Reading | Readings with Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE and Lonely Christopher

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performance collective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper, used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators “Wreckers of Civilization.”

P-Orridge went on to found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV. In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, “pandrogynous” character, “BREYER P-ORRIDGE". Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

Genesis P-Orridge and BREYER P-ORRIDGE have exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain. S/he is the author of The Psychick Bible.

Lonely Christopher is the author of The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, a radical map of shortcomings in our daily experiences in the form of a debut story collection, which presents thematically related windows into serious emotional trouble and monstrous love. Lonely Christopher combines a striking emotional grammar with an unyielding imagination in the lovely-ugly architecture of his stories. He is the author of several poetry chapbooks and the volume Into (with Christopher Sweeney and Robert Snyderman). As a librettist and playwright, his dramatic works have been published, staged in New York City and internationally, and released in Mandarin translation. He is a founding member of the small press The Corresponding Society and an editor of its biannual journal Correspondence. He lives in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.