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Positive Surrender: An Interview with BREYER PORRIDGE
Dominic Johnson
Available online: 14 Mar 2012
To cite this article: Dominic Johnson (2012): Positive Surrender: An Interview with BREYER P-ORRIDGE, Contemporary
Theatre Review, 22:1, 134-145To link to this article:
Positive Surrender: An Interview with BREYER
P-ORRIDGE
Dominic Johnson
In their pronouncements on performance, art,
history and humanity, BREYER P-ORRIDGE liketo paint in broad brushstrokes. They create grand
narratives about human evolution, creative potential,
the politics of the body and self-determination
through art. Crucially, they do so in order to urge
us to attempt to replace old systems with new
possibilities for change. ‘Viva la Evolution!’ is a key
rallying cry of BREYER P-ORRIDGE, in interviews,
statements and performances. Formerly
Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer, in recent
years the artists have forgone their earlier names
and public identities towards a new collective
subjectivity. In tandem, the two formerly discreet
individuals used cosmetic surgery, performance and
other tools to produce a ‘Third Being’, a pandrogyne
– or positive androgyne – that goes by
the name BREYER P-ORRIDGE. This composite
identity has obliterated the two prior individualities,
towards a political exploration of the possibilities
that emerge from experiments with art,
science and culture. BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s
project epitomises and perhaps exceeds the use of
performance in everyday life to blur the distinctions
between art/life, even rendering such distinctions
obsolete. As Laure Leber’s portrait shows (see
Image 1), the efforts of the surgical and other
interventions have enabled the artists to achieve a
striking similarity, troubling the common divisions
attributable to gender, age, experience and other
factors that become seemingly inconsequential
under pressure from their unique ‘living art’ rituals.
Over a series of operations, beginning 1999,
BREYER P-ORRIDGE used cosmetic surgery andbody modification techniques towards a corporeal
translation of the cut-up technique of William S.Burroughs and Brion Gysin.
1 In Breaking Sex the two artists underwent a series of surgical procedures,
including breast implants, chin, cheek and eyeaugmentation, dental operations and facial tattooing.
Breaking Sex
was an attempt to manifest
physically ‘the third mind’, a concept that Burroughsand Gysin invented in the 1960s to invoke the
possibilities that arise from a blurring of subjective
limits through a technical approximation of collage
through writing. As Ge´rard Georges-Lemaire writes,
The Third Mind
is not the history of a literary
collaboration, but rather the complete fusion in apraxis of two subjectivities [. . .] that metamorphose
into a third; it is from this collusion that a
new author emerges, an absent third person
invisibly and beyond grasp, decoding the silence.
BREYER P-ORRIDGE followed, to the letter,
this merging of subjectivities at the expense of a
single authorial voice, producing the ‘pandrogyne’
(or ‘p-androgyne’), a fleshy incarnation of the
‘third mind’. They provocatively enacted Burroughs
and Gysin’s abandonment of inviolate
works and artistic ownership, ‘a magical or divine
creativity that could only result from the unconditional
integration of two sources’ – in this
case, the mirroring of bodies through surgical
interventions.
3One of the problems with writing about
BREYER P-ORRIDGE is the way in which theythread fertile fictions into their myths of self invention.
‘My original name was Neil Andrew Megson’, Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE states.
‘A couple of years ago I started to wonder what
happened to Neil. I have become an artwork with
no author. In a sense, Neil destroyed himself by creating me.’
4 The threat the artists pose to
traditional unities of biography and subjectivity wereconsolidated in disturbing ways when Lady Jaye
BREYER P-ORRIDGE died, suddenly, of heart
failure in October 2007. Since Lady Jaye’s death,
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE identifies in the first
person as ‘we’. As such, their work inspires semantic
trouble on several levels, from the capitalisation of
their name, to the merging of singular histories into
a confusingly conglomerate identity, to the surviving
artist’s decision to identify in the plural. According
to Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE,
Since Lady Jaye dropped her body on 9 October
2007, we dropped using ‘I’ in favour of ‘we’ tosignify Lady Jaye’s continued presence in our body
and personality, as well as her ongoing presence in
the Pandrogeny project – not just a nostalgic
presence but a dynamic one as we continue to
create works we co-created and proposed using
photographic and other biological materials to
realise new works.
Despite the tragedy of Lady Jaye’s death, the
project has persisted in a wide-ranging series of art/
life endeavours. The decision to carry on the
‘collaboration’ functions as another way in which
the artist(s) find new ways of complicating the
convention methods of scholarly, curatorial and
other practices of accounting for and narrating
artistic achievements. Traditional modes of biography,
historical summary and critical writing fail
when one tries to discuss the multiple identities,
harassed bodies and destitute subjectivities that pandrogyny
has produced. It has proven difficult to
negotiate how to refer to the artists, owing to the
different ways they identify across various moments,
in terms of gendered and singular or plural
personal pronouns (the artists refer to themselves
with traditional first pronouns in the dialogue
below, but have asked that I refer to them in the
plural in this introduction; Genesis BREYER PORRIDGE
also refer to themselves in the plural in
the prologue added since we conducted the interview).
They have invented a string of neologisms to
describe themselves and their practices. As a ‘Third
Being’, they are both multiple and a composite,
unified persona. However, language fails me in my
attempts to address them clearly and concisely. I
struggle in my abilities to write about them, and to
describe efficiently how they constitute themselves
as subjects and as artists. This is not simply a
methodological burden, but a sign of their insistent
refusal to allow others to assimilate them and their
artistic practices into convenient systems of production,
consumption and reception.
The following interview with Genesis and Lady
Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE was conducted live at
New York University in April 2007. The dialogue
was presented as part of the keynote address to a
symposium that explored the possibilities for
subcultural practice in an age of quickening and
intensifying processes of gentrification, containment
and commodification.
5 In their innovations
CTR DOCUMENTS
Image 2 BREYER P-ORRIDGE,
My Sacred Wound is
Your Material Glamour
(2005). BREYER P-ORRIDGE.
Courtesy of the artist and Invisible Exports,
New York.
4. Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, interview with the author,
New York, April 2007.
5.
After CBGB: Gender, Sexuality and the Future of Subculture
took place at New York University on 13 April 2007, and was
organised by the Centre for the Study of Gender and
Sexuality. I am grateful to Tavia Nyong’o and Robert D.
Campbell for permission to publish an edited transcript of
the dialogue. The transcript has been amended and extended
in correspondence since 2007, including a prologue added
by Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE in 2011.
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across the art/life divide, BREYER P-ORRIDGE
have resisted the tendency towards institutional
assimilation, by exploring a form of positive cultural
terrorism in and beyond performance. Here, they
explain how their current project
Breaking Sex
(1999–2007) complements and extends their earlier
solo and collaborative practices towards new
and challenging realisations in the cultural politics
of Live Art and performance. They discuss their
own perceived relations to ‘Live Art’, and a
preference for using the terminology of ‘Living
Art’, tying
Breaking Sex and earlier works into the
historical avant-garde project. Since the midtwentieth
century, the avant-garde has attempted
the ‘sublation’ of art into the praxis of life, in order
to demolish the bourgeois institution of art as a set
of practices, values and bodies of knowledge that sit
apart from lived experiences.
6 Live Art and
performance art practitioners in the UK have long
explored the avant-garde project of bringing art
into the praxis of life, for example the Living Art
projects of Gilbert & George or Leigh Bowery.
Genesis and Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE
are key to histories of cultural experimentation – in
the UK since the 1960s, on the one hand, and in
downtown New York’s club and performance scene
on the other – and these histories have merged in an
unprecedented experiment. The American-born
artist Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE was a
formative influence on downtown performance, as
a member of Blacklips Performance Cult (with
Antony Hegarty), a club performance troupe
inspired by Jimmy Camicia’s legendary Hot Peaches.
Lady Jaye was also influential as a co-founder of the
House of Domination at the legendary New York
club Jackie 60. Born inManchester in 1950, Genesis
BREYER P-ORRIDGE relentlessly inserted new
strategies into the horizon of art and popular culture
from an early age, and these included historical
cultural innovations such as industrial music and
body modification in the 1970s, acid house in the
1980s and, most recently, the figure of the pandrogyne.
7
I should add that the provision of
seemingly straightforward information, including
the artists’ personal histories, feels surprisingly
awkward in the wake of the unique collaborative
principles that BREYER P-ORRIDGE uphold. It is
this spirit of persistent interruption, I would argue,
that makes their work an apposite example of Live
Art (despite their protestations about the limitations
of this term), bearing in mind its frequent definition
as a strategic disturbance of institutional conventions.
This should hardly be surprising: a founder of
the British performance group COUM Transmissions,
the art/music groups Throbbing Gristle and
Psychic TV, and the spoken word project Thee
Majesty, Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE have been
at the forefront of British cross-disciplinary arts for
four decades. Nevertheless, many of these accomplishments
have been written out of dominant
histories of performance and Live Art in the UK,
along with the work of a range of prolific artists who
were similarly crucial to the cultural landscape of
British art in the 1970s and 1980s especially. These
include Shirley Cameron and Roland Miller, Pip
Simmons, John Bull Puncture Repair Kit and Bruce
Lacey. BREYER P-ORRIDGE discuss some of these
artists as influences on their early work, primarily
during the years in which COUM Transmissions
were active.
‘One of my main quests in life has been to take
control of my own identity in a very real way’,
BREYER P-ORRIDGE state.
In their practice,
this quest has involved performance art, collage,
mail art, sound and music, the occult practice of
Sigil drawing (inspired by the art of Austin Osman
Spare) and other seemingly uncategorisable artistic
pursuits. Since the public inauguration of the
Pandrogeny (or Pandrogyny) project their works
have focused upon video works, sculptures,
installations and photography. These diverse and
personally invested practices have led to the
development of new modes of performance and,
most strikingly perhaps, the obliteration of any
feasible distinction between art and life. As
BREYER P-ORRIDGE state, ‘Pandrogeny is not
about defining differences but about creating
similarities. Not about separation but about
unification, about inclusion and resolution.’
They
clearly define the project of breaking sex as anevolutionary endeavour, to urge the body into
more responsive and responsible arrangements.
CTR DOCUMENTS
This politics is clearly influenced by Burroughs,
who wrote of ‘the feeling that the whole human
organism and its way of propagating is repellent
and inefficient. A living being is an artifact, like
the flintlock. Well, what’s wrong with the flintlock?
Just about everything.’
10 Describing the
problems with early firearm technologies, and
their replacement by more sophisticated machines,
Burroughs continues that ‘the human artifact is
back there with the flintlock [. . .] There are
possibilities of more efficient organisms. If you
don’t use it you lose it.’
11 The relentless
deconditioning of limits has been a persistent
impulse for BREYER P-ORRIDGE across forty
years of creative experimentation. It constitutes a
subversive bleeding across contested boundaries,
and a highly political attempt to muddle preconceived
categories of experience. In the words
of their mentor, Burroughs, after the ‘Master of
the Assassins’, Hassan I Sabbah: ‘NOTHING IS
TRUE. EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.’
12
Prologue byGenesis BREYERP-ORRIDGE
We suppose we have exaggerated a few things in
terms of this project, but that’s what you do – can
do – in a work of fiction (thinking of Lady Jaye’s
life seen as a resume). One of the first strategies
Jaye proposed to me was after I complained about
the tedium of doing countless repetitious interviews
for different media, because of the imposed
separation of literature, music, performance, art
and life. S/he suggested that, instead of retelling
the same story and anecdotes ad nauseam, that we
make up different conflicting answers each time
we were interviewed. Through SELF-editing,
cultural, social and economic pressures and
intimidations alone all lives become fictional and
that is before neuroses, ambitions, paranoia and
mental idiosyncrasies become part of the mix. So,
as all identities are fictional, active co-authorship
of our Pandrogenic narrative is an essential
strategy.
13
Interview
Dominic Johnson:
How did Breaking Sex come
about?
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE:
At the beginning
of
Breaking Sex and Pandrogeny, Lady Jaye and
I saw it primarily as an incredibly romantic thing to
do – to want to become each other, to look like each
other. So the very first thing that we did that was
more or less permanent was I got two tattoos on my
cheek – beauty spots where Lady Jaye has some, and
then she had one removed on the other cheek, so
that we were beginning to make our faces more
superficially the same. Then she got the shape of her
eyes changed so that they were more like mine, and
got her nose worked on to make it like mine. Lady
CTR DOCUMENTS
Image 3 COUM Transmissions,
Scenes of Victory #3
(1976). Solo COUM Transmissions action by Genesis
BREYER P-ORRIDGE at Death Factory, London 1976.
BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Courtesy of the artist and
Invisible Exports, New York.
10. Cited in Ted Morgan,
Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of
William S. Burroughs
(London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 352.
11. Ibid.
12. William S. Burroughs,
Cities of the Red Night (London:
Penguin, 1981), p. xviii.
13. Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE added this paragraph as a
prologue in 2011 during the collaborative editing of the
interview from the transcript into a publishable form.
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Jaye and I both got breast implants three years ago
on Valentine’s Day 2003 and we woke up together
in the room where you come back from being
under the anaesthetic, and we held hands, and as I
looked down I found myself saying, ‘Oh, these are
our angelic bodies.’ I found it really interesting
that I would go to sleep and when I woke up I
would not recognise the person in the mirror in
the same way.
I’m just a basic heterosexual, which confuses
people because it’s much less common for heterosexuals
to be transgender. And I’m not fully
accepted by the transgender community because
they don’t understand why it would be an art
project. We really are investigating the idea of
evolution. We’re challenging DNA and refusing to
accept it as the programming that controls our
biological life. I am a p-androgyne – a positive
androgyne. A hermaphrodite by choice. Pandrogeny
is a suggestion or strategy for the survival of
the species. In some ways all the different projects –
even the music – are about challenging the status
quo in order to change. I think change should be
inclusive of other people, not exclusive.
DJ:
I’d like to ask you about the idea of allegiance,
in the sense of connecting to forgotten or less
privileged parts of cultural history. You’ve often
discussed your relation to William S. Burroughs,
Brion Gysin and Derek Jarman, for example. How
important is it to you to connect yourself to histories of
cultural experimentation?
GBPO:
People feel a kinship with what BREYER
P-ORRIDGE have been doing in our various
incarnations. It was the same for me when I was
young in the 1960s, and I’m sure for Lady Jaye in
her time. There are certain people, certain movements,
usually suppressed ways of seeing the world,
different ways of perceiving reality that shine like
beacons because they contradict everything that’s
being pushed into you by the so-called normal
world. I went to a very authoritarian British school
that actually had a statement in their manifesto that
said that art was not a real subject – parents were
expected to be glad that teachers didn’t waste their
CTR DOCUMENTS
Image 4 BREYER P-ORRIDGE,
Keeping Up With the Brian Joneses (2008). C-print on Plexiglas. BREYER
P-ORRIDGE. Courtesy of the artist and Invisible Exports, New York.
139
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time teaching us anything to do with literature or
art. For whatever reasons I’m perverse and that
made me want to look at literature and art as much
as I could. So there was an attraction for previous
manifestations of rebellion I think. If you feel
rebellious against the status quo you look for
commonality with other rebels. You seek them
out. You ask them what it is that they’re trying to say
and find out if you can say something similar but in a
more contemporary way. So that’s how I very luckily
got to know William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and
Derek Jarman very early, in the period between 1969
and 1971.
14
Burroughs and Gysin have been highly influential
to us, particularly in relation to the practice of
the ‘cut-up’. To liberate the word from linearity,
they began to cut-up texts and, incorporating
random chance, re-assembled both their own and
co-opted literature ‘to see what it really says’. They
referred to the phenomena of profound and poetic
new collisions and meanings that resulted from
their intimate collaborations as the ‘Third Mind’.
This was produced with a willingness to sacrifice
their separate, previously inviolate works and
artistic ‘ownership’. In many ways they saw the
Third Mind as an entity in and of itself. Something
‘other’, closer to a purity or essence, and the origin
and source of a magical or divine creativity that
could only result from the unconditional integration
of two sources.
DJ:
Literary experimentation was very important
to you. How has your work been influenced by
the history of performance in the UK?
GBPO:
We began working with performance in
1965 in Solihull, Warwickshire, with dadaist street
happenings like
Beautiful Litter.15 We scattered
small cards with evocative words written on them all
over town, inside cafes, bookshops, etc. and in the
street. As any curious person picked up the words
they were creating a haiku-like poem. All the cards
picked up also ‘wrote’ a long poem, but one that
CTR DOCUMENTS
Image 5 BREYER P-ORRIDGE,
Untitled (2006): photo by Laure Leber. BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Courtesy of the
artist and Invisible Exports, New York.
14. For a detailed history of this period, see Simon Ford,
Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions
and Throbbing Gristle
(London: Black Dog, 1999), pp.
1.11–2.10.
15. This section was also added in 2011, hence the shift from ‘I’
to ‘we’ in the use of personal pronoun.
140
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nobody would ever see or hear complete. In 1969
we joined David Medalla’s Exploding Galaxy in
Islington and it was there that we were mutated by
the rigorous aesthetics into entirely new ways of
seeing what art could become. We founded COUM
Transmissions in 1969 as well. Initially alone, later
with John Shapeero and, as time went by, more and
more people became involved to varying degrees of
engagement. COUM Transmissions began to flourish
in Hull in 1970–71 creating unsolicited street
theatre happenings. These actions got noticed and
we began to receive Arts Council bursaries and
grants. We added pages to
Groupvine [magazine]
and as a direct result COUM began to be invited to
participate in a lot of the Arts Festivals that
flourished then. We met Roland Miller and Shirley
Cameron who were very supportive of our early,
somewhat shambolic events and actions.Wemet the
John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, The Welfare State
and Jeff Nuttall and The People Show during the
early 1970s. We were generally surprised how many
of these people were art school lecturers with very
academic approaches to performance art – as it had
only just been dubbed. Almost all of these groups
seemed to have a pretty theatrical bent to their works
with, it also seemed, a diminishing ratio of improvisation
or happening. Because we were heavily
involved in mail art – and through that, Fluxus – our
influences were more conceptual and ironic.
As time progressed we dug deeper and deeper
into taboo, transgressive actions, sexuality and
gender roles, primarily with Sleazy Christopherson
and Cosey Fanni Tutti. We had all had the good
fortune to avoid art college, so our evolution was
based almost entirely upon our own communal
explorations together sexually and our lengthy
internal discussions about boundaries of all kinds.
Who delineates them? Who benefits from social
norms? Is there a valid reason for government
intrusion into the privacy of our individual physical
bodies? An artist’s right to choose how they use and
abuse their flesh was an important issue. Towards
the end of COUM Transmissions the work was
almost entirely about gender roles as we tried to
destabilise them.
DJ:
Performance is clearly an important methodology
in your practice. Do you find the term ‘Live
Art’ relevant or useful as a description of your work?
If not how would you describe your practice?
GBPO:
If you said ‘Living Art’ we might be
comfortable with that as a term. By changing ‘Live
Art’ to ‘Living Art’, more levels and flexibilities of
meaning are aroused. Living Art implies some form
of being alive as opposed to dead. The art is active
and filled with potential and still evolving. From the
artists’ perspective it clarifies an important distinction
for BREYER P-ORRIDGE, namely the
insistence that we are living art constantly without
any separation between creation of art objects,
installations, films and any other useful medium
available, and what are normally seen as ‘domestic’
activities in daily living. Art, we believe, must be allinclusive
and 24/7, with its prime motivation
embedded, no matter how obliquely, in every
action or product. That motivation is a positive
evolution of the human species: a transcendence of
current economic, social, sexual and religious
mores. When you consider transsexuality, crossdressing,
cosmetic surgery, piercing and tattooing,
they are all calculated impulses – a symptomatic
groping towards the next phase. One of the great
things about human beings is that we impulsively
and intuitively express what is inevitably next in the
evolution of culture and our species. It is the Other
that we are destined to become.
It is important to point out that whilst we
continue to develop and document performances
(primarily through Sigils [
magickal drawings],
Polaroids and video), these are almost exclusively
enacted in private. We use self-created rituals to see
how deeply we can explore the neurosphere (the
consciousness and the chemical brain), the endurance
levels of our bodies and minds, and their
threshold for restriction and physical limitations of
our bodies. The goal is not to produce aesthetically
satisfying artworks but to try and retrieve the
diaphanous waves of potentially new information to
explain questions such as why are we here? What
other states of being are there? What is the true
nature of time? What other dimensions and
locations beyond our small consensus reality might
exist? Pandrogeny includes every means of perception,
so ‘Live Art’ would be inaccurate, misleading
and far too constricting a term for BREYER PORRIDGE.
DJ:
You both bring very different histories and
experiences to the project of
Breaking Sex. Can you
each say something about the preparations that
enabled you to tackle such complex and provocative
material?
Lady Jaye BREYER P-ORRIDGE:
Although
our backgrounds are very different, Gen and I share
common early childhood experiences. When we
discussed our early life quite soon after we met we
realised that sharing these similar experiences
caused us to perceive the world in a certain way.
As an extension of that some of the same artists
resonated strongly with us – Marcel Duchamp,
Pierre Molinier, Hans Bellmer, Stelarc and ORLAN
spring to mind. Like getting hit over the head, you
CTR DOCUMENTS
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find something obscure or suppressed and it seems
like a truth, and you ask how it could have escaped
you for so long. Not all of our life experiences have
been the same, naturally – we’re from different
generations, and from different countries, but that
in many ways helps our work. It would not be a
work of the Third Mind/Third Being if we saw
everything identically. Sometimes our views will
contradict each other, like an exception that proves
the rule. Our work isn’t parallel sometimes, but
rather perpendicular, and forms a greater whole
that covers a lot more territory.
GBPO:
Jaye became very active in the downtown
New York scene and alternative theatre. Do
you want to mention that?
LJBPO:
A lot of the work that I did when I was
younger drew certain parallels to Gen’s work. Had
I known about Gen’s work – had I been a little
more worldly and sophisticated – I might not have
done some of these things, knowing that they had
already been done in the 1970s! But I felt a need in
myself to explore certain things, and when I started
reviewing Gen’s early work I realised it expressed
similar ideas to what I was feeling at the same age.
DJ:
To turn specifically to the Pandrogeny project,
one of the most striking tensions in the work is that
although it may seem at least superficially to be
monstrous or horrific, on a much deeper level it
demonstrates an investment in romance. Can you say
something about the collision between monstrosity and
romance?
GBPO:
At the very beginning before we were
committed to being with each other for a long
time, one of the very first times we actually met in
New York I stayed at Jaye’s apartment – we were
still just good friends – one of the first things she
did was dress me up like a little doll, in a very
androgynous way.
LJBPO:
It was a green crushed-velvet Betsey
Johnson cat-suit.
GBPO:
And a little leather skirt, with Fluevog
shoes that you bought me especially.
LJBPO:
Only the best.
GBPO:
Only the best. So there was an immediate
resonance between us that was never discussed at the
beginning where we began to blend. From then on
we playfully started to cross-dress with each other,
and play with the idea of looking similar and not
taking on traditional roles. When we got married on
Friday 13 June 1995, we intuitively – without a great
deal of discussion – swapped roles. I wore a white
lace dress and nice white and black shoes, and Jaye
wore skin-tight leather trousers, motorcycle boots, a
leather vest over her naked torso revealing her
breasts, and a moustache. That was the first step – a
deeply romantic urge to blend. The mutual orgasm
can be a transcendent experience where two people
seem to become one. Another way you can have that
experience is to create a baby, which is again two
people becoming one. We didn’t want to have a
baby, but we did want to create a new being that
represented the two of us, so we took each other and
started to analyse how we could play with that sense
of Positive Surrender, and create a new dynamic
being. That’s where the more considered artistic side
began.
DJ:
Would you say that Breaking Sex is a utopian
project?
GBPO:
When we began Breaking Sex and as it
developed into Pandrogeny both of us saw it as
primarily a process of and for our own liberation
from any gender or identity expectations or social
conditioning. The central energy was our deeply
romantic love for one another. Inevitably, as
performance artists and creators who see no separation
whatsoever between our daily life and the
concept of ‘art’ we channelled our responses and
observations back into our practice, and integrated
CTR DOCUMENTS
Image 6 BREYER P-ORRIDGE,
Topless Poor-trait
(2008–2010). C-print on Plexiglas: photo by M. Sharkey,
reprocessed by BREYER P-ORRIDGE.
BREYER PORRIDGE.
Courtesy of the artist and Invisible Exports,
New York.
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documentation into exhibitions via sculptures,
assemblages and photo works overlaid onto collages
of original Polaroids generated by our experiments
and rituals. A core part of our collaboration was
always endless discussion and dialogue back and
forth about the effects we were noting on ourselves,
and the expanding implications we felt we were
exposing.
In 1971, Burroughs charged me with a task:
‘How do you short circuit control?’ We came to
feel that control was ultimately inseparable from
information and in turn recording devices, from
pre-Astoric cave paintings to the Internet to the
archaeological residue recorded within the earth
itself. Control, we concluded, resides biologically in
and as DNA. The gender, shape, medical flaws and
longevity of individual existence are pre-programmed
to a large extent by DNA. We speculated
that DNA itself might be the primary life form on
earth, with our species as host organisms that
unwittingly enabled the continuity of DNA. We
saw DNA as a limiting mechanism of human
existence. To contradict, interdict and deny the
DNA pre-programme of our physical unfolding
became both a part of our agenda personally and a
symbol of our absolute rejection of any and all
imposed evolution. So we began mutating towards
an hermaphroditic logo of our rejection of DNA.
As we became more comfortable as a third being of,
at least conceptually, obliterating obvious physical
and gender differences, we discovered another layer
of meanings and possibilities released by our
project. When you refute the control of DNA we
felt you can begin to embrace a rejection of any
limitations to the mutability and possibility for
evolution. BREYER P-ORRIDGE have come to
view the physical body as simply raw material. ‘A
cheap suitcase for consciousness’, as Lady Jaye says.
We support all surgical or genetic advances
towards self-designed futures. Why not hibernate
in order to colonise space for example? Grow gills
to swim underwater? Fur or feathers as fashion
accessories? Central to all these various speculations
was the collapse of binary systems into redundancy.
We believe that as one becomes the author of one’s
own physical and social narrative by inclusivity
instead of exclusivity, as you excise oneself from
either/or, black/white, Muslim/Christian, male/
female and so on you can become aware of
similarities, commonality, and eventually perceive
oneself as part of a ‘HumanE Species’. A world
embracing mutation and radical evolution will
more naturally assign resources to the most
advantageous aspect for the well-being of the entire
species. This is a very brief explanation of our
thought process. From union through and as love,
to union as a demonstration of change socially, and
eventually to union of an entire species perceived as
one fully integrated organism with no limitation on
any level of biological mutability. Self designed
personally and socially in preparation for the next
phase of humane evolution. The colonisation of
space. The human body is not sacred, it is a tool
with a consciousness. There is no reason to believe
or assume that this is our finished state. This is, to
BREYER P-ORRIDGE, a ‘larval’, initial state of
being at a crossroads. We believe, with Pandrogeny,
that the means of perception can be seized and
become limitless, leading our species into being an
inclusive, integrated organism on a threshold of
unimaginable and miraculous achievements. Hence
we say, ‘Viva La Evolution!’ Utopian? Absolutely.
DJ:
How does the political emerge from this
particular sense of the utopian? I’m reminded of
Burroughs’ statement that ‘paranoia is having all
the facts’, where a political statement emerges from
blurring the boundaries between two opposites: the
positive and the negative, loaded and neutral,
romance and monstrosity.
GBPO:
Burroughs also said that if there’s a
situation that makes you uncomfortable, or feels
threatening, look for the vested interest. Well, we
felt very uncomfortable in the stereotypical roles we
were assigned, in terms of gender and being
biologically present. We wanted to expose the
deliberate conditioning and the push towards
emotional, economic and creative inertia, which
serves the purposes of globalised culture. The last
thing that the great corporations would like is to
have a new species erupt that’s based on the
absolute rejection of everything inherited at birth –
identity, body, social position, gender, race,
humanity – a new species that has the right and
the way to erase everything we were given and
rebuild itself. That’s where the political emerges.
LJBPO:
Today I was talking to Gen about the
story of Marduk and Tiamat. It’s the first recorded
story of how mankind was created – a Sumerian
narrative about a pre-Biblical god who conquers the
dragon Tiamat who represents femininity, chaos,
nature and wilderness. The other gods made
Marduk in the figure of a man, and gave him the
power to create the world – including the first city
and the first civilisation – and the power to rule its
people.
16 So the very first creation story is based on
control. There’s an extension of the story that says
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16. See Stephanie Dalley,
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the
Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
(Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks,
2008).
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humans were put here to serve gods and to serve
kings, and fill their storehouses with grain to give
them wealth. I would find some kind of change
refreshing at this point.
GBPO:
Gender infuses every cultural system and
is a very important aspect of reassessing what it is to
be present, to feel that you’re alive in any particular
consensus reality. Yet people often confuse gender
and identity too easily. Identity is something that
begins from the moment you’re conceived, while
you’re still inside your mother’s womb. Before you
even come out there is the influence of relatives
you’ve never met that you may hate when you do
meet, all these things that your parents want to
have happen, and their friends have investments in
what you’re going to be, and it just gets worse from
then – school, peer groups, you’re a boy so you
have to hang out with the boys and do boy things,
and so on. The key point about this structure is that
it’s fictional. If it wasn’t you making all those
choices up to the point you become fully self-aware,
perhaps around puberty, then you’ve had the story
of your identity written for you – a narrative written
by someone else. That’s just not acceptable.
Everyone should have the absolute right to be the
person who writes their own story and creates theirown narrative. To give it away or to let it go
through laziness is a tragedy. That’s how we’re
controlled, because we let those stories become the
warp and the weft of the fabric of society, and then
we’re stuck. So a process of deconditioning is
incredibly important if you want to rebuild your
own identity and write your own story.
LJBPO:
It’s difficult of course, because our culture doesn’t accept change, and if you were to reject everything – all your family’s wishes and alltheir dreams for you they would be hurt. We’re controlled by guilt.We don’t want to make changes
that will make other people love us less or not acceptus.
that will make other people love us less or not acceptus.
GBPO:
I’m sure everyone knows about that.
Everyone has to go through it over and over again.Well, there are very simple ways to change your
identity. Change your name. The name is the firstway that other people exert power over you. If you change your name you take on a huge challenge.Neil Megson thought he could make an artwork
that was an extension of Andy Warhol’s idea of thesuperstar, and create consciously a character as an
art piece, which was Genesis P-Orridge. But Neil
hasn’t been seen since 1969. Gone. Subsumed.
LJBPO:
And the character wasn’t just Genesis.
If I look at what’s left of the archive, all the photographs, there are hundreds of different characters that all have very distinctive personalitiesand represent different ideas. Sometimes theylasted for ten minutes and sometimes they lasted for a few years. It was so wonderful to see an artist who had so much to express.
DJ:
Finally, I think it’s clear from the amount of
exhibitions and performances that you are workingon right now that there seems to be a moment for your
work. I’m interested in the conditions that make thereception of work possible, but I’m also intrigued as to whether you think there’s a future for subculture. Whyis this the moment right for Breaking Sex and the emergence of the pandrogyne?
LJBPO:
In one of your earlier questions you
used the word ‘monstrosity’. In the past twentyyears, broadcast media and advertising have become
so sophisticated that ever since punk all these
manifestations of subversive culture that young
people especially are attracted to have been taken
from the streets and repackaged, and sold back to
them. Everything is a potential product, and I think
that for some people we are just a little too raw and
a little too hard to look at. It’s going to be very
hard to put our work in a box, place a little ribbon
on it, and sell it. I think that’s exciting because
what we are working on isn’t a commodity. How
can you sell individuality? It’s not the kind of
ndividuality like ‘I want to be different like
everybody else’, where a subversive style is defined
for you, along with where you should go, the typeof people you should hang out with, the shops you
should purchase your clothing at or the kind of
music you can listen too. What we’re doing is much
more abstract than that – you can’t pin it down as
easily because it covers so many bases.
GBPO:
There are two lines of thinking that I’m
pondering. One of them is quite simple, which isthat Pandrogeny, as a word, is uncluttered by any
specific connections to gender, sexual orientation
or sexual preference. It’s a very gender-neutral
word. But it’s also a very clear declaration at the
same time. At the very least it gives a lot of different
people a chance to discuss issues to do with the
survival of the species, the way that culture is
working and the changes that are happening to the
way people view their bodies. If Pandrogeny does
nothing else but open up debate by becoming a
word that can be rebuilt from the beginning to
represent a much more non-aligned view of things,
then that would be important.
The second way I can respond to your question
is that we’re in an age where people are still driven
by prehistoric genetic codes. To put it simply, when
we were all running around naked trying to catch
slow-moving animals in prehistoric times it probably
came in very useful for the male of the species
to have the fight or flight reflex in his genetic code,
in order to hunt and survive. Without that primitive
drive we wouldn’t all still be here. We then
discovered weapons and tools that helped us to kill
some of those slow-moving animals, including each
other. We got very excited when we learnt we could
make tools, and slowly but surely over thousands of
years we built this incredible, miraculous, technological
environment. People can pick up little boxes
and talk to somebody at the other end of the earth,
they can fly, they can be in space looking down. But
nobody’s been bothered to check on our behaviour
and move it along at the same rate. We’re still
genetically prehistoric. So we’re in this horrible
situation of a futuristic technological environment
and a prehistoric band of clever apes ready to destroy
each other because their behavioural responses are so
polarised from the world they live in. It’s an
incredibly dangerous time. Dualistic societies have
become so fundamentally inert, uncontrollably consuming
decreasing resources and self-perpetuating,
threatening the continued existence of our species
and the pragmatic beauty of infinite diversity of
expression. In this context the journey represented by
Pandrogeny – and the experimental creation of a
third form of gender-neutral living being – is
concerned with nothing less than strategies dedicated
to the survival of the species.
Pandrogeny went from that deep romance that
you mentioned into a discussion about identity and
how it’s made. That led us to realise that really the
ultimate question is: evolution or not. That makes
it a very volatile and exciting concept for us, which
contains the seed of a discussion about survival.
That’s why it’s resonating – people instinctively are
seeing Pandrogeny as a door they can pass through
in order to talk about their fears:
And then you want two
See if you could
Go right through
A thick brick wall.
CTR DOCUMENTS
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