Canada Choate on Breyer P-Orridge
“WE ARE BUT ONE,” a presentation of artwork by Genesis and Girl Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, focuses on the couple’s Pandrogyne undertaking, a virtually two-decade-long effort by the pair to rework their our bodies through cosmetic surgery into one “pandrogynous” creation: a singular being they consult with as Breyer P-Orridge. Organized by Invisible-Exports proprietor Benjamin Tischer, this paean to like in its highest state—a narcissism that rises above the self to embody the beloved—shows relics from the pair’s reciprocal metamorphoses within the type of images, sculptures, collages, and handwritten concrete poetry that, taken collectively, signify a monumental effort to transcend individuated subjecthood.
Genesis P-Orridge died of leukemia in March 2020, and on the heart of the present sits a shrine to the artist, theorist, and Throbbing Gristle cofounder: a wood construction created by he/r daughter, Genesse P-Orridge, to deal with sacred objects retrieved from her father’s house altar alongside bits of he/r organic matter and supplies widespread to he/r creative observe. Taking the domed type of a Himalayan stupa, this temple orients the viewer towards key themes of formality, corporeality, and benevolent magic, displaying tooth, household pictures, and Blood Bunny, 1998–2011, a small wood rabbit soaked in Girl Jaye’s blood and topped with a lock of Genesis’s blond hair. Close by, the sculpture Alchymical Marriage ceremony, 1997–2012, spatializes and allegorizes the fusion of Girl Jaye and Genesis, capturing saved hair and nail clippings from every lover in two separate handblown glass spheres and intermingling the remnants in a 3rd. Produced over the course of fifteen years, together with a interval during which Girl Jaye not existed on this airplane—she died of coronary heart failure in 2007—Alchymical Marriage ceremony turns the noun marriage ceremony right into a verb that sutures folks collectively throughout house and time. Cronenbergian Polaroids of Genesis and Girl Jaye within the strategy of their transition, wrapped in gauze, lips swollen, newly altered breasts leaking fluid, seem all through the gallery, returning the viewer to the astonishing actuality—and mutability—of the physique. For A Love Story, 2010, the couple photographed one another from the shoulders up from the entrance, at a three-quarters angle, and from behind, diagramming a second of their transition. Set towards backgrounds of shimmering gold leaf, these portraits evoke Warhol’s 1962 Gold Marilyn Monroe, but they find the divine not within the godheads of celeb however within the bodily extremes of self-mortification.
Polaroids of Genesis and Girl Jaye within the strategy of their transition return the viewer to the astonishing actuality—and mutability—of the physique.
To my thoughts, the strongest items in “We Are However One” are a collection of never-before-exhibited textual content drawings. These works on paper emerged from Thee Whispering Started, 2003, a video filmed by Psychic TV projectionist Sam Zimmerman during which Genesis and Girl Jaye silently take turns writing down phrases associated to their Pandrogynous perception system in gold and pink ink. In a single, the couple place their phrases in a decent sq. centered on the web page, then deface the textual content with a spiky, flame-like pink scrawl. In one other, the phrases EVE EVE EVERY EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IS A MAN AND WOMAN kind a pyramid, with the ultimate WOMAN sliced in two. These works are indebted to Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, a method involving the reducing up and rearranging of preexisting texts that additionally profoundly influenced the novel reimagining of gender within the Pandrogyne undertaking. When gender differentiation occurred and identification throughout genders grew to become taboo, write Genesis and Girl Jaye in one of many drawings, ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE. The couple aspired as a substitute to RETURN TO THEE ORIGIN, earlier than such a break up took maintain—to the genesis of life itself.
Discussing the undertaking within the Village Voice in 2012, Genesis famous that they selected the time period pandrogyne as a result of it was “a phrase with none historical past or any connections with issues—a phrase with its personal story and its personal data.” The Psychick Cross, a logo designed by Genesis in 1981 to signify the magical fellowship Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, fulfills the identical operate. This twentieth-century alchemical emblem, a mash-up of the papal cross and the Cross of Salem, sits atop Genesse’s stupa and hangs in neon on the again wall of the exhibition’s pew-filled viewing room, serving as a logo of life cast anew, seemingly out of skinny air. With their pandrogyny, Girl Jaye and Genesis—or Breyer P-Orridge—efficiently launched a brand new signifier, a brand new actuality, a testomony to their love that lives on in our world whereas they’re reunited on this airplane.
“Breyer P-Orridge: We Are However One” is on view at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, by way of July 10.
Canada Choate is a author primarily based in New York.
