(genesis p-orridge)
_______________
"You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe."
"You take the red pill and you
stay in Wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes."
"There is but one thing in the world really worth pursuing - the knowledge of God."
Robert H. Benson
by Richard Metzger - November 10, 2002
As the never-ending dialectic of pop culture marches on, neutering and commodifying 'rebellion' and 'outrage' for mass market consumption, some 'rebels' manage to retain their artistic credibility by constantly reinventing themselves and finding new and improved ways of confounding the status quo. One such figure is artist, musician, writer and "cultural engineer" Genesis P-Orridge.For 3 decades now, as a performance artist, as a prime mover behind both 'industrial culture' and the early 'rave' scene, and as the anti-Pope of his own magicko-religious order, The Temple of Psychic Youth, P-Orridge has infuriated the powers that be with his deliberately provocative and innovative body of work and ideas. His mutant 'magickal children'--Marilyn Manson being a fine example--are themselves continuing his policies of mischievous media manipulation the way that P-Orridge himself once studied and enlarged upon the revolutionary templates provided for him by the likes of his own predecessors William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol and Aleister Crowley.
After a near-death experience left him determined to follow his notion of becoming a beatnik writer, the young P-Orridge's instinct for finding other "genetic terrorists" like himself led him to the psycho-therapeutic bootcamp of the Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia commune (which also included filmmaker Derek Jarman). Members were required to sleep in a different location every night, to take meals at different times during the day, and to act out assigned roles and attitudes, often in costume and with unerring earnestness, going so far as to have atypical sexual encounters (in character!) or risk getting badly beaten up if a situation warranted it.
The commune's anarchistic spirit and insistence on life as art and art as life inspired the performance art events of COUM (pronounced "coom") Transmissions. Staged primarily by P-Orridge and part time pin-up model Cosey Fanni Tutti (born Christine Carol Newby, 1951), COUM's outrageous "happenings" were parallel to the work of Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch's Orgies Mysteries Theater. COUM's shamanic improvisations involving enemas, blood, roses, wire, feathers, sexual intercourse, milk, urine, licking up vomit, crucifixion, maggots and self-mutilation were often not conceptualized until the very moment of the performances, if at all. Indeed, the point often escaped the performers themselves. For P-Orridge and Tutti it was about freeing themselves (and the spectators) of their own taboos by performing benign exorcisms of a sick society's malignancies.
COUM's ephemeral oeuvre was celebrated in an ironic 'retrospective' at London's prestigious Institute of Contemporary Art in October of 1976. The show, called "Prostitution" --a wry, multi-leveled commentary on the artist's role in society-- consisted of beautifully framed photographs of Cosey cut straight out of the pornographic magazines that she'd posed for; P-Orridge's post-Fluxus sculpture which utilized her used tampons; photo documentation and props from past COUM actions. Most importantly, the opening night party featured the official debut of the 'musique concrete' freakout of Throbbing Gristle. Great Britain's self-appointed moral guardians, predictably, went apocalyptic at COUM's decidedly avant-garde provocation. "Prostitution" became a symbol for everything that was wrong with the country and compounding the furor, the exhibit had been staged at the taxpayer's expense. P-Orridge and Tutti appeared live on primetime television after a week of media overkill with over 100 magazines, newspaper headlines, even cartoons (mostly) denouncing the duo. Tory Member of Parliment Nicholas Fairburn declared the show "a sickening outrage. Obscene. Evil. Public money is being wasted here to destroy the morality of our society. These people are wreckers of civilization!" All of this, it should be pointed out, was a few weeks before the Sex Pistols swore their way into history at talkshow host Bill Grundy's expense and long before Andres Serrano's Piss Christ or Karen Finley's yam-stuffed asshole caused similar firestorms in Reagan-era America.
"Prostitution" was one of the most highly publicized art scandals of the 20th century and with it 'the music of 1984,' had arrived a bit early. Throbbing Gristle's 'mission of dead souls' had begun.For Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge and Tutti were joined by Chris Carter (synthesizers, rhythms) and Peter Christopherson (prepared tapes, electronic percussion). Carter had constructed light shows for bands like Yes and Hawkwind. Christopherson designed album covers as a partner at the legendary 70's design firm, Hipgnosis. P-Orridge played bass, electric violin and fronted the group. Tutti played the guitar. The TG sound ran the gamut from soft (albeit doomy) improvised proto-ambient instrumentals (In the Shadow of the Sun), to punishing rhythms and electronic squall played at top volume layered with P-Orridge's psychotic screaming (Subhuman) to Carter's ABBA influenced synthpop (United). "It was John Cage meets Stockhausen meets the Velvet Underground" P-Orridge says.
The group deliberately encouraged myth and confusion by titling its debut album Second Annual Report and its flirtation with quasi-fascist symbolism such as the now familiar red and black TG 'electric bolt' logo reminiscent of the National Front symbol and the anarchist flag, further muddied the waters. Lyrically TG continued COUM's policy of not toning down the members' interest in the darker areas of the human psyche. The red light district of London's seedy Soho, deadly viruses, burn victims, mass murderers like Myra Hindley, Ian Brady and the Manson Family were all grist(le) for the lyrical mill.
TG's disturbing obsessions liberated the concept of what could serve as thematic fodder for pop music for all time, yet it was difficult to tell if the group was endorsing their subject matter or just saying 'Here it is.' The group's dangerous ambiguity was meticulously calculated to force the audience to think--not so much conceptual art, rather it was "deceptual art" as P-Orridge friend, painter Brion Gysin described their work.
It's been said that "the legend of Throbbing Gristle was easily as important as the outbreak of punk," but other than a small handful of substantial articles (RE/Search, Rapid Eye), by and large, COUM and TG's histories are hazy and apochryphal. Now with the imminent publication of Simon Ford's authoritative COUM and TG history Wreckers of Civilization and a planned exhibit at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Genesis P-Orridge is finally getting his due. Not surprisingly it comes at a time when the "sickest man in Britain" --forced into exile by moralist hysteria like Oscar Wilde before him-- is at a safe distance, far from England's green and pleasant land and living in New York City.
P-Orridge' s current activities are concerned with identifying the hidden themes of his life. He sees himself, echoing Andy Warhol, as a "work of popular fiction." P-Orridge wishes to "dematerialise" his celebrity to see what it really describes, further re-inventing himself by abandoning his creation and donating the myth to the public who now shape it to conform with their own expectations. "
Genesis P-Orridge" is a complex person he once knew and he is now the curator of a life seen from the perspective of a sympathetic biographer. He views his first 50 years as a "product" he now co-manages which will manifest itself in fine art photoworks, hand made books, and other formats. Away from the audiences, away from the psychic youth, away from his public persona, Genesis P-Orridge lives his life. He does not live other people's perception of his life.
Nothing Short of a Total War
When "Prostitution" was held at the ICA in 1976, this was pretty far-out stuff for such a prestigious public institution or anywhere else for that matter. Not only is the ICA "owned" by the Queen, it's just down the street from Buckingham Palace, so I'm wondering . . .
We were almost within spitting distance of Buckingham Palace when we were doing "Prostitution" . . .
And you were spitting on it! The ICA obviously received money to mount the show from Britain's art councils, so the funding for "Prostitution" actually came from the Queen herself, in a manner of speaking, didn't it? Do you think she actually knew about the used tampons and the milk and blood enemas?Absolutely! She and I have had a long standing relationship (laughs)!
She sent three Law Lords down . . . They tried to do the British diplomacy thing, you know "C'mon, you've had your moment of fun, old chap. If you just calm things down, behave nicely, we'll forget about this." And maybe you'll get more money! (laughs)Basically, what I replied to these Lords --who were under the administration of the Queen, answerable directly to her-- was "Look, you try to close this show down, we'll paint the whole place camouflage. We'll put sandbags outside and declare this a free zone. We'll have a war. You're not coming in, we're not going out. What do you want? Because I will not stop and I will not close this show down for you, for the Queen, the government, the newspapers or a-n-y-o-n-e. If we have to live in here under siege, we will. And you won't like THAT publicity!" (laughs).
Surely you knew what kind of reaction 'Prostitution' was going to cause . . .
I thought I did. Unbeknownst to the other members, I'd secretly assembled, then serepticiously utilised, a list of "yellow" journals and journalists --around fifty or so names and addresses . . . I'd done this before and nothing had happened. I was thinking very much in terms of Dada and Surrealism. Sending out flyers to titillate and arouse. Where just the action of the mailing was an event in and of itself. A souvenir if you like. I 've always viewed art as being much closer to sea-side merchandise and memorabilia than it likes to admit. I must confess though, I had no idea that the media would take it so seriously, or that it would turn out to be so serious. It started a cultural war in much the same way as the grievious grenade in Sarajevo did! Which caught all of us off guard to be honest.Your public life and your art has always been very confrontational . . .
No, self-indulgent (laughs). And prepared to have a confrontation as a result of a specific action. I try to be realistic in forecasting the inevitable, such that I can make a calculated decision that I'm aware that confrontation can or probably will occur and I try and have various back up plans in mind even before it occurs. I try to strategize carefully and remain aware that confrontation can occur. There have been times when I've been annoyed and incredibly angry at hypocrisy, but confrontation just for its own sake has never been something I've been interested in, funnily enough.
How did Throbbing Gristle develop out of COUM?I'd been messing with tape recorders and sounds and raw noise from when I was 12, feeling there was a new way to make music as a band, so it was actually a continuous thread waiting to become a rope. What happened was that suddenly here was the unit of people who absolutely "got" how to do "it" and all of whom could realize it and contribute something that made it much, much better. It was a concept and a spectacle and detail. A lot of detail figured out, and a lot of resonance and reverberation. You still need the right people for it to work and be convincing. And of course, making the vehicle such that it had the ability to accept and to "mediumize" the information that came through.
Music From the Death Factory
Like a seance? How did TG go about preparing to "transmit" these energies?
Well for a start we all slept together every weekend for a year. We used to make a joke and say 'the band that plays together lays together.' Here's the thing, this is also, don't forget, a reapplication of the early psychodramas from the days of the Transmedia commune I'd lived with in the 60's. 'Here's the uniforms, here's the concept, here's the name, here's the characters, here's the attitude, here's the objective.' We will live it. We will live it and commit our lives and our bodies and our souls to it. That's the only way it will work. That's the only way we will find out (whisper) what it is. The medium is manifested by total immersion.Was this sex magick or an attempt to decondition yourselves?
It was primarily de-conditioning and building a sense of separate unity in order to be effective doing the alchemy with the music. I mean after all, you have to remember that we were basically redrawing the global perception of what popular music could be. As it turns out. I mean that was our intent, but it turns out that we actually were. Now that requires an amazing amount of focus and camaraderie and we achieved that.
How did the TG sound take shape?
We spent about a year looking for it, waiting for TG to tell us how it sounded. During the weekdays Chris and I would build speakers. I would help him with that because it was kind of manual work, wiring, screwing, sawing wood. He would build effects and synthesizer modules. He rebuilt my bass guitar. And then we would experiment. I would use the space echoes and so on and we would just endlessly feel for noises or sonic effects or volume effects. He would keep on and on telling me all these ideas that he'd read about in electronic magazines and what they might mean and I'd say "Yes! Let's try that one!' or "No, that's boring." "Oh, very high frequencies, doesn't that mean that such and such would happen?" It would be trial and error, discussion, build, experiment. If it was something to do with the effect of the sound on the body he and I would use our own bodies as the Guinea pigs.
You were trying to break down pure sound in order to gauge its magickal effects?
Well it struck me that the original reasons for music were ritual reasons and that somewhere along the line, if we jump to rock and roll, people started to believe that if the audience got excited and leapt around and felt sexy and wanted to fuck the singer and ripped up the seats, it was because the band was good. Because the singer was sexy. And it was my feeling was that this wasn't what was happening at all. The sound and the resonance and the frequencies and the rhythms and the pulses and the lights and the group mind psycho sexual effect were actually as important, as vital, if not more so. That was what was interesting and no one had really looked at and explored that in an interesting way in so-called popular music. It was wide open to be explored and also relevant: there was no music that really seemed to reflect the disenfranchised, economically depressed, predominately white, Western European post-industrial revolution culture.
But you were a bunch of rarefied, intellectual artists and theoreticians turned musicians. Throbbing Gristle were an archly 'arty' band. Maybe the most intellectual pop group of all time. Are you saying that TG actually set out to be a sort of prole rock group?I don't see that there has to be a contradiction between comprehending what it was like to be living in England in 1975 and being an artist. I never considered myself to be different from most of the people living on my street. Somebody said to me during the peak of COUM, when it was so successful "That's all fine, but would you be able to do that in the local pub?" Believe it or not, that's what made me really determined to see TG work. So it could have lots of artistic intent, lots of intellectual theories and concepts and satisfactions for me as an artist. But it also could be simply visceral.
In other words, you took what you wanted from it and that was an interesting change.
Entertainment was not the focus, nor was music really. It was much more out of control in terms of the actual moment of live performance and it was the voluntary refusal of "control" to set up an alchemical musical environment and then be equally at its mercy to some large extent compared to the usual concert set up. Be equally barraged by the sound as the audience. The sound on-stage was as loud, if not louder, than the sound in front. I had huge bass bins next to my ear. Sometimes we'd even have a second PA at the back facing us! My favorite times were when I'd touch the bass guitar and the wood on the stage would start to vibrate my feet. My whole body' kind of shake like a "Tom and Jerry" cartoon and that to me was the perfect acoustic to a TG gig because I was feeling it equally, if not more than, anybody else. My body was absolutely at the mercy of the sound. And THEN things would come through and then voices would come through and words would come through and dynamics and textures would come through . .
.In some of the live TG recordings, you sound as if you're possessed or speaking in tongues. It's pure glossalalia.
That's right. And in that sense there was a certain considered selfishness which is "I want to find out what this feels like. I want to see what happens to me." The best way to finance and to execute this is to have live situations to do it. Plus, I'm curious to see what happens to other people. So hey, guess what, a gig is a great way to do that and that's why we did so few. Cause it wasn't the primary reason, it was just one of the reasons we did it. Chris and I, in particular, did that stuff, in the Death Factory, to each other a lot any way. He had moments when he had tunnel vision, couldn't walk or stand up straight and so on from certain frequencies we hit. And there were times when we left the equipment running itself, a bit like [Lou Reed's] Metal Machine Music (laughs) for two or three days to see what happened when it was just there and we came and went and did other tasks but the same loops were just going and going and going and going and going in order to see what happened to our brains. Or not. It was a chaotic, in the best sense of chaotic . . . a chaotic research lab.
Assume Power Focus During the 30 or so TG concerts, which you'd dubbed "psychic rallies"
--the mood, the building of energies and the audience interaction . . .It's a necessary part of the magickal process, it's even the invocation. Which is why sometimes I can become very uncomfortable with having to perform because I would be happy to stay at home. There are some times when there is no way to make "it" happen except to interact with "a public" and with the society and all the environment. Magick always works with the environment it's in and each form of magick is built from a reaction to its environment. And as the environment changes the magick should change, obviously and as my environment changes, so must my magick change. That's why I abandon personas, projects, magickal orders (laughs)!
Did an aptitude for magick come naturally to you? Did you just "get" it?
I've got a photograph that my mum just sent me where I'm one year old and I realized looking at it that I've made circles of stones all my life. I've been obsessive about making stonework. From a very young age I worked with stones to make symbols, circles, to make shapes, make tunnels and hidden chambers. And as soon as I knew how to masturbate I would use my sperm and I would eat it. Sex magick came completely naturally to me. It was like various flags were set there for me to find . . . And I didn't miss them. I was very fortunate. It was like a biological imprint. I could spot the flags. Whatever the interference that was going on around me, I could see the flags. And whether that is a gift, a fluke or a neurosis, who cares? That's what happened. That's the way it worked for me. It's one of these things. It's a curse and a blessing to have hindsight.
When I read Magick in Theory in Practice and I looked at the picture of Crowley I realized it was someone I'd met and talked to when I was younger. And that really was confusing . . .
Someone you'd "met and talked to"?
Yes. He died in . . .Yes.1947.Yes.And you were born in 1950?Exactly.Huh?Well, I was living in Gatley in Cheshire, 1957, and I remember very distinctly walking along the road in a very ordinary suburban place in Cheshire, which is dairy farming and the suburbs on Manchester combined. I started hearing footsteps and this old guy caught up with me and started talking to me. And I thought, oh, I'm not supposed to talk to strangers (laughs). He had a shaved bald head and he was telling me stuff. And as he was talking to me all the streets started to change: the houses started to look like they were made of bread. That was how I remembered it at the time. And everything was very unreal and it was if the street didn't get any shorter or longer as I walked along with him. I was going fast but I wasn't getting anywhere. And then he patted me on the shoulder and left. And I went home. It didn't strike me as very odd and I had thought about it over the years, but it wasn't until I read that book that I thought "Fuck, this is that person I was speaking to." I don't exactly follow what you are trying to convey . . .I'm not speculating. I'm saying that's what happened. One could argue that he turned up, that he somehow inter-dimensionally turned up and spoke to me for his own reasons or could argue that having never seen a picture of him or heard his name ever, anywhere, somehow I hallucinated him anyway. That's not very likely. Until I was 15 I'd never heard of him. Nor had anyone I knew. You couldn't get his books anywhere. So what did it mean? I had the shock of recognition, from which I drew no conclusions except that it was interesting. And then I read the book and realized it was what he'd told me.
Cultural engineer" is a term often used to describe you. There's a great moment on Heathen Earth when you say: "You should always aim to be as skillful as the most professional of government agencies. The way you live, conceive and market what you do should be as well thought out as a government coup. It's a campaign, it has nothing to do with art." Were music and art, when viewed as the propaganda platforms of popular culture, merely means to an end for you? Do you look at over 3 decades of your career and the various "movements" you've been closely associated with or helped birth --performance art, industrial music, rave culture--and see a fairly straight trajectory?
Do you want to know what, for me, the goal is? It's basically a sequence: art, music, literature --divinity. The whole point of any project is to get to the point where some form of 21st century philosophical meta-PHYSICAL manual can be assembled from the detritus of all the work, that is functionally useful and inspiring to other people. I want to write a really, really good book of amusingly arcane ideas, that could help some people come to terms with and be blessed by the weird mystery of being alive. That's what I want to do. There's nothing else to discuss in life. That's the only point. Why we exist. What "being" is. Is there a purpose and if there is a purpose how do we achieve it? That's the only topic of interest. That's it. End of story. "Entertainment" has never been of interest to me, as such (laughs)!I'm a fanatic, a compulsive fanatic. I far as I was concerned commitment to the project is the most important thing at any given time. I think some people find that hard to live with, I think some people don't believe it. And I think some people just get tired. And that's all reasonable. Those are all reasonable responses, aren't they?
For me, being a romantic, the reasons for something and the long term altruism, the metaphysics, is the only thing that truly gives me creative pleasure and gets me feeling it's worth the effort and without that, it's just more . . . stuff. There are very few people who are prepared to truly give their life to an idea, come what may, and be prepared to fight countries and governments and global cultural imprints. Indefinitely. Maybe for no financial or egocentric reward, you know? There aren't many around. Not that that means there should be . . .
You're sort of the grand old man of the counter-culture now that William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary have died. Higher evolutionary DNA has not seemed to produce many 'rebel philosopher' types in any great number . . .
Seems that way. Maybe that's just the balance of things. Maybe that's how the mutant gene pool works. I imagine that the next challenge will be becoming "beyond human." Working towards the next species and moving towards the portal of the inconceivable without fear or expectation. That's the door I wish to pass through. I'm up for change and adventure and I'm in it for the duration
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