Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis P-Orridge is an industrial music legend, pioneering the form as well the lifestyle — his ventures in body modification, tattoos, and piercing were well documented in the seminal RE/Search book “Modern Primitives,” a counter culture sensation that spawned a mainstream aesthetic form.
He still performs with both his bands, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV.
Recently, P-Orridge’s partner in life and art, Lady Jaye, died in their Brooklyn home. The two had been working on a performance project of body modification wherein they created a third being, known as Breyer P-Orridge, and received cosmetic surgery to bring them closer visually. The work was an examination of self and sexuality that the couple made personal and part of their everyday life.
The following interview was conducted prior to Lady Jaye’s death — in the same interview session Lady Jaye spoke about the Breyer P-Orridge project in conjunction with an installation at Mass MoCA — that can be read here. What follows is the conversation with Genesis about his beliefs and work.
SB: The book “Modern Primitives,” which you were featured in, is one of those quiet bits of influence that never really gets its due.
GP: It’s funny, because that book Modern Primitives, I knew Vale, who runs RE/Search, already and he used to do it in a newspaper format and called it “Search and Destroy” and then I was hanging out with him way back in 1980, maybe earlier, and we were talking. I said “You know what someone should do? Do a series of books that are like an alternative culture encyclopedia that you get in volumes and start to document all these new underground movements that are going on.”
So the first one was William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle, then he did “The Industrial Culture Handbook” and then he said to me when I was visiting “What next?” I said that we had been getting piercing and tattoos and the Fakir Mustafar and Mr. Sebastion, I explained why it was interesting, this reclamation of the human body, and that was how “Modern Primitives” happened, it was actually a suggestion that he took up.
We had no idea that it would be so incredibly influential. When you look at it chronologically, that’s when it exploded across the planet. Now there’s a piercing and tattoo shop in almost every village, everywhere you go, it’s incredible.
SB: You can’t pass a teenager without one or the other or both or several.
GP: We walk along and Jaye says “I blame you for this.”
We were very serious about looking at it as a modern contemporary exploration of a ritual, of a shamanic revival in the culture, the idea of a human body and the skin being inevitably part of the canvas of art, and it didn’t strike us at all that it would also become a fashionable accessory. I have to be honest about that, we had no idea. But then, we didn’t know that when we called our music “industrial” it would become a global phrase either, it would become an acceptable genre.
When somebody once asked me “What do you do?” and I flippantly answered, “I’m a cultural engineer,” with hindsight, I kind of am — but if I got too self-conscious about it, it wouldn’t work.
SB: Are you Marilyn Manson’s spiritual granddad?
GP: Oh, sure, there’s no question. There was no one calling music industrial until Throbbing Gristle decided to do it in 1975. It’s one of those very rare moments in culture where you can actually say ‘September 3, 1974, Monty Khazarzar and Genesis were talking and they said “Let’s call it industrial music” and now everybody in the world uses that phrase and there are lots of generations that have taken it and interpreted it their own. It’s become a genre. It’s like being able to say, “I started jazz.” It’s actually true for once. I often say that if I got ten cents for every time somebody said “industrial music” I’d be doing all right. But it doesn’t work that way.
We both came from different directions but we were both fascinated by the idea that modern art has not necessarily continued with the tradition of the human body being the central theme. It happens here and there and it’s present in contemporary art, but it’s not necessarily been fully explored in terms of contemporary techniques and the possibilities, so we both very naturally fell into redesigning each other to become more and more similar.
A lot of it is the result of Burroughs and Gyson’s experiments of the Third Mind and, as you know, I collaborated with both till they died. They’ve had a massive influence on me personally.
We sat down and discussed feelings we were having and things we were noticing in the culture, like in the back of the Village Voice, the sex ads would originally be biological females asking for male clients, but now it’s about 70 % she-males looking for heterosexual clients. That tends to suggest that something really interesting is going on within the sexual zeitgeist of the species now that heterosexual men are seeking out androgynous, hermaphrodite people to realize their fantasies. This is incredibly powerful, interesting stuff; it’s a big change.
With each other, we were always starting to intuitively dress the same and look at the ways that we felt psychologically bonded, so we took the third mind and thought ‘What if there was a third entity? What if we took ourselves and cut those up — literally and in intellectually — and created a being that only exists when the two of us are together, or as a result of the two of us collaborating? What would that do?’
Burroughs, in 1970, said to me “How do you short circuit control?” and my next question to myself was “Where is control?” The ultimate answer seems to be DNA. DNA is a recording that dictates the physical length of our lifetime and it dictates what we look like and it dictates an incredible amount of our projected time on earth. We decided that that’s it, that’s where it is, the recording is DNA. How do you cut that up the same way you would cut up audiotapes? Behavior is part of that process. Can you change behavior? How? By forcing yourself to be different so that you have to change.
It all came out of that debate with ourselves, really. What can we do? How can we change ourselves? And then of course, we looked at alchemy as well, the idea that the original beings were both male and female, that the hermaphrodite was considered a divine entity, and we thought that that’s what we want to do. We want to seek this way of being and present it as an evolutionary step.
SB: Other people experience all this psychologically, in that many couples do function somewhat as one entity when they are together.
GP: Absolutely. We would see that as confirmation that this is an area or a state of being that’s worthy of more investigation and understanding, but our ultimate desire is mutation, is the freedom of mutation, in order for the human species to finally evolve and be worthy of potential. At the moment, we’re falling back into these terrible dark ages of polarized bigotry and we should be ashamed of ourselves. We’re throwing away this miraculous and wonderful environment for the sake of dogmatic and fundamentalist perceptions of reality. It’s a tragedy just waiting to happen.
SB: Is the prescription less for people to do what you’re doing and to do what is right for them?
GP: To be quite frank, we are also encouraging people to do what what we’re doing. We would hope to encourage and find and locate genetic engineers and people who understand the process of replication and actually redesign the potential of the species. If we want to go into space, which we should as a species, we’re going to have to be physically different, we’re going to have to be able to hibernate, we’re going to have to be able to exist in weightlessness. There are all kinds of examples of ways in nature to do some of that already. Cross species fertilization is something we actually believe in. We might actually need fur or scales to exist in space, we might need extra limbs, we don’t know yet, but we should not consider the human body sacred.
Timothy Leary used to say that the body is only here to make the mind mobile. That’s all it does, but that doesn’t mean it’s at the end of the evolutionary chain — and I think that’s a great mistake we make as a species, that this is the end of the evolutionary chain. It’s not. It’s the end of a primitive evolutionary chain and it’s time to become contemporary modern and accept responsibility for ourselves as a species and redesign ourselves for better or worse.
SB: People go online and pretend to be someone else – other people involved may not have any idea of their true physical form – this seems like an everyday, practical way that people encounter what you’re speaking of.
GP: Definitely. I would agree with that. Definitely. Usually there’s evidence all over the popular culture of an innate sense of what should happen next that goes on within everybody and it manifests itself through different ways — through the sex industry, through the Internet and through the acceptability of new gender and identity stereotypes in the media. What builds up is a kind of pressure towards and evolutionary lurch, a sudden very radical mutation. What we’re trying to do is add to the pressure of that mutation, whatever that might be and I think that definitely happens in many different ways.
SB: Is this only with industrialized nations?
GP: This is where it gets so strange, isn’t it? We’re living on a planet, which, in a way, is a recording device to, in that if you go to the Sahara, there are still Bushmen living prehistorically, scratching a living, scratching an existence day-to-day, very, very primitive social grouping. You get to the Amazon and it’s more complex. You go to certain countries in the Far East and it’s medieval. You go to other countries and it’s 20th Century industrial or 19th Century. You can come into Japan and certain parts of America and it’s 21st Century futuristic, they’re all existing simultaneously and parallel on one planet, so there’s an archaeology of potential and there’s also an archaeology of failure to mutate and these are all forms of recording that exist simultaneously. We’re looking all the time to apply the idea of chopping up and reassembling reality for all kinds of societies and it’s obviously much more immediately relevant to a post industrial technological society, because they’ve already made the leap to potential and let go of some more fantasy based ways of viewing the universe, shall we say. So that is definitely problematical, but I don’t think we should ever hold back from the future because some people are living in the past. I think we can only ultimately change the world by example and by fearlessly embracing what could happen.
SB: Which is what you are doing.
GP: We’re trying.
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