Cutting Into the Real
For the photographic print "Transgen Sacredheart," Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge yank out Jesus's sacred heart and display a surgical drain, nearly full with pinkish body fluid, in its place. The image appropriates one of those ubiquitous icons that renders Christ in treacly soft focus, his face pale and blank, his head haloed against a shockingly blue sky. It's a sentimental image, one that's been replicated and displayed to the point of ubiquity: ambient, inoffensive, instantly recognizable. All these qualities make it ideal material for Genesis and Lady Jaye to interrupt. In their iteration, Christ's head is collaged onto a photograph of Genesis's body. S/he holds the drain just below he/r new and bandaged breast implants. Jesus's resurrected body crashes into blood and lymph and saline; the blond hair of a patriarchal God frames the surgically feminized form. The juxtaposition is startling, nearly comic. An image through which power reproduces itself denatures with a few minor alterations.
Throughout he/r artistic course, which, in addition to visual art, encompassed bodily transformation, writing, recording, and performance, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge repeatedly pursued such desecrations. S/he sought out the opportunity to puncture the familiar, especially in places where power guarded it fiercely. Having endured the ritualized physical abuse that pervades the British schooling system in adolescence, s/he understood intimately the ways that power inscribes itself on the body, the way it demands submission through physical fear. But if those in power could use the body as canvas, so could anyone else. From he/r early work with the art and performance ensemble COUM Transmissions, through the foundational industrial band Throbbing Gristle, and into the multi-genre, multi-decade musical output under the banner of Psychic TV, Breyer P-Orridge dug into the skin to pull out the real.
The concepts and techniques that coursed through Breyer P-Orridge’s music also revealed themselves in one of he/r most indelible projects, showcased throughout the exhibition “We Are But One” at Pioneer Works. Via the Pandrogyne Project, Genesis and Lady Jaye endeavored to become one being, united in image, shape, and somatic experience. The two artists underwent cosmetic surgery to more closely resemble one another, to defy gendered social scripts and uproot conceptions of the couple form and the individual, both fundamental units of capitalist society. In this stretch of history, anyone born in the U.S. or the U.K. immediately gets tethered to a legal name, a legal sex, an identifying number. They begin accumulating linear narratives about who they are and what they deserve, what forces may be acted out on their individual bodies, where they might live, what they receive, and of what they're deprived. As Pandrogyne, Breyer P-Orridge challenged that fiction. The durable repetitions that produce individuals, couples, and families are just stories. People can tell different ones. A single soul can fuse and unfurl across two bodies through ritual modification. A soul can use flesh as canvas, tracing sigils with surgical steel.
"It's not about gender," Breyer P-Orridge said in an interview about the Pandrogyne Project for CityBeat in 2017. "It may be about identity, but ultimately it's the eternal existential question: 'Why am I here, how can I think, what is my consciousness, how do I receive information?'" These were all questions s/he sought to answer through use of the cut-up technique, an artistic strategy propagated by artist Brion Gysin and writer William S. Burroughs in the mid-twentieth century. Typically, it's applied to the written word: A completed text is segmented and reassembled in a random order, creating a new work. "With myself and Lady Jaye, we thought, 'OK, William and [Brion] say that cut-ups are the product of a third mind that only exists as a combination of the two—it doesn't exist separate from that,'" Breyer P-Orridge continued. "We say, 'What happens if we do this … to the sacred body, the flesh, the obsession?' We say, 'Now we have actually cut ourselves up to become a new individual being.' That's the [pandrogyne]—the two of us combined in absolute total surrender, fuelled by unconditional love."
The idea of the self spilling beyond its usual confinements and joining with other selves consistently bores through the surface of Breyer P-Orridge's lifelong musical output. After the band Throbbing Gristle emerged from COUM’s live happenings in Hull in the mid-1970s, Breyer P-Orridge and he/r collaborators began using both performance and recorded sound to explode materiality, identity, and the stifling confines of linear time. Their intentions were fractal: If the conventions of a pop song could be reordered, its usual pulses and affinities torn up and swapped, so might the conventions governing social relations more broadly. The group founded their own label, Industrial Records, to release their music, and in 1978 issued their debut single, “United.” The song belies a spiritual mistrust of the individual as the basic, irreducible building block of the social field. Breyer P-Orridge's voice wafts across lyrics that dispute the fundamental chasm between the well-worn "you" and "I" of the pop song. At their simplest, pop songs cry out for the other. The singer constructs a subject, the "I," who is contained and embodied within the length of the song. The "I" sings toward a "you," who, in most cases, lives somewhere beyond the perimeter of the song, either coming into the singer's life or departing from it, to either contagious celebration or palpable grief. The drama issues from that distance. Breyer P-Orridge's voice, in its careful deadpan, unearths a different narrative on "United." The "I" and the "you" comingle. There is no real difference between them. He/r voice never heats up into longing, never raises its volume to call out for the other, because the other is not the other; everyone's already here.
In texture as well as text, Breyer P-Orridge often defused the pop song's typical libidinal release. Many of Throbbing Gristle's compositions exploit bathos in their course through time. They rarely peak and rarely resolve, often deploying electronic instrumentation that sounds copied and distorted to the point of alienation from any original source. The cymbals on "United" are washes of static sharpened to a percussive edge. The gentle muzak lull of the vibraphone and bass on "Tenith," from 1979's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, bubbles up against machinic squeals; the piece beckons and then chews up the ear, like two songs collapsed into one, one welcoming and the other hostile. Throbbing Gristle toyed with expectations of pleasure from pop, forestalling easy release in favor of more harrowing pursuits. Rescript your listening, and you might be able to rescript yourself.
Breyer P-Orridge furthered these explorations with Psychic TV, the band and video art group formed in 1981 after Throbbing Gristle’s dissolution whose forays into Britpop and acid house similarly crashed disparate elements together into jagged, bleeding wholes. In dance music imported from New York, Detroit, and Chicago, Breyer P-Orridge found opportunities for another analog to the collages and cut-ups s/he favored on paper. S/he could put together house tracks from dissections of existing songs, some pleasurably familiar, others discordantly new. On the late ’80s song "Joy (Joy-Orgasm-Youth Mix)," the whispered German count-up from Kraftwerk's "Numbers" feeds into a pummeling bass loop stained with traces of Arthur Brown's voice from the 1968 psychedelic rock track "Fire." From the same era, "Jack the Tab" lands a turn in its last act squarely into the pre-chorus of Run D.M.C.'s hit single "It's Tricky," then pivots away just when the explosive hook is due to hit. The ear cranes toward the satisfaction of familiar release, only to be denied it and plunged instead back into the groove.
Even Psychic TV's more conventional excursions into psych-pop questioned popular music's role as a pleasure delivery system. There's a sickly murk hanging over the 1985 charting single "Godstar," a song written in devotion to the late Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones that makes for one of the readiest entryways into Breyer P-Orridge's musical output. The beat kicks off sturdy and full, only to sound out into a miasma of competing, denaturing voices. Tape flutter lacerates the "oohs" of the backup singers; reverb turns voice into atmosphere, sucked from its source and dispersed. These discontinuous voices echo the logics of the cut-open bodies in Breyer P-Orridge's visual and somatic work. H/er interrogations into culture were consistently suspicious of incorruptible presence, that image or sound that is not allowed to be slashed apart. The individual mutilation of a human body, and by extension a human voice, stood in symbolically for the ruin of society. S/he crossed that line, and cut bodies and voices apart, and watched what happened, watched as new life turned out to bloom in the wounds.
In Breyer P-Orridge's work, words—whether sung out loud or written on paper—tend to take life on their own. They seethe and squirm and expunge their insides across the page or through the vibrations of a song. "Redundant as author, my words could speak for themselves. Words had their own voice. We were both conscious entities and would continue to collaborate together for the rest of my life," s/he wrote in he/r posthumously published memoir Nonbinary. He/r text-based visual pieces from the early millennium tend to layer word over word, building language as architecture in gold and pink marker. These words have literal meaning, but that is not where they take root. Semantics only make up the foundation. The pieces have a gestalt magic, the shape and color and size of the words whirling across the meaning in the same way the particularities of a singer's throat and the distortion of magnetic tape can expand the meaning of a song's lyrics. The pieces are inert; their combination is alive.
If you listen to "The Orchids," from the 1983 album Dreams Less Sweet, you will hear Breyer P-Orridge's voice dart from the right channel to the left and back again. If you are wearing headphones, it may feel as though s/he is orbiting you, he/r voice soft, thin, and close. At first, the channels trade lines. Then the voice shudders back and forth mid-lyric. "My eyes burn and claws rush to fill them, but in the morning / After the night / I fall in love with the light." It is one of Psychic TV's gentler offerings, acoustically accompanied and sweet like a lullaby, but the bifurcation of the vocal track makes it feel as though there is something inside it to be chased, something that can never sit still. And there is. There is language, which flowers from consciousness, which is obviously there and also impossible to pin down. It's the only thing there is and it might not exist. All you can do is reach for its reflection, and ripple it in your reaching, and reach out again to touch the waves. ♦
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