by Simon Warner
During his time with COUM Transmissions, tattooing took on a talismanic quality – for instance, both he and Cosey Fanni Tutti had tattoos out of loyalty to a jailed associate72 – and tattooing and piercing have become ongoing emblems of transgression in his résumé. Tattoos on the right shoulder, arms and lower abdomen – a snarling wolf ’s head on his right groin, providing a bestial emblem which echoes the sexual power of the penis – and body piercing – including genital decoration – have formed an intrinsic feature of P-Orridge’s look for many years.73
P-Orridge talked in Modern Primitives about the concepts behind pandrogyny, while he was still involved in an earlier relationship with his then wife Paula. He said:
Paula and I function as a symbiotic team when we do rituals and that is the Third Mind. We become fused as an androgynous being, or as we call it, a Pandrogynous being: P for power, Potency, and also for the Positive aspects of being blended male-female. And also because it then makes Pan, and Pan is also a good concept. Pandrogyny is one of my on-going investigations, and the other one is the idea that we’re not an occult group, we’re an occulture. Because my interest is in culture, but I approach it through occult means, if you like.74
In 2002, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, a photographer and also performer as member of Psychic TV, the woman to whom he has been married since 1996, embarked on their experiment in pandrogyny, each pursuing, not a sex change, but a movement towards, what they describe as, a hermaphrodite state. This creative concept raises many issues about sex, gender, sexuality, identity and the part that art might play in annotating or obscuring those characteristics and their relationship to each other. So far, P-Orridge has undergone a number of surgical procedures – implanted breasts, a shrinking of the waist, work to cheekbones and lips – not to mention the installation of an impressive, and expensive, set of gold teeth.
We might also add that the tradition of gender play or gender bending or sexual ambivalence has a potent history within the field of entertainment – from boys playing women in original Shakespearean dramas to castrati of the Catholic choirs and the principal boys and dames of the Comedia dell’Arte-inspired pantomime. These theatrical antecedents have been particularly replicated in the field of post-war popular music – from Little Richard’s outrageously camp stage style of the 1950s to the long-haired, feminised affectations of the hippy 1960s (the Stones have already been mentioned in this context) and onward to David Bowie, the New York Dolls, Boy George, Prince, Marilyn Manson and a large number of others (most often men, but sometimes women like Patti Smith, Annie Lennox and k.d.lang) who have resisted accepted notions of the masculine and feminine and turned those expectations on their head. It is important, I believe, that Genesis P-Orridge’s transgressive patterns are considered in relation to that particular history, too.
Sheila Whiteley touches upon such ambiguities when she speaks of Mick Jagger as ‘“the king bitch of rock” […] with a performing style derived largely from a careful scrutiny of Rudolph Nureyev and Tina Turner’ and how he ‘promised fantasy gratification of both the heterosexual and the homosexual’.75 We have also already seen how P-Orridge’s homoerotic celebration of Jagger’s band rival Brian Jones – with his ‘new identities that transgressed taboos with abandon’ in the Godstar sleeve notes76 – was a crucial juncture in his own artistic coming out.
Yet P-Orridge feels that for all these recent physical re-orderings, the bodily aspect of his art-making is not a stand-alone strategy, rather part of a pattern of creativity, reconstructing by reassembling texts, in the very widest sense, that stretches back to ‘Beautiful Litter’, his spontaneous haiku games on his own high street in 1968. ‘My whole life before’, he tells Bob Bert in BB Gun magazine, ‘as an individual artist and musician was about experimenting with cut-ups in music, art, collaging in every possible way. Now I can see that I have always included my body in all of that as well in some form […] Consciousness, body, sexual identity, perceptions, senses, and all those things that in some way add up to one thing that is called ME in one’s head. All of that is now contributed as raw material to this new Breyer P-Orridge entity […] It makes sense that we collaborated in the past with Burroughs and Gysin, that the invention of Industrial music grew from a desire to find a way to apply cut-ups to contemporary music in a way that talked about modern times.’77
It seems that Genesis P-Orridge has spent the last 40 years constructing an alternative reality – an art-inspired parallel universe which challenges all notions of conventional organisation, whether musical, literary, visual or ethical, or the sexual categorising of the human being. However, at the end of it all, this programme of body modification, while it may be a dramatic course of action and a life-altering process, it is, for him, primarily an art project or art process, one that has attracted attention among the cognoscenti of cutting-edge art – whether that be makers or followers of performance art, installation art or body art – and will be seen as just that, with a documented record, compiled in photographs and film, mapping the evolution of the piece, to be exhibited in the future.
In fact, the very venture is also serving to stress P-Orridge’s credentials as a maker of art, challenging his reputation as a renegade rocker. As he told writer-researcher Jayne Sheridan in an interview in England in 2004: ‘Painful but Fabulous […] was very much concerned with me as an artist and not a musician and I really wanted to redress that balance, not be categorised as a musician because I don’t feel that’s what I am; I feel I am a multi-media artist. Everything I do I approach with the aesthetics of an artist, very much. I conceive an idea. I then explore and do research around the concept and if it seems valid to explore it and basically test it on the public, then I will. But I never do anything that I am not prepared to do to or for myself.’78
He also explained that as Lady Jaye ‘edited all the photographs for the book, it became more and more apparent to us both – and for me it was quite a surprise – that within all the conscious projects that I’ve done in performance art, music, collage, painting, sculpture, that what was really central to all of them was an exploration of identity; it wasn’t even just gender but it was identity itself. Who creates the person that we say we are? And it became more and more apparent, too, to me in fact everyone’s identity is fictional and most of it is written by other people, that this is a narrative that we live and it can be re-written and we can actually usurp the outside world’s control over our character, our identity, and we can begin to write the story for ourselves and be whoever we want to be.’79
But what happens when the investigator re-discovers the subject of this piece having known him in another time, another space? When the subject is Genesis P-Orridge, the question takes on extra pertinence especially when change of all kinds is a credo underpinning his activity, his life-long adventure. I had changed too, naturally – the eight-years-old boy had become the 48-years-old man – so the dislocation occurs on both sides of the fence but his pursuit of transformation seems to have been endemic; in my personal case, ageing alone could be blamed.
For me, meeting P-Orridge four decades after my initial encounters with him as Neil Megson was strange for many reasons. When I called him from close to the Brooklyn subway station – he had proposed meeting me there when I arrived – to let him know I was nearby, I asked how I would recognise him. ‘I’ll be wearing a white shirt and a blue, denim mini-skirt’, he replied.80 That was briefly disorientating but, when we met up just minutes after, we quickly connected. With a bob of peroxided hair, full lips and petite, he looked younger than his 54 years. He mocked me gently for my hippy-ish appearance. I was wearing a bandana and he suggested my stay in San Francisco in recent days had affected me. It broke the ice for both of us.
The afternoon and evening we passed together – my own partner Jayne Sheridan, who looked superficially, though still surprisingly, like P-Orridge, speedily befriended him, too, and later Lady Jaye joined us as we headed for a meal at Sea, one of the fashionable Williamsbur
g eateries – was comfortable and rewarding. I interviewed him on tape, was shown the only known sculpture, a self-portrait, that William Burroughs had created sitting close to the space where the Breyer P-Orridges have been planning a basement gallery, and shared our thoughts on a whole range of topics.
Genesis P-Orridge has pursued his personal metamorphosis for many years, but it seems that his association with Lady Jaye has given the quest for physical re-orientation a renewed and powerful momentum. He may be chasing this outcome in response to the sexual ambiguities he recognised in Brian Jones, and was so attracted to, when he met him in 1966. He may, as Pitts and Hebdige have proposed, be pursuing this extreme form of body modification for the same reasons he drew on tattoos and scarification in previous periods, as a subversive, cultural displacement activity. He may also have decided, in part, to strive to retain his Peter Pan-ish appearance for reasons of vanity, too – P-Orridge would not deny here the power and place of his own ego. But it seems that the intensity of the latest project has less to do with gender distortion or gender reassignment and more to do with sheer playfulness with the notions of identity – he refuses to be bound by his name, his culture, his own body and sees this refusal to comply, this disobedience, as the absolute moral obligation of his art and his artistry.
There are other issues and paradoxes that we could explore, too. P-Orridge’s fall from the window of an ablaze LA studio in 1995,81 when he suffered such serious injuries including multiple fractures, might be regarded as the ultimate, if unplanned, cut-up. At the same time, his surgical procedures, conducted with planning and precision, could be regarded as the antithesis of cut-up: although the surgeon’s knife literally slices the human tissue and re-constructs the body, the random laws of chance, seemingly central to the aesthetics of cut-up, appear to be removed from the equation. But those are speculations for further and future consideration.
For P-Orridge in 2005, while rock music and his spoken word pursuits – via Thee Majesty, a smaller ensemble also featuring Psychic TV personnel including Lady Jaye – will continue to feature in his portfolio of activities, it is his life as a maker of art, as an artist, as expressed through his bodily and identity alterations, that seems set to dominate his agenda now and in the years to come. His personal masquerade, as shared with his wife, will become the performance, the artwork, the process at the very centre of what he does. Yet there is also, at the heart, literally and metaphorically, of this pursuit an oddly old-fashioned commitment to his partner – the ritual they are enacting also has a strong under-current of a Romantic love pact. In the midst of these cut-ups, there is an older, healing, spiritual dimension which lends a mystical, almost anachronistic, quality to the avant garde anarchy of their modus operandi.
As Genesis P-Orridge remarks:
You know the old phrase that’s my other half. Well we’ve taken it very literally and we are each other’s other half and so we want to use the available resources of surgery and cosmetics to become more and more, at least on a basic gestural level, like each other physically. So it ‘s a cut-up literally – we are not just cutting up information, we are cutting up ourselves both our internalised consciousness self and our physical self in order to becomes mirrors of ourselves in order to see what happens, what unusual and remarkable things might happen when difference is removed and similarity becomes the objective.82
As for the enduring influence of the Beats, there is no question that William Burroughs and his artistic strategies remain central to P-Orridge’s activities. He is unequivocal on this. ‘My entire life is dedicated to quite literally my belief in, my faith in, the cut-up; even my body’s a cut-up now quite literally and so I can’t imagine anything that I do not being influenced by the cut-up. It’s always there; I do collages, almost every week, certainly, I’m making collages. When I keep notebooks I always write them non-chronologically. I’ll open them at whatever page is open – if that was my diary I’d just go “Okay, woops” and then I’d write on that page and then tomorrow I might write on that page and then sometimes I’ll turn them the other way up and write back the other direction so all my diaries are cut-ups. Those are what I refer to when I’m writing lyrics.’83
But his interest in Burroughs’ principal colleagues, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, intense in his formative teenage period, has declined significantly. Of Ginsberg he told me: ‘When you remove the bohemian trimmings, he is a very traditionalist, pretty much academic poet who was very self-conscious about placing himself in the Walt Whitman, American literary tradition and that that was his real ambition, to be seen as an academic and established poet even though his path to that was based on sensationalist, bohemian happenings and publicity. So I saw him as being innately conservative. His primary contribution I would say, apart from the fact that he wrote some okay poetry, was his championing of gay rights which I think one has to admire and give credit for. He did do an awful lot of important publicity for tolerance, tolerance of the gay life life-style and trying to get middle America to stop and think about the legal and social implications of and need for gay rights. For that, I think, he gets full marks. His poetry…I think “Howl” is a great poem, it’s a really wonderful spontaneous outpouring that still stands up today. If you read it out loud it’s fantastic and his other poetry is good poetry but for me it’s not poetry … his work isn’t something that I can take and apply to rock music or theatre or collage or a fine art gallery or streetlife/ popular culture and have it constantly reveal and re-value creativity. It’s a frozen moment, it’s a historical, specific, traditional piece of literary work, whereas Gysin and Burroughs, the cut-up and the ideas and the attitude that everything can be taken and re-worked and re-shaped and is malleable and forever, potentially life-changing. Culture is malleable and thought is just an incredible energised gift that can contribute to the evolution of the species. All of that I see in Burroughs and Gysin which just isn’t in Ginsberg in the same way.’84
For Kerouac he has also revised his adolescent opinions, too. ‘It seems that Kerouac was this wonderful inspirational manifestation for the adolescent and most people that I meet that have been inspired by Kerouac, it was when they were teenagers. By the same token most people when they return to Kerouac find him a lot less satisfying when they are older and more mature so it seems that Kerouac captured an incredibly, vivid raw adolescence and in that capturing of adolescence, he also captured the utopian, idealistic, devotional love of the universe and potential which still happens when people first come across it and that’s an amazing thing to have achieved, somehow encapsulating that adolescent love of potential but, in terms of its true literary worth, I know that it’s studied at universities everywhere and they do all these books about it – he’s the most written about of all of them in academia – but he just doesn’t do it for me now, the magic event doesn’t happen when I re-read it.’85
Note to reader: Jackie Breyer P-Orridge died in New York City on 9 October 2007. See her obituary: Pierre Perrone, ‘Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge’, The Independent, 23 October 2007, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lady-jaye-breyer-porridge-397604.html [accessed 16 December 2011].
Author’s note: A version of this chapter formed part of the published proceedings of the biennial international conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), held in Rome, in July 2005.
Notes
1Quoted in Genesis P-Orridge (ed.), Painful but Fabulous: The Lives and Art of Genesis P-Orridge (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2002), p. 1.
2Ibid., p. 5.
3At an event called the Nightmare Before Christmas, Pontin’s Holiday Camp, Camber Sands, Sussex, England in December 2004.
4Comment by Genesis P-Orridge, filmed interview with writer/researcher Jayne Sheridan, Columbia Hotel, London, 8 December 2004.
5See Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1999), p. 1.2.
6‘Androgyne’,
Collins Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Patrick Hanks (London: Collins, 1980), p. 53.
7‘Androgynous’ can be regarded as a synonym for hermaphrodite – ‘having male and female characteristics’. Note also gynandrous which also describes the hermaphroditic. In addition, with reference to pandrogeny, androgenous means ‘producing only male offspring’, Hanks, ibid.
8Simon Warner, ‘Genesis and revelations: From the Midlands to Manhattan’, ‘Anglo Visions’, Pop Matters, 12 March 2003, http://www.popmatters.com/columns/warner/030312.shtml [accessed 29 March 2005].
9The public school in English parlance would be private school within the US system.
10Ford, 1999, p. 1.2.
11Genesis P-Orridge, ‘An over-painted smile … re-collections of mo-meants ov inspiration 1963–2004’, CD sleeve notes to Godstar: Thee Director’s Cut (Hyperdelic, 2004), p. 11.
12Ibid. Note: Genesis P-Orridge has used a language of his creation since the early days of his artistic emergence which draws attention to the sliding signifiers within words – for example, L-if-E, b-earthday, y-eras, movemeant – and also avoids the application of familiar pronouns like ‘I’ and ‘me’ replacing them with E and SELF. Called COUM speak or TOPI talk. (See Genesis P-Orridge, ‘Full-length bio’, the official Genesis P-Orridge website, http://www.genesisp-orridge.com/index.php?section=article&album_id=11&id=77 [accessed 3 April 2005]). The construction owes its inspiration to William Burroughs and issues of control related to language but also a system called E-Prime or English Prime which dispensed with the verb ‘to be’, Jason Louv, ‘The GP-O Language’, personal communication, email, 7 March 2005).