#Neil Andrew Megson

[savage-kult-of-gorthaur]

A LOOK AT GEN'S UNDERREPRESENTED LONG-HAIRED, GOATEE YEARS -- CLASS OF '69.

PIC(S) INFO: Spotlight on a long-haired, goateed Genesis P-Orridge (1950-2020) and his then significant other, Cosey Fanni Tutti (b. 1951), c. 1969. 📸: John Krivine.

PIC #2: A COUM performance outside Feren's art gallery in Hull, UK, c. 1971 (Tutti second from left).

"I’d gone to an “acid test” at the union at Hull University. I walked in, paid my entrance fee and received my tab. People were already tripping when I arrived: they were on the floor groping one another or playing with a bathtub of coloured jelly. A guy was playing the saxophone, free jazz-style. The notes were so jarring, fast and scatty that it drove me crazy. As I went to leave, I saw what I thought was a hallucination: a small, beautiful guy dressed in a black graduation gown, complete with mortarboard and a wispy, pale-lilac goatee beard.

About a week later, I was out dancing when a guy came over to me and said: “Cosmosis, Genesis would like to see you.” “What?” It was explained to me that a guy called Genesis had seen me and named me Cosmosis. It was the man I thought I had hallucinated, and he wanted us to get together. “Gen was so beautiful,” reads an entry in my diary for November 1969. "His eyes were a clear blue, his hair dark brown and his skin a clear, golden colour. He smiled so beautifully.""

-- THE GUARDIAN, "The art provocateur recalls life in an art commune in Hull, fighting the Hells Angels and thrashing Genesis P-Orridge on stage in Amsterdam," by Cosey Fanni Tutti, c. March 2017

Source: www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/14/i-smeared-gen-in-flour-paste-and-whipped-him-hard-an-extract-from-cosey-fanni-tuttis-book.

[musicktoplayinthedark]

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 22 February 1950 – 14 March 2020)

[nofatclips]

Foggy Notion (The Velvet Underground cover) by Psychic TV / PTV3 from the album Mr. Alien Brain vs. The Skinwalkers

[nebris]

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 22 February 1950 – 14 March 2020)

[pieterzandvliet]

Genesis P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson; 22 February 1950 – 14 March 2020) was an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, visual artist, and occultist who rose to notability as the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective and lead vocalist of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle. P-Orridge was also a founding member of Thee Temple ov Psychick…

[marrengo]

Neil Andrew Megson aka Genesis Breyer P-Orridge      Feb. 22, 1950 ~ March 14, 2020     Iconic Industrialist 

[kraftwerk113]

Life´s too short for weird music - Tagesempfehlung 14.03.2020

Throbbing Gristle / Hot on the heels of love

Neil Andrew Megson ist tot. Als Genesis P Orridge war Megson Gründungsmitglied der elektronischen Avantgarde Formation Throbbing Gristle. Aus dem Sheffielder Dunstkreis legten Throbbing Gristle den Grundstock experimentellen elektronischen Musizierens in Großbritannien. Das Gesamtwerk von Throbbing Gristle verteilt sich auf 18 Alben, die zwischen 1975 und 2012 veröffentlicht wurden. Das komplexe und oft nur schwer zugängliche Gesamtwerk von Throbbing Gristle offenbart selten so eingängige Momente wie „Hot on the heels of love“ vom in 1979 veröffentlichten „20 Jazz-Funk Greats“. Und doch wird Genesis P Orrigde und seine Kunst lange nachwirken.

[sonicmoremusic]

Genesis P-Orridge, performer and Throbbing Gristle co-founder, Dead at 70

Photography by Alice O’Malley

Genesis P-Orridge, born Neil Andrew Megson who identified as “s/he” and “he/r,” died early Saturday after battling leukaemia for over two years. The news comes from Ryan Martin via Genesse and Caresse P-Orridge.

P-Orridge rose to notability as the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective and lead vocalist of seminal industrial band, Throbbing Gristle. He…

[robbialy]

In 1965 in Solihull, near Birmingham in the Midlands of England, my English Literature teacher known affectionately as "BOGBRUSH" to us students asked me " Please stay on after class"...immediately we thought "Oh no! what have we done wrong?". We went up to his desk. He said "Here is the title of a book and author that I think you would really appreciate and enjoy." The note on a scrap of paper said, "ON THE ROAD" by Jack Kerouac. In those days it was imporrible to get ANY books by Kerouac, Ferlingetti or Burroughs. But we hitchhiked to London with a friend, "Little Baz" to seek out obscure books. We were wandering Soho, then the porn,hooker part of London looking for milk to steal off door steps. We drifted into the porno shops. To my surprise we found Jean Genet "Our Lady of the Flowers". Eventually in various of these VERY underground shops we discovered Henry Miller, and "Naked Lunch" by W. S. Burroughs. It dawned on us that what all these books had in common was they had been accused of obscenity! So the sex shops smuggled them in assuming they were porn. It was in these shops that we also discovered OLYMPIA PRESS books from Paris, France. We still collect any Olympia Press we come across and also ANY Hanuman mini Books. Little did Bogbrush know how totally deeply these books would inspire Neil Andrew Megson to create a living artist as art that he called "Genesis P-Orridge. By 1971 the die was cast, we changed my name legally to Genesis P-Orridge. // Djin GEN

[hell-yeahfilm]

NONBINARY

P-Orridge, who died from leukemia in 2020, was born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, England, in 1950. Considering their birth name a "temporary tag," P-Orridge believed that a name change was "a really potent form of magic.” Their overriding goal in a lifetime of art- and music-making was to "short-circuit control," a directive given to them by William Burroughs. The author’s early years in British schools, where they suffered from verbal and physical abuse from classmates and authority figures alike, "taught me who my enemy was." Their early experiments in performance art and street theater set the tone for their career: “Does anything have to exist just because it did before?...Who does it serve?” Throbbing Gristle, the seminal industrial band P-Orridge co-founded, used "the tools and the toys of the military-industrial complex" as musical instruments to subvert “their original intent, which was, of course, control.” Confounding expectations, the author’s next band, Psychic TV, aimed to “seduce the audience rather than alienate them.” Using esoteric rituals, fetish objects, sacred figures, and shamanic tools, their music conjured spiritual states and aimed to "make the occult trendy again.” For another conceptual art project, P-Orridge served as one half—with dominatrix and partner Lady Jaye Breyer—of a "pandrogyne" fusing male and female beings into a "third being,” a further breakdown of the binary model. They erased differences between them with body modifications and medical techniques, applying cut-up methods to "our problematic bodies.” They considered this project the "egalitarian integration of two artist explorers, this third being Breyer P-Orridge," a proposed "end of either/or" that is "essential to the survival of the species." As much a manifesto as a memoir, this wild life story is dedicated to the breakdown of categories: "End gender. Break sex. Destroy the control of DNA and the expected. Every man and woman is a man and woman.”

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/3wsaWue

[opsikpro]

Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge has died, aged 70

[ad_1]

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, co-founder of seminal industrial groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, has died aged 70.

P-Orridge, who identified as pandrogynous and used the pronouns s/he and h/er, was diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia in 2017. H/er death on Saturday (March 14) was confirmed in a statement by h/er two daughters Genesse and Caresse.

Born Neil Andrew Megson in…

[dailywikis]

Genesis P-Orridge Bio, Age, Wiki, Dies, Married, Children, Net Worth, Instagram

Genesis P-Orridge Bio – Wiki

Genesis P-Orridge was an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, and occultist.

P-Orridge was born on 22 February 1950 in Victoria Park, Manchester, England. P-Orridge’s birth name was Neil Andrew Megson. P-Orridge died on 14 March 2020.

https://twitter.com/robinrimbaud/status/1238933072822894592

Family

P-Orridge born to Ronald and Muriel…

[tipsoctopus]

"Really is the cheapest of cheap" - Many West Brom fans react to Matt Wilson update

The circus that has unravelled since Darren Moore’s sacking at West Brom has left fans of the club on Twitter bemused as some supporters now see the only viable managerial option as James Shan, the current caretaker boss.

Shan has guided the club to two wins from his two games in charge, leaving certain individuals under the impression that with seemingly no plan in place, he would be the best bet until the end of the season.

This comes after an update from the Express & Star’s Matt Wilson suggested that Preston wanted to keep hold of Baggies target Alex Neil.

West Brom are fighting for promotion and sit in 4th place in the Championship. But despite their good league position, the Hawthorns faithful have been left angry over a lack of developments in their search for a new permanent manager.

The recent news led to one supporter claiming the list of targets wasn’t very exciting, arguing that because things hadn’t been sorted, it now looked likely Shan would keep the job.

Some reaction has seen supporters urge for the 40-year-old to be kept until the end of the season. That’s before appointing someone like Slavisa Jokanovic when the club will have a better idea of what division they’ll be in.

Was Darren Moore’s sacking unfair? The Pl>ymaker FC squad name which Championship bosses should have gone instead in the video below…

A specific individual claimed the club should bring back Gary Megson to link up with Shan whilst another hoped no one would come into work alongside him, citing the poor relationship the club had with Graeme Jones, assistant manager to Moore.

Here’s what was said about Shan and the current situation after Wilson’s update hit Twitter…

Give it Shan to the end of the season and bring someone in during the summer. No pressure then and we’ll know what division we are in.

— Bomber’s Boots (@BombersBoots) March 19, 2019

Personally, just give it Shan until the end of the season and then appoint Joka or Neil so they have a full season to bring their style of play into the club etc. How high are the chances of Shan until end of the season Matt?

— John (@Johntur01) March 18, 2019

Just bring Megson back to work alongside Shan for the season.

Jokanovic will want to start a new style of football with old players. Feels like Groundhog Day.

— Brad (@brada_wba) March 19, 2019

Personally think the last thing we need is somebody coming in above Shan and dictating to him what he should do similar to Jones with Moore.

— Hamish Colley (@colley_hamish) March 18, 2019

Not a very exciting list of candidates is it really, rowett, Alex Neill, Appleton my days ?‍♂️ it really is the cheapest of cheap options. This should have been sorted well before now longer it does go on more likely Shan will keep job until seasons end

— Andrew Grainger (@andrew_grainger) March 18, 2019

Would be happy for Shan to take charge for the rest of the season if we were guaranteed a new manager begin work from the final whistle of the season. Because promoted or not we are going to need it! For me Jokanovic still seems the best option but wouldn’t say no Neil.

— Dan Barnett (@dnbrntt) March 18, 2019

from FootballFanCast.com https://ift.tt/2TKif1f via IFTTT from Blogger https://ift.tt/2TNBZ43 via IFTTT

[coweatman]

there are good photos in the original, but, y’know, paywall.

Genesis P-Orridge Has Always Been a Provocateur of the Body. Now She’s at Its Mercy.

By John Leland

Neil Andrew Megson discovered Max Ernst when he was 15 years old, and it set a course for his life. The book was called “The Hundred Headless Woman,” surrealistic collages of human and animal forms. It presented the body as fluid and mutable, and the self as open to negotiation. It was the mid-1960s, and to a British schoolboy who felt he didn’t fit in — into his school, his gender, his body — this was freedom.

In the half-century since, Megson — better known as the musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge — has steadily probed at the boundaries of the body, both literally and figuratively, evolving from art provocateur to founder of the influential British bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to semi-established fine artist with archives at the Tate Britain. As P-Orridge now considers retiring from live music, Throbbing Gristle’s albums from the 1970s and early 1980s are newly available in deluxe reissues on Mute.

At 68, P-Orridge lives on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in a body racked by chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.

“I’m stable right now, my blood counts are close to normal,” P-Orridge said on a recent afternoon at home, flanked by a snoring Pekingese named Musty Dagger. “But at some point it will finally flare up and become terminal, and there’s no way to know when that might be. Optimistically, two years. Less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death.”

The artist at home: working-class English accent, Rogaine in the bathroom, black T-shirt reading “Thank God for Abortion.” Breast implants and a mouth full of metal teeth, an idea P-Orridge got from watching the movie “Belle de Jour” on LSD. Shelves full of books and artwork, mostly by P-Orridge, including various fetish objects and a wooden rabbit dotted in blood, the residue of hundreds of ketamine injections.

Since a series of operations with Jacqueline Breyer P-Orridge, P-Orridge’s wife, who died in 2007, P-Orridge prefers genderless pronouns, usually first person plural, but is O.K. with female pronouns. Her life, she said, was an experiment that was still playing out.

“We know that Neil Andrew Megson decided to create an artist, Genesis P-Orridge, and insert it into the culture,” she said. “Some people take their lives and turn them into the equivalent of a work of art. So we invented Genesis, but Gen forgot Neil, really. Does that person still exist somewhere, or did Genesis gobble him up? We don’t know the answer. But thank you, Neil.”

It has been a provocative run. P-Orridge first came into being with a Dadaist performance collective called COUM Transmissions, whose shows included whipping, masturbation and live sex; “Prostitution,” their 1976 retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, included nudity and bloody tampons and scandalized the British public.

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When P-Orridge and others branched off that year to form Throbbing Gristle, they added assaultive industrial noise and Nazi imagery to the mix.

“In terms of being shocking, punk was pretty tame in comparison,” said Simon Reynolds, the author of “Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984.” “They were writing songs about serial killers and cutting themselves onstage.”

In 1981, P-Orridge reversed course in the gently trippy Psychic TV, whose danceable songs echoed the occult writings of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, and included a tribute to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones called “Godstar.” P-Orridge imagined the band as the center of a global consciousness raising, and recruited fans to join Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, a cross between a fan club and a cult, whose members donned paramilitary gear and submitted bodily fluids as part of their initiation.

In 1995, after a recording session with the band Love and Rockets in the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin, P-Orridge woke up to a massive electrical fire there and jumped from a second-story window, shattering her arm and suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. Psychic TV went on hiatus, but returned in the late ’90s and again with a new lineup in 2003.

But all the time she was making collages and other visual art, including a solo show at the Rubin Museum of Art that made The New York Times’s roundup of the Best Art of 2016. And she was writing books, including, most recently, “His Name Was Master,” a collection of interviews with Brion Gysin, whose “Cut-Up” literary experiments with William S. Burroughs — splicing and recombining texts to unlock meanings — have been a driving aesthetic in P-Orridge’s work and life.

It takes a moment in the apartment to realize that the two naked blondes in a wall-sized photograph, identical of breast and chin, are P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, Jacqueline’s nickname. In the bedroom are photos of their California wedding, June 1995, Friday the 13th. Genesis was the bride. Lady Jaye wore a mustache, tight leather pants and a leather vest, nothing underneath.

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Their marriage — they met at an S & M dungeon in New York, where Lady Jaye worked — began a new creative phase, this one a partnership, in which their main medium was their bodies.

Lady Jaye was both a registered nurse and a dominatrix, a delightful combination. P-Orridge sometimes worked with her at the dungeon, as the domineering Lady Sarah. The pay wasn’t bad — maybe $200 an hour for what was called a “tribute” — but the work wasn’t steady, she said. They had money from a lawsuit after the fire, and an idea: What if they altered their bodies to become a third entity, neither male nor female, but free from the binary framework that they saw as destructive?

They called their project the pandrogyne, the fusing of two persons into a third that only existed when they were together. P-Orridge had been an early proponent of piercing and ritual cutting or scarring. The pandrogyne was their way of applying Burroughs’s and Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique to their own flesh.

P-Orridge, the father of two daughters from a previous marriage — she attended PTA meetings in a miniskirt and thigh-high boots — remembered calling up her daughter Genesse, saying, “‘There’s something you ought to know. Lady Jaye and myself, we got matching breast implants last week.’ And Genesse just said, ‘What? You got breast implants when you could have bought me a new car?’ That was 2003. She was about 19.”

“My daughters adore me still, despite everything that’s been unorthodox,” she added. “They don’t bat an eye. They call me Papa Gen-Gen.”

Lady Jaye had surgery on her chin and nose to match her mate’s. The couple took hormones but didn’t like them; they took ketamine, daily, and liked it so much that they often went to sleep with full syringes on their night stands, so that whoever woke up first could inject the other partner in mid-slumber.

The French filmmaker Marie Losier documented their relationship in the 2012 documentary “The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye,” which ran at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month.

The writer Douglas Rushkoff, who briefly played in Psychic TV, recalled nights in the city with Gen and Jackie, as he called the Breyer P-Orridges (like other old friends, Rushkoff refers to P-Orridge by masculine pronouns).

“He and Jackie were our most normal friends,” he said. “We’d just go to the Indian restaurant. He had weird teeth or took weird drugs or had weird art, but we would talk about what to do with savings, or how to deal with air conditioning. Just normal, mundane stuff.”

Then in 2007, Lady Jaye died of an acute heart arrhythmia. Her death left P-Orridge alone, one half of an art project that no longer had a second half.

“It became really tricky,” Rushkoff said. “To make that level of commitment, not just in marriage and love, but to do this thing to your body that doesn’t quite make sense anymore without the other half, that’s rough.”

When P-Orridge developed leukemia, Rushkoff organized a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign that has raised almost $55,000 for her medical bills.

“We realized for the first time in a tangible way how much people care for me,” P-Orridge said. “That was really beautiful to discover. See, I’m getting teary already. That’s a good feeling, that that many people want you to stay.”

The prankishness of P-Orridge’s work sometimes distracts people from the art itself, said Jarrett Earnest, 31, an art critic and curator who met her at a performance piece by Leigha Mason called “Spit Banquet,” in which people sat at a table and spat into empty vessels.

“What she’s done as a thinker and as a maker, this has not been understood in the wider art world,” Earnest said. “People in the music world know her in a specific way. But her writing and her ideas about culture and the relationship of life to art are so profound.”

Earnest added: “She does a lot to play the part of the cartoon, because there’s a part of her that’s really silly. She is those things, but at the same time this sweet, profound, authentic person. It’s not just someone with weird teeth who looks like a cult leader.”

On another afternoon in October, P-Orridge wore a T-shirt that read “Cult Leader.” She was recovering from pneumonia, preparing to travel to Europe for two concerts, the last two dates in an otherwise scrapped tour. After that, she said, she did not expect to tour again, because her health was too unpredictable.

And she was in love, with a woman she’d met in Granada a few years back.

“We certainly didn’t expect it, at our age,” she said. “What a beautiful surprise it was to be in love again. She’s 28. It’s ridiculous, but what can you do, man?”

In the last year, an old bandmate and girlfriend, known as Cosey Fanni Tutti, accused P-Orridge in a memoir of being physically and emotionally abusive. P-Orridge said she had not seen the book, but denied the allegations. “Whatever sells a book sells a book,” she said.

And she was busy, preparing two volumes of her notebooks from the 1960s and a graphic novel called “Man Into Wolf,” whose title comes from a 1948 book about sadism, masochism and werewolves. Museums, she said, were calling about new and old work.

“Derek Jarman said, ‘Gen, when they know you’ve got a terminal illness, they start liking what you do,’” she said, referring to the director and author. “‘You wait and see.’ And now people want the art in art exhibitions.”

If there is a next chapter, P-Orridge hopes it will be to form a collective community, with people sharing resources but having more privacy than in a commune. The ‘60s dream still drives her.

“When you’ve got a terminal illness, you think about what your legacy might be,” she said. “My only answer is, we would hope that it would inspire people to see that they can do a life totally as they would like it to unfold. Live your life every day like a page in your book of life, and make that page as interesting as you can. Whenever you have a choice, say: Which is the better page in my book?”

She said she was not afraid of death. “I’d like to stay, because it’s fascinating here,” she said. “But as far as we can tell, having a physical body is a luxury we don’t often get, and too many people squander that luxury.”

She smiled, a mouthful of gleaming metal. “We’ve not squandered it,” she said. “We’ve utilized it to the maximum we could.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 11, 2018, on Page AR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Provocateur of the Body, Now at Its Mercy.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: “This Is a Revolutionary Moment”: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on Intersectionality in Art

  Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “My Funny Valentine” (2013), Expanded Polaroid, C-print mounted on Plexi, 48 x 47.5 inches, edition of 3 (image courtesy the artists and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS)

Intersectionality is a powerful reminder of our connectedness, but it has arguably lost some of its weight due to overexposure. Many art critics have coopted the word as a lazy syllable for identity politics, vaguely encompassing discussions of race, gender, sexuality, and feminism. Intersectionality can seem like another big word meant to hide the art world’s ugly essentialism — an impulse to sort artists into epithetic categories.

But essentialism be damned. The Intersectional Self at the 8th Floor Gallery shows that this big word is more than an empty container. Intersectionality has the power to unite people, if we let it — if we can appreciate its nuance. In this exhibition, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge invokes intersectionality to destroy the body politic. As the founder of pandrogyny, P-Orridge seeks the collapse of all senses of identity into one self, one total humanity. (Accordingly, P-Orridge speaks with the pronoun “we,” not in the royal sense, but in the sense of unity with his/her departed partner in pandrogyny, Lady Jaye. P-Orridge also prefers the pronouns s/he and h/er to further demonstrate that bond.)

Pandrogyny manifests itself in the artist’s work as simultaneously humorous and visceral. As the founder of hardcore industrial music, there will always be something inherently confrontational in P-Orridge’s work, if also political. For example, “My Funny Valentine,” on view at the 8th Floor Gallery’s exhibition, is a kaleidoscopic image of hearts made out of an ambiguous assortment of body parts. Are we looking up someone’s skirt? Are these pieces of flesh from someone’s backside?

Through h/er work, P-Orridge puckishly calls for an end to gender as a construct, and so, h/er participation in The Intersectional Self feels apt. I spoke to P-Orridge and the broader world.

*  *  *

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Mousetrap” (2016), cigar press, tampons, meunstral blood, resin, brass, 24.75 x 15 x 5.25 inches (image courtesy Invisible Exports)

Zachary Small: How would you define intersectionality? Do you ascribe to that phrase? Is pandrogyny intersectional?

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: To be honest, we are not 100% sure. But pandrogyny is a wide-ranging and contemporary concept. It’s outside the gender gap. Our view is that society’s real issue is with evolution. Historical (we prefer to say ahistorical) progressions in the human species have lead us to this moment where we either mutate or disintegrate. Our war has always been with binary systems. What do you think the intersectional self is?

ZS: I think intersectionality is also a relatively new concept in the same way pandrogyny is. And therefore, I think it is still being defined and redefined. But generally, I’d say it is identity at the cross-sections of socio-economic and political status, race ethnicity, gender, and sex. It can be many other things as well.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Gender is a Drag” (2011), mixed media, 14 x 11 inches

GBPO: Okay, so both intersectionality and pandrogyny address the problematic issues of the body, identity, and socioeconomics. How do they interact and what do they mean? For us, it’s also a spiritual issue, which is something contemporary art avoids. The origin of art goes back to prehistoric times when people didn’t know if the sun would come back the next day. Our idea of consciousness was still primitive, and there was a terrible fear of the darkness. That fear gradually gripped civilization, which required control. And there was a long period of about 3,000 years when everyone linked their individuality with the idea of perpetuating groups. It was about submission: submission to individuals in order to survive. But we are past there! The problem is that some people still want to maintain control. And while our environment has become more sophisticated and complex, our attitudes and social behaviors have been left behind. Now is the moment when we must regather our thoughts and say that it’s imperative to reintegrate ourselves with our minds. Why are we here? What do we want to do? How can our experiences and physical life rationalize the material world?

Those in power create wars to maintain their opposition. But this is a revolutionary moment, and we cannot revert to the ongoing distractions of a binary system. We need to take back who we are and write the narrative of our own stories. It’s about stripping away our inherited archetypes and our distracting issues to look at our solid bodies, our experiences amongst people. Who is writing my story? Who am I submitting myself to? Who am I forcing to submit? What is it that I truly wish to be? That’s where the real battle will be: Will we have an evolutionary thrust or stagnation?

ZS: As recognition of your work has only grown, how do you make sense of your own rise to prominence in a political climate that exceedingly wants to return to binaries?

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Red Chair Posed” (2008), C-print mounted on Plexiglas, 56.5 x 72 inches, edition of 3 (image courtesy Invisible Exports)

GBPO: We are really depressed, to be honest. We were not surprised about Trump or his cronies. We looked at the situation and thought about the worst that could happen. And it happened. It was instinctive, intuitive. People have been distracted for so long; they’ve become narcissistic, obsessed with selfie culture, and entitled to information. When we realized that Trump would win the election, we turned to our friends. We grew up in the 1960s. We were part of the psychedelic revolution. We worked with Gay Lib Street Theatre. And we were involved in political action when homosexuality was finally made legal in Britain. We worked with squatter’s rights, animal rights. We worked against apartheid. And slowly, we saw common sense winning. People became more tolerant. It felt like a liberal expansion where people were left alone unless they were destructive. Now, it feels like we’ve returned to postwar austerity — an austerity of ideas and imagination.

We did all this work and for what? To be rejected by these idiots? It’s depressing but I guess we must do it again. We are in an amoral conundrum where the people left to fight, the youngest, have yet to wake up. There is an old but very usable saying given to us by a Native American shaman that says, “No attachments. No judgment. No expectations.” We must become all things that the current status quo is not: kind, respectful, loyal, and forgiving. We must do what the establishment does not expect us to and be good people.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (photo by Drew Wiedemann, courtesy Invisible Exports)

ZS: Right, because the bureaucracy can only understand so much. It makes me think of the idea of comedy as rebellion, and I sense elements of comedy in your work. Would you agree? GBPO: Oh, of course! One of the great disappointments of our career is that no one noticed our dark, sarcastic humor. I’m from Manchester — what can I say? — we are famous for our sarcasm. Looking back at the 1960s, you have the yippies who go to Wall Street and throw money into the pit. It’s still talked about because it was such a simple action that jarred everyone’s realities. The symbol worked beautifully, humorously. Anyone that wants to evolve a thinking culture must look for ways to avoid overtly aggressive work.

In the 1980s, there was punk and industry. We were so angry and trying to destroy everything. That was the right strategy against Reagan and Thatcher because it helped adjust the culture. But we cannot use that anymore. They know that. They’ve diluted it, coopted it with money. It’s the same with Hip-Hop. Where is Public Enemy now? Power tries to bribe you. Don’t be tricked. Think about what they are used to — anger, rage, demonstrations — do the unexpected. Be kind and thoughtful. Speak with a considered voice and explain how you feel so there is no excuse for them dismissing you. Anyone that wants to evolve a thinking culture today must look for methods that shy away from overt aggression.

ZS: Do you think the art world has cultivated a thinking culture?

GBPO: No. What’s really depressing for us is how long the art world has followed in the shadow of the Young British Artists. Initially, they were smart, funny, and clever. “We hate art and there it is.” But now everyone wants to brand themselves that way. They aren’t thinking about content. Art must have a story, comment, some kind of information that you can take away. That’s the definition of art: creation.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, “Perfecting, undated,” mixed media, 14 x 11 inches

ZS: You’ve talked about pleasure as a weapon. What does that mean and how do we use it?

GBPO: When you make art, it’s implied in the content. Same with music. As an attitude, I see pleasure as an attempt to create a blank slate each day. One good way to do that is changing your name. That new person is just a name, and then you can say, “Who is this? What are they like? What do they do?” And that’s what we did. We invented Genesis. What happened to Neil? [Laughs.] Neil is the artist and we are the artwork that Neil made. We still exist but where the fuck is Neil?

ZS: Where is Neil? Does Neil ever come out?

GBPO: No, no. God knows where Neil is. We should make a tattoo saying, “Copyright: Neil Andrew Megson.”

ZS: “Have you seen Neil?” Put it on a milk carton.

GBPO: Put it on my leg! You see, we’ve created another little comment. It’s got humor but it’s saying something important. You can deconstruct yourself and become the truth, the author of your own narrative. Once you do that, every day becomes a story. You are free to decide your life.

ZS: Thinking about these ideas of reaction and resistance for queer people, I wonder what’s possible. If the pandrogyne is an intersectionality, a third being, does that also mean there’s a third world out there solely for queer people to inhabit?

GBPO: Oh God, there are infinite worlds. Anyone who’s taken acid will tell you that. If you can swallow a piece of paper and the world vanishes … We live in a moment when there are so many options to demonstrate our own perceptions. We need to give that ability to other people. Imagine humanity like a single living organism, maybe an amoeba. When the amoeba gets damaged — what’s the organism do? It marshals its resources together and heals itself. If the human species is one organism, and we believe it is, then we are all cells of a singular being. If everyone saw themselves as cells of the same organism, there would be no use for fighting. We could already be colonizing space by now! Curing illness! We could be that incredible species that maximized its potential and filled itself with love.

The Intersectional Self continues at the 8th Floor Gallery (17 W 17th St, Flatiron District, Manhattan) through May 19.

The post “This Is a Revolutionary Moment”: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge on Intersectionality in Art appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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