughs, under Gysin’s tutelage, repopularized the “cut-up” technique of the early 20th century Surrealists, in which text, or narrative imagery, is cut up and re-organized, creating a new, non-linear formulation. The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work, highlighted in “30 Years of Being Cut Up.”

P-Orridge was an early participator in Fluxus and Mail Art, applying the theories of John Cage (upon which the foundations of Fluxus are built) on the pressed recording “Early Worm” in 1968, and exchanging works with Ray Johnson among others. Responding to P-Orridge’s Mail Art, the British General Post Office charged h/er in 1976 with sending “indecent and offensive material” through the mail, including desecrated images of the Queen. (Several of these images appear in this retrospective.) Like many artists at this time, P-Orridge rejected market-driven work, choosing instead to maintain an artist-centered creative nucleus in which work was shared within a community, and was never intended to enter the commercialized art world. P-Orridge later began an occultist practice influenced by the theories of the artist Austin Osman Spare. The “sigils” they performed explored the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self through magical techniques such as automatic writing, drawing and actions, relics of which can be found in many of P-Orridge’s collage work.

In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced again by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, "pandrogynous" character, "BREYER P-ORRIDGE." They embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in order to resemble one another as much as possible. The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousnesses, a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union. (Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE.)

"30 Years of Being Cut Up" is a three decade retrospective of photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, which includes many works never exhibited before, as well as a sampling of P-Orridge’s early Mail Art. The show will mark the culmination of a new, re-emergent phase in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s life. He/r career — and most particularly he/r recent pursuit of pandrogyny — tests the limits of transgression and traces the tragic fate of the underground, proving again the expressive power and pervasive influence of those artists who take the world not as it comes to them — sensible, orthodox, predictable — but as they would like it to be.

Genesis P-Orridge and BREYER P-ORRIDGE have exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain.

A CATALOG IS AVAILABLE.

 

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS 14A Orchard Street, New York NY 10002 >> 212 226 5447

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.”

 

INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to announce 30 YEARS OF BEING CUT UP, a retrospective spanning three decades of collage work by Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

* * *

As it is, so be it. Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is a true legend of the Anglo-American underground, an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of work reminds us that what is dangerous and what is important are never far apart—and that, when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too. “30 Years of Being Cut Up” draws on collage work from throughout P-Orridge’s remarkable career, demonstrating both the breadth and scope of h/er engagement with a medium that has remained constant throughout h/er life.

P-Orridge first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performance collective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. (P-Orridge would, in 1981, found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV.) By the time COUM disbanded in 1976, it had helped push the boundaries and shatter the definitions of performance and contemporary art, paving the way for later transgressive work. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper, used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators “Wreckers of Civilization”—a history documented in a book of the same name by Simon Ford, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship. Burroughs, under Gysin’s tutelage, repopularized the “cut-up” technique of the early 20th century Surrealists, in which text, or narrative imagery, is cut up and re-organized, creating a new, non-linear formulation. The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work, highlighted in “30 Years of Being Cut Up.”

P-Orridge was an early participator in Fluxus and Mail Art, applying the theories of John Cage (upon which the foundations of Fluxus are built) on the pressed recording “Early Worm” in 1968, and exchanging works with Ray Johnson among others. Responding to P-Orridge’s Mail Art, the British General Post Office charged h/er in 1976 with sending “indecent and offensive material” through the mail, including desecrated images of the Queen. (Several of these images appear in this retrospective.) Like many artists at this time, P-Orridge rejected market-driven work, choosing instead to maintain an artist-centered creative nucleus in which work was shared within a community, and was never intended to enter the commercialized art world. P-Orridge later began an occultist practice influenced by the theories of the artist Austin Osman Spare. The “sigils” they performed explored the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self through magical techniques such as automatic writing, drawing and actions, relics of which can be found in many of P-Orridge’s collage work.

In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced again by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, "pandrogynous" character, "BREYER P-ORRIDGE." They embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in order to resemble one another as much as possible. The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousnesses, a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union. (Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE.)

"30 Years of Being Cut Up" is a three decade retrospective of photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, which includes many works never exhibited before, as well as a sampling of P-Orridge’s early Mail Art. The show will mark the culmination of a new, re-emergent phase in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s life. He/r career — and most particularly he/r recent pursuit of pandrogyny — tests the limits of transgression and traces the tragic fate of the underground, proving again the expressive power and pervasive influence of those artists who take the world not as it comes to them — sensible, orthodox, predictable — but as they would like it to be.

Genesis P-Orridge and BREYER P-ORRIDGE have exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain.