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WORK TITLE: Art Sex Music
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Newby, Christine
BIRTHDATE: 11/4/1951
WEBSITE: http://www.coseyfannitutti.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 4, 1951, in Hull, England; daughter of Dennis Newby and Winifred Magueritte Guard; married Chris Carter; children: Nick.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Musician, performance artist, and author.
Exhibits: “Prostitution,” Institute of Contemporary Art, London, England, 1976; “Pop Life: Art in a Material World,” Tate Modern, London, England, 2009-2010; “Pop Life,” National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2010; “Picture Industry,” Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA, 2010.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Cosey Fanni Tutti is most well known for her work as a musician and performance artist. She reached the height of her career in the 1970s, when she began using her platform to present her own brand of feminist critiques to her audiences.
Art Sex Music serves as a memoir of Tutti’s career, beginning with her early years and leading up to Tutti’s current life. Tutti recounts the time she spent living with her strict father and her attempts to assert her own individuality, as well as the numerous experiences that molded her career and the person she has presently become. Tutti also relates two other important relationships she formed throughout her career, one of which escalated into abuse, while the other offered her love and fulfillment.
A contributor to New Internationalist remarked: “Art Sex Music is Tutti’s chance to right wrongs (write rights, perhaps) and she does this beautifully, intimately and without vindictiveness.” A Kirkus Reviews writer called the book “[a] bravura rock memoir vibrating with fierce and fearless memories” and “a must-have item for Chris and Cosey and Throbbing Gristle fans.” New Statesman writer Jude Rogers expressed that “it is unquestionably Cosey’s story, however radical and riotous a read it may be.” On the Guardian website, Fiona Sturges commented: “Though the details of Tutti’s career are consistently fascinating, these glimpses of life outside it are what gives the book its warmth.” Simon Tucker, writing on the Louder Than War website, said: “Art Sex Music is an essential read for anyone interested in the human condition.” He concluded: “Fearless, powerful, humorous, warm and intelligent, Cosey is everything and this book is a manual for anyone wanting to be the same.” Drowned in Sound contributor Giuseppe Zevolli remarked: “Art Sex Music will captivate anyone with an interest in the evolution and contradictions of cultural value: the ways what we regard as “good” art and/or music can be challenged.”
On the Spinoff website, Kiran Dass wrote: “It’s a great insight into her life, and the diary entries benefit from the lack of hindsight and retrospection.” She added: “In that way, it feels very immediate, immersive and raw.” Filthy Dreams reviewer Emily Colucci stated: “In many ways, Art Sex Music feels more than a memoir.” She added: “It’s not just a record of her experiences, but a seminal female performer’s reassertion of her own place within art, music and performance history.” A writer on the South Dublin Reads blog called the book “[a] fascinating memoir by an utterly fascinating individual in which she tells her own story, clearly, truly, and once and for all.” On the Freq website, one contributor stated: “For someone with an (imagined) fearsome reputation as an ‘out there’ artist, this memoir succeeds because the details unfold at a gentle pace…” The reviewer also observed: “[Y]ou don’t get any sense of bitterness about the things that have gone awry, just a sense of wonder related to the things that have gone right.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2017, review of Art Sex Music.
New Internationalist, September, 2017, review of Art Sex Music, p. 40.
New Statesman (London, England), April 28, 2017, Jude Rogers, “Cosy, not by nature,” review of Art Sex Music, p. 47.
ONLINE
Cosey Fanni Tutti Website, http://www.coseyfannitutti.com (May 3, 2018), author profile.
Dazed, http://www.dazeddigital.com/ (May 10, 2017), Luke Turner, “Cosey Fanni Tutti: Art Sex Magic.”
Drowned in Sound, http://drownedinsound.com/ (April 5, 2017), Giuseppe Zevolli, review of Art Sex Music.
Filthy Dreams, https://filthydreams.org/ (July 20, 2017), Emily Colucci, “Postcards from the Edge: Cosey Fanni Tutti’s ‘Art Sex Music,'” review of Art Sex Music.
Freq, http://freq.org.uk/ (April 20, 2017), review of Art Sex Music.
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 30, 2017), Fiona Sturges, “Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti review–elder stateswoman of the avant garde,” review of Art Sex Music.
Huck Magazine, http://www.huckmagazine.com/ (July 4, 2017), Cian Traynor, “Cosey Fanni Tutti: fearless provocateur, ultimate outsider,” author interview.
Jezebel, https://themuse.jezebel.com/ (April 25, 2017), Rich Juzwiak, “Noise Innovator and Former Porn Performer Cosey Fanni Tutti on Her New Memoir, Art Sex Music,” author interview.
Louder than War, http://louderthanwar.com/ (April 4, 2017), Simon Tucker, review of Art Sex Music.
New Statesman Online (London, England), https://www.newstatesman.com/ (May 2, 2017), Jude Rogers, “Cosey Fanni Tutti’s memoir ends with an unexpectedly conventional romance,” review of Art Sex Music.
Noisey, https://noisey.vice.com/ (May 4, 2017), Ben Handelman, “From Throbbing Gristle to ‘Art Sex Music,’ Cosey Fanny Tutti Has Always Been a Fighter,” author profile.
Pitchfork, https://pitchfork.com/ (April 26, 2017), Alison Nastasi, “The World Wasn’t Ready for Cosey Fanni Tutti, Throbbing Gristle’s Other Provocateur,” author interview.
South Dublin Reads, https://librarystaffpicks.wordpress.com/ (September 19, 2017), review of Art Sex Music.
Spinoff, https://thespinoff.co.nz/ (December 19, 2017), Kiran Dass, “The fourth best book of 2017: Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti,” review of Art Sex Music.
CURRENT BIOGRAPHY (abridged version)
Born (4th November 1951) in Hull, Cosey began her art and music career during 1969, appearing in art performances and musical improvisations in and around Hull until 1972.
In 1973, Cosey moved to London and continued working as a performance artist representing Britain at the 9th Paris Biennale, 1975 and Arte Inglese Oggi, 1976. She also performed in Belgium, Germany, Holland, France, Italy, Austria, USA and Canada until 1980.
Throughout the period 1973 - 1980 Cosey was exhibiting, contributing to mail art exhibitions and performing in other group exhibitions around the world. Often working naked in her performances, Cosey went on to investigate self-image within the context of sex magazines and sex films, glamour modelling and striptease acts. Her experiences within these industries during the period 1973 - 1984 were brought into her art work as she explored the many aspects of sex as it is perceived and transacted as commercial product. She placed conventional beauty in a situation where it was subjected to simulated mutilation before a live audience. This provided a visual contrast highlighting and questioning the notion of what is presentable as 'beauty'.
In her infamous exhibition 'Prostitution' at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1976 Cosey Fanni Tutti occupied multiple roles; artist, model, musician, and herself. Music was used in some of Cosey's performances in preference to spoken language, which she considered an obstacle to her visual presentations. She continued to explore
the use of sound, scientifically, politically, commercially and as a means of physical pleasure or pain. In 1976 she co-founded the group Throbbing Gristle with Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge. They broke the rules of established music and its contextual business practice, ultimately becoming successful with their own record label, Industrial Records. In 1981 Cosey immersed herself in creating music and video with partner Chris Carter under the name Chris & Cosey most recently performing and recording as Carter Tutti. Their joint musical and video collaborations, some 32 albums, have met with continuing international success.
1994 marked Cosey's re-entry into the art world since which time her works have been widely exhibited in Museums and Galleries in the UK, USA, Italy, Austria, Germany, Lisbon, Japan, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and Sweden.
Cosey's continuing multi disciplinary approach to her work has generated many audio and visual works contributing to a prolific output in the past 15 years alongside her guest lectures, discussion panel appearances and numerous presentations.
In 2000, after studying for five years, Cosey received a Bachelor of Arts, First-Class Honours Degree and was conferred at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, England.
Her approach to her work also inspired the one day event in March 2010 'COSEY COMPLEX' at the ICA, London in which a range of artists, writers and other practitioners were invited to present works inspired by the notion of 'Cosey as Methodology', culminating in a music event 'COSEY CLUB-ICA'.
In 2009 - 2010 Cosey's work was part of the travelling exhibition 'Pop Life:Art in a Material World' at Tate Modern, London. Also in 2010 Cosey performed a solo audio visual piece in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern as part of the Tate Modern 10th birthday celebrations.
Her art practice takes its place alongside her continuing music work with Chris Carter (as CARTER TUTTI) and the re-grouping of Throbbing Gristle and their continuing world-wide performances and recordings. Her work continues to be exhibited internationally, most recently in 'Pop Life' at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada and 'Picture Industry' at Regen Projects summer show in Los Angeles in 2010.
In 2017 Cosey’s autobiography ART SEX MUSIC was published by Faber & Faber.
Cosey works closely with and is represented by Cabinet gallery, London. WEB SITE LINK
For a comprehensive unabridged CV / biography please contact: Cabinet gallery
For a full list of exhibitions Cosey has appeared in follow this link
(this page will be updated during 2017)
ALTERNATIVE BIOGRAPHY:
Extract is taken from: WRECKERS OF CIVILISATION.
THE STORY OF COUM TRANSMISSIONS AN THROBBING GRISTLE
by Simon Ford - Published by: Black Dog 1999 But who was this 'flower girl' and where had she come from? Christine Carol Newby was born on 4 November 1951 in the Hedon Road Maternity Hospital in Hull, just before midnight. She was the second daughter of Dennis Newby and Winifred Magueritte Guard. Dennis, was a fireman who later became a Chief Station Officer. He was a strict disciplinarian whilst Tutti's mother; Winifred, was much more lenient and sympathetic towards her daughter. Winifred later became head of the wages department of a large manufacturing firm in Hull. "I was the second daughter and I was supposed to be a boy (ironically to be called Christopher)," Tutti recalls. "Hence I was brought up more like a boy than a girl. I was very rough, always fighting. I had great times getting into all sorts of trouble and was hedonistic as a child and well aware that childhood only lasts so long. My only problem was my over-strict Victorian father. He put the dampers on anything, even Christmas day. When I was in my teens it was a case of always finding out what my father's shifts were so I could organise my social life. If he was on nights I got to stay out with my friends.
If not I was miserable. My poor mum was stuck in the middle." Tutti's early interest in music manifested itself when Mike, her father's youngest brother, stayed briefly with the Newby's, bringing his guitar and harmonica. Whilst he was out
Tutti used to sneak into his room for a quick play. Her father, meanwhile, although he played no musical instruments, was an electronics enthusiast and Tutti remembers well the grating, whining, and shrill noises coming from his room as he tuned his radios. Use particular birthday present she remembers was a Grundig tape recorder that she almost wore out taping herself and music from the radio. She also, rather reluctantly, attended piano lessons and passed her exams despite often skipping the hated lessons. Tutti attended Bilton Grange Infants and Junior School in Hull, from 1956 to 1962.
Then, after passing her eleven plus, she went to Estcourt High School for Girls, from
1962 to 1967. She describes Estcourt now as verging on St. Trinian's" but she did well
and passed all her GCEs. Her favourite subject at school was art, but her father persuaded her to concentrate on the sciences. One early art experience she remembers vividly was being greatly affected by paintings of suffering slaves in the William Wilberforce House in Hull. But apart from this there were few opportunities for Tutti to develop her artistic interests further. "I lived a very working-class lifestyle on a working-class estate in one of the toughest towns in the UK," she says. "Art was not a priority so much as survival among my peers." At school her favourite teacher was the art teacher called Miss Kirten. No matter how disruptive or naughty Tutti was, Miss Kirten never gave her detention or reported her. "She valued unorthodox artistic expression and think that had a profound effect on my attitude to both art and music. She wanted me to stay on and do my A level but it wasn't to be." Under pressure from her father; Tutti left school after her exams and went to work as a laboratory assistant in a local school. It was around this time that she started smoking dope and dropping acid which led to her taking a lot of time off work. Eventually she handed in her notice and became unemployed. This was too much for her father who said she should either get a job or get out. Subsequently she left home and stayed with her friend 'Lelli'. "I missed my mother; she was so dear to me and helped me so much through the battles with my father. She called to me from the house one day when she saw me and begged me to come home for Christmas. I did but I'd left before the end of January. My father and I were incompatible, he wanted total control and I wanted none
of it." Tutti had always hated the name Christine and preferred people to call her Carol. After meeting P-Orridge she changed her name again, first to Cosmosis, then to Cosey. The lengthening of the name to Cosey Fanni Tutti took place in 1973, when mail artist Robin Klassnik suggested it via a postcard. The new name came from the title of Mozart's 1790 opera, Cosi fan tutte (which has been variously translated as 'They (women) are all the same', 'Thus do our women', or 'All the Women are at it'). The new name suited her well with its corruption of the high art form of opera into the low art form of the music hall and the burlesque (and even rock 'n' roll with its echoes of Little Richard's 'Tutti-frutti'). It soon became obvious to their friends that P-Orridge and Tutti were a well-matched couple. In particular they both shared rebellious and self-confident personalities. "When you're in your late teens or early twenties," Tutti explains, "you have little sense of responsibility. You're just out to get whatever experiences you can, you don't think of what the consequences are going to be. You don't even think as constructively as that.
We just went out and did it. We were very anti-establishment anything- music and art.
We wanted to destroy anything that had ground rules, that kept everything suffocating
and safe. We were out to break all the rules any way we could." This idealism, though, was not shared by other members of the household. Tutti recalls that within the commune they were regarded as outsiders "because we actually wanted to do things for real and follow them through to a conclusion. We sold Oz and made tie-dye T-shirts and 'loon' pants and also started doing what we called our 'acoustic doo-dahs' and the street theatre. The rest of the commune didn't really appreciate our commitment because they were out of their heads most of the time. Although I'd experimented with drugs I found them just a total waste of time, like getting pissed and doing nothing. You're just numbing your brain and doing nothing with your life and we were ostracised for even thinking like that within the commune. When Tutti joined COUM they were still a predominantly musically orientated group, playing instruments such as broken violins, prepared pianos, guitars, bongos, and talking drums. Tutti began to take part in performances in 1971, before then she would help build props and design costumes. "I became more involved as the direction started to change," Tutti told David Bourgoin, "COUM was musically based and took the form of acoustic improvisations, just anywhere, then more abstract scenarios started creeping in and we made entire environments for enjoyment." Tutti also described some of the happenings they produced, highlighting their often absurd nature: "People had to crawl through a polythene tunnel to get into the hall.
by Simon Ford 1999
For a full biographical account of Cosey’s career please check out
her new autobiography ‘ART SEX MUSIC’ published by Faber & Faber.
Art Sex Music
New Internationalist.
.505 (Sept. 2017): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New Internationalist http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
Art Sex Music
by Cosey Fanni Tutti
(Faber & Faber, hardback and ebook)
Christine Newby from Hull in the North of England wasn't always Cosey Fanni Tutti. It was a chance meeting with one Neil Megson in the early 1970s, a student who had already changed his name to Genesis P-Orridge, that got the ball rolling.
'Tutti was a central figure in the bands that she was in. COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle (and its spin-offs) and Chris and Cosey (the duo Tutti formed with her partner, Chris Carter) were key to the cultural life of alternative music from the mid-1970s to the present day. Throbbing Gristle was not so much a band as an experience that drew inspiration from sonic experimentalism and other areas. One of these, especially for Tutti, was sex/power, which she explored by strip-dancing and modelling for porn mags.
Tutti came to a feminist critique of the sex industry later. I expected these to be the hardest bits of the book to read, but they weren't. The most brutal aspects concerned people close to home: a father who banishes his daughter; the abusive relationship with P-Orridge. The history of COUM and Throbbing Gristle has up to now been dominated by its mythomanic spokesperson, P-Orridge. Art Sex Music is Tutti's chance to right wrongs (write rights, perhaps) and she does this beautifully, intimately and without vindictiveness.
**** LG faber.co.uk STAR RATING
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***** EXCELLENT **** VERY GOOD *** GOOD
** FAIR
* POOR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Art Sex Music." New Internationalist, Sept. 2017, p. 40. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503466907/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=90645df2. Accessed 11 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A503466907
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Tutti, Cosey Fanni: ART SEX MUSIC
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Tutti, Cosey Fanni ART SEX MUSIC Faber & Faber (Adult Nonfiction) $18.95 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-571-32851-2
The female half of the alternative music group Chris and Cosey reveals the "harsh and definitely not rose-tinted view of my past." Drawing on her library of diaries, musician and performance artist Tutti's autobiography is an apt reflection of her daring, lifelong restlessness and creative ambition. Born in 1951 in Kingston upon Hull, known during post-World War II Europe as the "most violent city in England," Tutti was raised in a strict household, and her mother's singing voice and father's penchant for electronics "fed and formed my notions of music and sound." As her mischievous nature emerged, so did the 1960s counterculture in music, art, TV, and other areas. The author went on to co-found the COUM Transmissions art collective and broadened their productions to incorporate prop and dance elements that expanded into controversial commissioned installations on sex and prostitution, including an esteemed exhibition for the British Council. Tutti's experiences in the stripping and pornography industries inspire pages of brazen, provocative anecdotes that fans will devour. All of these experiments in expression led the author to a passionate coupling with fellow artist Chris Carter and the development of the bands Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s and then Chris and Cosey in the artistic bacchanal of the 1980s. All of these historic events are lavishly and painstakingly detailed, much like the intriguingly written diaries they are culled from. Tutti clearly takes great delight in sharing the roller-coaster emotions experienced within each era and how particular watershed moments shaped her as an artist and an independent woman. Most impressive is the author's reflection on the decisions that defined her and her personal and professional relationship with Carter that, to this day, has managed to survive culture shifts, age, health scares, and the evolutions of both the music industry and their fan base. Without a hint of regret, Tutti bares all in the name of art and personal integrity. A bravura rock memoir vibrating with fierce and fearless memories--a must- have item for Chris and Cosey and Throbbing Gristle fans.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tutti, Cosey Fanni: ART SEX MUSIC." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668520/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=6e289a84. Accessed 11 Mar. 2018.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A487668520
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Cosy, not by nature
Jude Rogers
New Statesman.
146.5364 (Apr. 28, 2017): p47. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd. http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Art Sex Music
Cosey Fanni Tutti
Faber & Faber, 512pp, 14.99 [pounds sterling]
November 1969. "Sugar Sugar" by the Archies is number one for the month. The Beatles' Abbey Road is just out, the band's beautiful swansong. At a Hull students' union, an 18-year-old girl spots a 19-year-old boy. She is ferociously bright, getting into the late-Sixties swing. He has the look of a Greek Orthodox priest and carries a "wooden staff, the full length of which he'd carved by hand into a continuous interwoven spiral which converged at the top with the yin-yang sign, above which were small horns for his thumb to hold the staff firm". His mother named him Neil. He is now known as Genesis. He decides that her name is Cosmosis, abbreviated to Cosey when they become a couple. It is helpful to note that they meet at an acid test, where people are playing with a bathtub full of coloured jelly and where someone's skronking free jazz on a saxophone makes Cosey run away.
Rock autobiographies are generally conventional tales of excess but Faber has published some properly alternative takes in recent years. And the great thing is that many of the most recent ones have been by women on the margins of pop culture, such as Viv Albertine of the Slits (who unwrapped the messy world of punk in Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys) and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who described the death of her relationship with Thurston Moore in Girl in a Band. And now comes Cosey Fanni Tutti, a founder member of the radical music and art collective COUM Transmissions and later Throbbing Gristle, an important influence on the darker side of electronic music. She is far from a household name but her book Art Sex Music arrives laying out huge concepts in its title, confidently, as it should.
We begin with a story of an ordinary, ramshackle family living in the north-east. Christine Newby is born with her left elbow bent and fist wedged against her chin, like Rodin's Thinker, at a hospital standing between a prison and a cemetery. Her female role models are caring and strong; her cold and detached father certainly isn't.
This section is full of other seeds of portent, but buds of creativity, too. Hull's bombsites become playgrounds where stories are made among "toys, pianos, kitchens left almost intact". Aged
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seven, Christine and a friend find photographs of Belsen victims in a book. ("We should not have been looking at those images," she states. Years later. Throbbing Gristle make Music from the Death Factory and put a picture of a Nazi death camp on the cover.) She is ten when the Cuban missile crisis reaches the Humber: "It was a frightening, life-changing moment to be told in my junior-school assembly that we could all go home early to our families because the world might end tomorrow." Cosey's tone throughout is full of such matter-of-fact tenderness.
Despite fascinating details, this part of the book is a tough read. The timeline darts haphazardly and it is hard to keep track of prominent and incidental players alike. The feeling extends through Cosey's early forays into art and music: we are left with scattershot impressions of lives, moments and ideas. But perhaps that was the point. COUM's work was about rejection of conventions, after all--they sent art through the post by direct mail, and proclaimed seven years before punk that "the future of music lies in non-musicians". Still, their work was also about being accessible, and a firmer editing hand would have helped.
But then comes the sex. Cosey was a pornographic model and stripper in the middle of the 1970s and second-wave feminism, using her body in artworks to comment on the sex industry. "I was no 'victim' of exploitation," she writes of that time, persuasively and fearlessly. "I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes ... I wanted a purity in my work, to push against existing expectations and my own inhibitions, and to understand all the complex nuances and trials it imposed on everyone ..." COUM's 1976 exhibition at the ICA in London also featured her bloodied sanitary towels in installations, more than two decades before Tracey Emin's much gentler. Turner Prize-winning My Bed. You boggle at how bold Cosey's work is, even when its extremity puts it on the edge of parody--unless you and your boyfriend have ever ended an onstage performance by being penetrated with either end of a nail-studded pole.
The boyfriend (yes, the same one we met earlier) gets his comeuppance. Genesis P-Orridge throws a breeze block at her head and cats down the stairs, and reminds us of the darker sides of sexual liberation ("Gen says to gain more power I am to screw each cock that I don't want," reads one of Cosey's particularly grim diary entries from 1976). But she rebels, settling down with her fellow bandmate Chris Carter ("my heartbeat", as the dedication to the book reads) and continuing her avant-garde explorations in music and art with him, and their son, by her side. If there is any conventional narrative to this memoir, it's this: here's a life in art spurred by a meeting with a manipulative man, over whom the heroine triumphs. But it is unquestionably
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Cosey's story, however radical and riotous a read it may be. Jude Rogers is a music critic and broadcaster
Caption: Poser: turning porn into performance art
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rogers, Jude. "Cosy, not by nature." New Statesman, 28 Apr. 2017, p. 47. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495476378/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=4256ccbd. Accessed 11 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476378
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Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti review – elder stateswoman of the avant garde
A performance artist and member of the band Throbbing Gristle, Tutti has spent decades breaking down barriers. This is a fascinating, unfussy memoir
Fiona Sturges
Thu 30 Mar 2017 02.30 EDT
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 10.15 EST
Blunt matter-of-factness … Cosey Fanni Tutti.
Blunt matter-of-factness … Cosey Fanni Tutti. Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian
It’s taken half a lifetime for Cosey Fanni Tutti to be recognised for her achievements in art, performance and music. Over the years rejection has come from all quarters: from her father, who threw her out of the house in her teens and later cut off all contact; from the police, who drove her out of her home town of Hull and, in London, repeatedly investigated her for indecency (charges were never brought); and, most startlingly, from Genesis P-Orridge, her former lover and fellow member of the art collective COUM Transmissions and the band Throbbing Gristle, who sought to marginalise her.
Art Sex Music isn’t merely a memoir, then; it’s a chance for Tutti to clear up the misconceptions about her career and reclaim her own narrative – and what an extraordinary narrative it is. This is the tale of a preternaturally creative individual dedicated to challenging and, where possible, breaking down ideological and social barriers, often at enormous personal cost. It’s also about resourcefulness amid astonishing unpleasantness and hardship.
At the centre of it is P-Orridge, a university dropout with a fascination for Aleister Crowley and Charles Manson, whom Tutti met on the late 1960s hippy scene in Hull. Back then she was plain Christine Newby, but P-Orridge rechristened her Cosmosis (it was later shortened to Cosey) and the pair moved into a crumbling, leaky commune known as the Ho Ho Funhouse. Creativity and a rejection of social norms was at the core of their existence, yet Tutti, as one of the few women in the group, was run ragged, taking on office work to bring in money and working on COUM projects while being solely responsible for the cooking, cleaning and washing.
They decamped to London, where their performances went up a gear, taking in live sex, bodily fluids and masses of offal
P-Orridge was, she says, “a charismatic prankster with an intellectual bent and a great line in telling people that they needed to access and be their true selves – while not practising what he preached”, all of which seems a generous assessment given what came later. His behaviour towards Tutti makes for grim reading as he threatens to throw her out when she socialises without him, refuses to use condoms (four months after they meet she has an abortion that leaves her emotionally bereft), insists on an open relationship and encouraged group sex. There are violent outbursts too: when she suggests they separate he tries to strangle her and, in the midst of a fracas when she finally leaves, he runs at her with a knife.
By 1973, COUM had moved from dressing up in glittery costumes and performing surreal “actions” in front of startled families in the city centre to smashing up statues of the Virgin Mary. Harassed by police, skinheads and disapproving neighbours, they decamped to London, where their performances went up a gear, taking in nudity, live sex, bodily fluids and bucketloads of offal.
‘Wreckers of civilisation’ … Tutti performs with Throbbing Gristle at Coachella 2009.
‘Wreckers of civilisation’ … Tutti performs with Throbbing Gristle at Coachella 2009. Photograph: Michael Buckner/Getty Images
Tutti had also become interested in pornography and worked in porn movies, and as a stripper and nude model. These solo excursions into the underbelly of London’s sex scene tested her mettle both as an artist and a woman, and made it hard to relate to the feminist campaigners who were trying to shut the industry down. “I was a free spirit and didn’t want yet more rules and guilt thrown at me about my actions,” she explains. “Yes, by doing my sex work I was contributing to, but not necessarily endorsing, the thing they were fighting against. But I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation. I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes, to subvert and use them to create my own art.”
In 1976, several of her magazine spreads featured in a huge COUM retrospective at London’s ICA, alongside a 5ft, double-ended, blood-smeared dildo and a Perspex box containing one of Tutti’s soiled tampons crawling with live maggots. The show, called Prostitution, prompted a meltdown from the tabloids and a discussion in the House of Commons in which COUM were branded “wreckers of civilisation”.
All of this – the coercion and abuse, the sex work, the maggoty tampons – is told with a blunt matter-of-factness, as if none of it were anything unusual. The effect is to make it all the more vivid while allowing the reader to take the most outre scenes in their stride. Tutti’s prose is pleasingly unfussy and, though there are confusing moments – not least with the vast number of friends, collaborators and associates who appear and reappear and whom it’s assumed we can recall by their first names – her memory of events that took place over 45 years ago is impressively sharp. She can be darkly funny too, remarking on her dog Tremble’s habit of eating the tampons put aside for her artwork. In the early 80s, having split up with P-Orridge, she relocated to rural Norfolk with her partner, Chris Carter (also of Throbbing Gristle). It’s with winning understatement that she recalls taking their son, Nick, to the local toddler group in the village hall and noting: “I didn’t have a lot in common with the other mothers.”
Though the details of Tutti’s career are consistently fascinating, these glimpses of life outside it are what gives the book its warmth, and provide a much-needed counterbalance to the relentless awfulness of P-Orridge. Her relationship with Carter, which began in the early Throbbing Gristle days and is now in its fourth decade, is touchingly drawn. Similarly heartwarming is the current demand for Tutti, via talks, retrospectives and reunions, and her newly acquired status as elder stateswoman of the avant garde. Forever accustomed to life as an outsider, Tutti has never sought approval, but now it’s here whether she likes it or not.
• Art Sex Music is published by Faber. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
Topics
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The World Wasn’t Ready for Cosey Fanni Tutti, Throbbing Gristle’s Other Provocateur
Cosey with the Throbbing Gristle flash. (Photo courtesy of Cosey Fanni Tutti)
pitch
by Alison Nastasi
Contributor
Experimental
Electronic
Rock
April 26 2017
“Early November 1969: Cosmosis he named me after seeing me just once,” reads an excerpt from Cosey Fanni Tutti’s diary, published in her forthcoming autobiography Art Sex Music. The nickname given to the artist born Christine Newby, one of the founding members of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, is indeed evocative of her life and career. She eventually found harmony and wholeness, alone and with longtime partner/collaborator Chris Carter, following a number of traumatizing periods in her life: a difficult upbringing in Yorkshire, an abusive relationship with her COUM Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle co-founder Genesis P-Orridge, and ongoing backlash to her more transgressive work as a pornographic performer.
As Tutti writes in Art Sex Music, the past few years have found her making peace with her past, via exhibitions of her performance art with COUM and her hardcore magazine collages, as well as Throbbing Gristle’s reunion in the latter half of the ’00s. But Art Sex Music challenges assumptions about Tutti’s radical contributions, sharing the oft-missing humanity of a woman once dubbed one of the “Wreckers of Civilization” by a Tory MP in 1976. The book is a raw, moving testament to how Tutti’s resourcefulness and dedication have helped her end up an avant-garde art icon. We spoke with Tutti about her memories of and lessons from a life spent making brutal noise.
Pitchfork: You write that Genesis P-Orridge tried to control your diary entries. Did that change how you felt about Genesis, or the voice you wrote with?
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Cosey Fanni Tutti: Yes, it did. It was quite a shock to suddenly come across a page that had been written in by someone else in a critical way. My diaries weren’t about hiding anything. They’re about the everyday. It was quite crushing.
What was it like to return to some of the more difficult moments in your past, like your relationship with Gen?
It wasn’t too difficult at all. A lot of people have asked me why I put up with it, instead of asking why did [Gen] do it. I have to excuse my behavior, because of someone who behaved to me in a way that they shouldn’t have. It’s almost like victim blaming, although I never felt like a victim. I always felt pretty strong. I’ve taken it as a challenge, to turn it around into something positive. TG came out of all of that.
**Genesis and Cosey circa 1969. (Photo by John Krivine)
Your father and Genesis both assumed a position of authority over you, and your art is often about breaking apart those established systems. You’ve said that conflict was essential to the success of Throbbing Gristle, but I still have to wonder how you made music in such a difficult setting.
I just transcended that. Other people’s problems with me weren’t my problem. I was on a different trajectory. It was about creating and being myself. Whatever people did to me along the way, that was their problem, not mine.
That’s not easy for a lot of people. How do you transcend something like that?
A belief in yourself and a belief in the reality that you are equal to other people, and you have the right to do what you want to do, as long as you don’t harm anyone. Even in my childhood I had to deal with that kind of oppression and expectation. But I had the mindset of a male entering into the world—that it was my oyster. I attribute that to my father treating me more like a boy than a girl. I don’t think he intended that to happen. It was a side effect of how he brought me up.
You describe growing up in Hull, England, with all the bombed-out houses and post-war rubble of the 1950s. It was as though you were born into a kind of violence, which became a big part of your work. Do you still need an element of that when creating?
I suppose I’ll always need it. That element in my work is a foundation of what we’re all made from. Our base instincts of survival, sexuality... when you take away all the superficiality of the internet, consumerism, and everything else we’re given, we are just beings who need to interact with one another, to physically feel one another. That’s what I always tap into. I love technology—and I would embrace anything if it would help me do what I want to do—but I don’t see it as a lifestyle. As far as accessing the dark side of the human condition, which is what I’m really talking about, it’s all over the internet. If anything, it’s in our faces more than ever.
What do people misunderstand most about Throbbing Gristle and industrial music as a whole?
There was a lot of irony in TG. “Hot on the Heels of Love” was a Donna Summer meets Martin Denny kind of thing. Industrial music for us was about being industrious. It wasn’t about industrial sounds, literally, which is what I think people interpreted it as. The amount of cassettes we got sent of people doing so-called industrial music… you’re sort of thinking, “Well, we’ve done that. Why would we want to hear someone else trying to do it?” It’s not the sound—it’s the attitude and approach to their work. I’d like to hear some music in the industrial genre that keeps with what it should have been and was originally—it doesn’t even have to sound like TG.
TG songs like “Hamburger Lady” and “Hit By a Rock” evoke disturbing imagery in their language, but it’s the hisses and other noise that become even more abject. How do you strike a balance between work that’s both inherently mechanical and attempting to recreate visceral sounds that affect the body?
You do it by creating sounds that are visceral to you and actually express how you feel physically about the subject matter. Playing a guitar and never being taught to play a guitar is a bit of a bonus, because it just becomes an instrument of sound for me. Lately, it’s become an extension of myself.
When you’re dealing with those kinds of subjects that are really dark, they’re about the deepest feelings that people internalize. To externalize those feelings, you have to use very basic language like we did with the lyrics and deliver them in a way that’s uncompromising. On top of that, you bring the sounds with it that express all the vomiting-inducing feelings of the horrendous moment that you’re trying to tell people about. You have to connect on that very base level. It’s exhausting at times, but it’s also really fulfilling.
After COUM Transmissions’ infamous Prostitution art show at the ICA in 1976, there was kickback from feminist circles regarding your work. They didn’t necessarily see you posing in pornographic photos as reclaiming your body and image. Were you conscious of those reactions at the time?
I didn’t think about it at the time at all. Feminism of the ’70s was very different than how it is now. It didn’t cater to the differences amongst women. It tended to focus on hating men, and I’ve never hated men. It seemed pretty divisive to me, rather than bringing people together on the same equal standing. It didn’t do it for me back in the ’70s.
____ TG’s first gig, at the Prostitution art show. (Photo by Paul Buck)
How does it feel to find acceptance in circles that weren’t so welcoming initially?
When you do something that is regarded as unacceptable, extreme, or transgressive, it is that very thing, because it’s out of its time—before its time, even. So there has to be logically a point at which it meets with people’s minds and understanding. That’s not a problem for me.
My biggest problem is that if I do something now and it’s accepted straight away, I think, “Oh my god, what have I done? I’ve betrayed myself.” [Laughs] Acceptance doesn’t figure in when I’m at the point of making anything. I want to get across how I feel and hope that someone has some kind of… not even empathy, but that they find it interesting.
How does a transgressive artist avoid cliché once people think they have them pegged?
In the early ’80s, I did a performance piece in Holland. I came out on stage, and it was quite late at night. I immediately picked up on the fact that they were waiting for me to strip off and do the cliché thing that they were expecting. So I did the opposite, because I thought, “I’m just not here to pander to what you want to see me do. I’m here because I have something to say.” And so I ended up doing a piece where I destroyed images of everything they were expecting instead. It was like an exorcism, really.
You write about how live shows were essential to fostering your love of experimental music. When you went and saw who was actually listening to this music, did you ever feel disconnected from that scene?
Audiences affect something, for sure. The only time I felt like that was when I saw John Cale at the Hammersmith Odeon [in London] in the ’70s. I went to see him, and it was just like, “Who the hell are these people?” He was trending at that point. I thought, “They don’t even know about his early material, his history, or anything.” I was quite disgusted, so I walked out.
** Recording TG’s ‘Journey Through a Body’ in 1981. (Photo by Chris Carter)
Art Sex Music is out May 1. Tutti launches the book today (April 26) in conversation with Lenny Kaye at NYC’s McNally Jackson.
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1495-the-world-wasnt-ready-for-cosey-fanni-tutti-throbbing-gristles-other-provocateur/
From Throbbing Gristle to 'Art Sex Music,' Cosey Fanny Tutti Has Always Been a Fighter
Ben Handelman
May 4 2017, 12:30pm
We spoke to the controversial art rock icon about censorship and control (and nabbed an exclusive excerpt from her new memoir)
How much can a single person create in a lifetime? For many artists, the aspiration is to make an entire lifetime into a body of work. Few creators of our age have come as close to this goal as Cosey Fanny Tutti. For just shy of fifty years, she's been in a near-constant state of creative motion, crossing mediums and boundaries in ways that were seldom done before her time. From her highly controversial work with COUM Transmissions (which has often caused her and her cohorts to be treated as artistic threats to the public good) to her role in establishing the genre of industrial music as a member of Throbbing Gristle, her earliest works alone could fill volumes. Her ongoing work with her husband, Chris Carter, as Chris & Cosey and subsequently Carter Tutti, has been equally influential in the music world, often overlapping with retrospective glances and reimagined works pertaining to her sex art actions of the Seventies.
Still, it's not the art alone that makes a human being interesting. What drives them, what happens in the spaces between the creation—these are the things that really feed into the completeness of a person. In Cosey's new book, Art Sex Music, her activities are given the proper autobiographical treatment, but in a fashion that presents things both grand and personal with equal merit. Reading the boom is like having an old friend sit and recall stories about everything they've experienced, from it's tiny anecdotes about childhood rebellion to attending the funerals of lifelong friends. Some passages are humorous, others troubling, and some even heart-wrenching, but throughout the entire book, there's a consistent thread in the narration that keeps the pacing and atmosphere familiar and grounded.
With the opportunity to examine such a vibrant and extreme life in a definite way, I was thrilled to follow up with the artist and author herself. We spoke about controlling men, censorship, and her constant way of filling time and life with art and productivity. Read on for our conversation, and for an exclusive excerpt from Art Sex Music.
Photo credit: Chris Carter
Noisey: Your book was culled from your diaries and has a very conversational tone. It seems as a direct result of the diary format. Was this intentional? What was your process in approaching the writing?
Cosey: Yeah, it was intentional. I didn't want it to be overblown or embellished in any way or pandering to myths. No analytical speak, if you like. I wanted to be as if I was writing to someone about my life in my every day way that I communicate with people. Also, the fact that there's so much in it because I wanted to bring people within my world as it progressed from being a child like to how things fed into one another. Some meetings facilitated projects years further on down the line. I wanted the style of it to be casual, and hopefully friendly, as if I was speaking to someone over a cup of coffee or something.
One of the earliest things that struck me in reading through was the importance of two major relationships early in life in Hull: your mother and your friend Les. They're two very different dynamics but they seem to be the two forces looking out for you when you needed the help early on. I know much of your relationship with your mother had to be carried out in secret.
As a child, she sort of countered my father's strict attitude towards me, and his coldness as well. She was in a difficult place because I think they were as close as me and Chris are now. I understand, in some ways, now more than then, how difficult it was for her. You do, as a child, expect your parents to sort of stand up and protect you. You don't think of the dynamics of their actual relationship and how you're impacting it. She had to, at times, lie to my dad on my behalf so that I could actually be free and do what I wanted to do. That went from childhood through to my teens. Then it all came to an end after the ICA, because she could no longer justify deceiving him on my behalf. I wouldn't say I was happy for that, but I accepted it. As an adult by then, I'd chosen my path in life and I couldn't expect her to destroy her relationship with my father. They were too close, you know. He could've made her life a bit easier and given her some more input into my life, allowed her to see her grandson and that kind of thing. He was just selfish and there's nothing much you can do with someone like that.
He seemed quite rigid.
He was very Victorian. I've learned since that his childhood wasn't the kind of childhood that would give him the skils that he needed to be in a father. So, in some ways, you can kind of forgive that. But on another level, how he was with me wasn't something I carried through to my childhood. There is a possibility of redemption, if you like, or just learning social skills and how to have a relationship with your children. I don't know how damaged he was from the war and things like that. It's very difficult. He's a very closed man.
Les was the other one in my life. We were really inseparable. We still are, he's like my brother. So, with my mother watching my back at home and Les outside the house, I was really lucky. My mom really liked Les. My dad recognized that he was the 'enemy,' because he wasn't allowed around the house. He couldn't even come into the garden.
With you touching on your experience with your father, it seems there's a theme of controlling, dominant men trying to put their heel down on you as a strong, self-defined woman. From moving out of your father's house and into your relationship with Gen, it seems like an ongoing thread.
Yeah, I think that a sense of entitlement has a lot to do with. And just being a product of the 1950s, even. It was a very patriarchal time. I mean, for my father, I was convinced that once I left home I was free. I had no idea what was going on behind the scenes when I wasn't around and how things were being manipulated. Well that's the whole point of manipulation, isn't it? It's under cover. But, I was used to fighting my own ground, literally at times. I didn't really think anything of it because Hull was a tough place to be and me and Les had fought our way, as children, through the estate, and in inter-estate fights. I supposed you'd call them gangs now.
When it came to living as COUM in Prince Street, whatever went on there, I was on my own path. Things that went on incidentally weren't really my top priority. I could handle that. I could handle my dad for seventeen years, trying to push me in one direction or another and trying to stifle me. So I saw no problem with this. It only became problematic towards the end because I really needed to get out then, I was so unhappy. I had so many people around me in Hull before we moved to London. Like Les, I had Fizzy and all these other people who could come around and I'd have so much fun with them. Once I moved to London, I was quite isolated. I think that made a big shift in my mindset. I had a realization of how isolated I was, whether on purpose or not. My sex magazine work meant going out and meeting a lot of new people and friends. I created my own group of friends again, outside of Hull. I wasn't going to be kept down.
That seems to be another recurring theme throughout the book. It seems that whether it's a dominant person or even your own health issues, your resilience shines through without being explicitly stated. I didn't realize how unhealthy I was until I wrote the book. Or, continually unhealthy. I always thought I was a quite fit person. Until I had my heart trouble I was always out swimming and bike riding with Nick as a child. I was all over the place. But yeah, it's just a part of life. You get up one day and you're ill and then you get on with it. There's nothing else you can do.
There's no sense in giving yourself to it. You touched on to moving to London and doing sex magazines. This seemed to be where you began defining your personal art and aims. It keeps getting revisited in galleries, in conversation, and in your own retrospective. How has your interaction and the public's interaction with these activities shifted and how has it remained the same? It's interesting for me now to go back and look at them and rework them. I see them quite differently. When you're in the midst of doing all that work, the focus is really on getting through that particular situation, because they're all different. I didn't sit and think about it as being my art when I was in the middle of doing it, because I had to do what was expected of me. This wasn't my art that I was doing, although it was, contradictorily. I was being a model and I had to deliver the goods, therefore I wasn't being an artist in action or in a gallery or anything. I was out of context. That was the dilemma that I was in. I knew that I was doing it and it was going to be taken and put in a gallery as an action, but it had to be done in the correct way for me. It's kind of quite a weird mindset to be in, having to forget the art to do the job that creates the purer art that I'm looking for.
Obviously, because I was thinking like that at the time, retrospectively it's all gone. I can see it in a different way. It's been more interesting and fulfilling than the actual action. I look at the magazines, and, just for the simple fact that I've framed them in their entirety it gives a full picture of that moment in time. You sort of get an idea of what culture was like and what the sex industry was like in the 70s when you see the full magazine laid out with the ads and everything. Like I said in my book, sometimes it's quite shocking and crass. But it is what it was, which is of its time. I can see now, looking back, why people look at it nowadays and see it as a feminist act because it was a difficult industry to be in as a woman, even if you were just a regular model. It was hard work.
It's interesting that you mention it being a feminist act. Feminism's own stance and sex work and the nature of things shifts with the times. How do you feel about your art being interacted from a feminist lens, knowing that much criticism was once leveled against you from the very same standpoint? Yes, it was critical then. I think that I just regard people as who they are. I don't want a label for me just because I'm a woman and the actions that I have. I don't know what feminism means anymore. All I know is that women are out there doing their own thing. They don't need the tag of "feminist" on top of that, because then you get into all these groups and sub-groups that have different kinds of theories about what feminism is and basically it just is being who you are in the world. The fact that you're a woman has nothing to do with it, not as far as I'm concerned anyway. Particularly now, with the internet, women are doing pornography in their own right. It's a very different world from what it was when I worked in it. As far as my work being in exhibitions that have a feminist theme, it's always about the fact that I'm just an artist and this is my work. The fact that it's been labeled feminist is incidental, because the action wasn't regarded as feminist when it was done. It's just me going out there and doing my own work, if that makes sense.
How has censorship shifted throughout time in regards to your work? Well it's not as bad as the ICA anymore, the response isn't that bad. My magazine works actually get on the walls of galleries now, which is good. I have come across instances where they have to put a warning up there, which I suppose is okay. I reject it I there is another work similar to mine that doesn't have a warning. Usually when that's happening it's when it's male artists' work. I don't understand why there's a difference between my work and someone else's which deals with the same subject matter but has to have a warning or a subtle return as you enter the space so that it's not viewable from the main area where people enter the gallery. I suppose you have to be careful not to have a full-frontal open crotch shot right in the front of a gallery that's viewable from the street. I just want equal treatment. I don't even ask for it because I expect it. It shouldn't be an issue, but sometimes it is.
Photo credit: Studio of Lust, Nuttfield Gallery, Southampton, UK
It's clear that Throbbing Gristle operated on a foundation of tension. Do you think it would've been possible to function or become what you became without the inherent trouble of your interactions with Gen and the inevitable dissolution it caused?
No, I don't think it would. If you think about the lead-up to Throbbing Gristle with the other people involved in COUM. Even before Chris arrived, there was nothing near what Throbbing Gristle sounded like. It just wasn't possible at that point. I think that the four of us were such strong personalities as well. We weren't going to just bend to another's will very readily. It was a democracy more than COUM ever was and it remained so even the second time around. It had to. The majority vote would make it what happened. Or sometimes we'd just not even vote, we didn't have an official formal vote. We'd discuss what we were going to do and if one person didn't want to do it and the other three did, then it happened. If it was two and two, then we'd shelve it for a while and come back to it. We all brought different things to Throbbing Gristle, for sure. It was the mix of the four of us that made it what it was and it was also the tensions that we had between us as well.
I'm intrigued by the regrettably short-lived X-TG work you mentioned, which there's some documentation of obviously. You'd have continued working with Sleazy as X-TG had you the option. How did it feel for the first time to work as the three of you?
It was great. At first Sleazy was a little bit, not hesitant, but he just didn't know where we were. We hadn't been in the studio together in a long time. He'd listened to the Chris and Cosey stuff but I don't think he'd listened to much of the other stuff we did CTI-wise. He was wondering where we'd come from. If you go off of Chris and Cosey and then back to Throbbing Gristle, it's a huge leap. He was used to being the boss in Coil. There was a point at which we were in our studio and he was sort of relaxing into being with us again and there was a point when he said "we'll do this and we'll do that." Chris is very polite and wouldn't say anything but I'm not so polite and I said "you can't come in here and order us about like this, you know. We're supposed to be working together." He was fine though. We all put it together intuitively and we were no threat to what he wanted to do. We just wanted to be working together and that particular day it all fell into place so wonderfully. He was back and we were all back on that wave of intuitive response to one another once we started making sounds.
Him and Chris obviously got back to their relationship of having ideas for new pieces of equipment or how to use different things and sounds. They were working together on that all the time, even during the second grouping of Throbbing Gristle it was like that all the way through.
We had a sort of parallel thing going, with Throbbing Gristle live, and then the album obviously. When we were in the studio though, the three of us, we were basically functioning as X-TG, jamming all the time. Then we'd all have to go out and do the Throbbing Gristle stuff. I think it was what kept us happy though was that we had this other side to us that made us feel it was good to regroup. Once it fell apart again then X-TG came through and Sleazy was so excited. That was the tragedy of it was that he never really got to do it beyond the two gigs that we did and the few recordings in the studio. I mean, there are recordings of X-TG that we will release at some point.
I wanted to ask about Gen's lawsuit against you and Chris following the final breakup of Throbbing Gristle. How has that impacted you in the last few years? It got resolved in its own way, which enabled us to go to Mute and have them look after our catalogue. There's no way Chris and me want that kind of angst in our lives, it's just unnecessary.
It seems stressful, which isn't good for anyone. It's not, especially not for me, for sure. I just didn't want that in my life. I didn't see the point in allowing it to be in my life. That's the other thing. Enabling someone to do that to you is not a positive act. A positive act is not allowing it.
Cosey and Gen. Photo credit: John Krivine
You went from performing in small, deliberate art spaces in the 70s to ultimately performing at Coachella. How was that experience for you? It's not typically a bastion of experimental or challenging art.
No, it wasn't, but it kind of suits our ironic sense of humor as well. We did one of our first gigs at a small-town festival where children make little hats and bonnets and we played that. That was the other side of the spectrum. Playing Coachella as well, they paid us for our work permits and allowed us to come to America and play to our fans. We'd have never had that opportunity if it wasn't for Coachella. It was a one-off thing, I mean. In service to our fans, it worked nicely.
That must've been a spectacle. While Throbbing Gristle has had a legacy of self-created bootlegs of gigs, you responded to digital era piracy in a really unique way. You made an art piece that couldn't be pirated with Gristle-ism.
As I explained in the book it came about with our soundman Charlie having a little Bully machine, a little loop machine. He'd play it before and after our gigs. I think Christian, the maker of these things, got in touch with Chris after he'd tweeted about how great it was. There was a correspondence about making one with Throbbing Gristle sounds and that's how it started. Me and Chris talked with Sleazy about it and we said "well they can't bootleg this if we do it." It was a very typical project for us in that it just emerged from what we were doing and the opportunity was there. It was a chance to do something new and we made it our own. Christian was in London at the time and Sleazy was in Thailand but we kept in touch and Christian came here to our studio in Norfolk and discussed the packaging and sorted out the right frequencies and technical aspects of the loops. It wasn't an easy thing to do and it was really exciting. We absolutely loved doing it. It's still around now and people are still using them live. I think Gen uses one live, actually.
Easing out on a lighter note, you've obviously got a constant in the book and in your life in Chris. You've lived a hell of a life and he's been there throughout it. So how do you make love last?
I don't know. If I knew the secret, I could market it, couldn't I? I'd make a fortune. It's just that we have a deep love for each other. So deep that we allow each other to be ourselves. Neither of us consume one another. We have been together 24/7. When I think of it like that, it is quite unusual. Most couples work away from home during the day or something. I don't know why, but it just works for me and Chris. We had a struggle to even be together, and I think that has a lot to do with it. Trying to get through days not being able to just touch one another was really difficult and quite depressing at times. I'd sit on the tube in London and think "I can't even do that in public." So, yeah, we're constantly celebrating the fact that we managed to be together and we're free to love each other and it's as simple as that. On top of that, we can create music together as well. We always support one another in our solo projects as well. That's always the case. When I was writing my book Chris was recording his new album. I was upstairs in my office writing my book and he was underneath me in the studio doing his new album. We'd meet for lunch and supper and have the evening off together. It worked out brilliantly well. I'd go downstairs and listening to what he was doing and he'd come upstairs and I'd read passages to him. It's just a way of working on our own stuff but helping each other out as well.
Now that you've finished writing your book, you've obviously got a press cycle, but what are you most looking forward to doing in your free time?
I find it very difficult to do nothing. Even if I'm watching TV I'm doing something. Life's short, isn't it? Can't just sit watching telly. In the summer, I love to sit in the garden. I read a book, have a nap, read some more, have a nap. The cat will come and sit in my lap and we can listen to the birds singing. That's my ideal summer and I'm aiming for that. But I've got music to do first, which I'm really eager to get on with. I've got solo projects to do and we've our own Carter Tutti work to do as well. There's a lot of things in the pipeline. I've got an exhibition coming up in London in September. I have to finish a short film for that. There's a lot going on, but it's all good. It's a continuation of my book, it's all full-on.
Excerpt from ART SEX MUSIC by Cosey Fanni Tutti
When we opened the doors to the main gallery people flooded in and the place was heaving. We were to play first as most of our equipment, being self-built by Chris was best left set up and undisturbed once it was all working. We took up our positions. Chris on rhythms, synths and machines, me on Raver Lead guitar and effects, Gen on vocals, violin and Rickenbacker Bass guitar, and Sleazy using his tapes. I wore my leather biker jacket, hung open with nothing underneath. I had Sleazy apply his casualty make-up to my boob so it appeared to be gashed open and bloody and during the performance I took my jacket off. Gen had the front of his hair shaved into an inverted 'V' (Peter Gabriel style) and had a bottle of Sleazy's fake blood to hand which he proceeded to pour into his mouth as he sang, spitting it out as he screamed apocalyptic lyrics into the mic.
The set began slowly, building intently into 'Very Friendly' (the Moors murderers song), 'We Hate You (Little Girls)', 'Factory', 'Slug Bait', 'Dead Ed' and finally letting rip, no holds barred, with 'Zyklon B Zombie'. Throbbing Gristle's official launch was complete and we were pleased with what we'd done. I didn't know, or care what the audience thought.
Next up was Shelley the stripper who enthusiastically took to the 'stage' for her striptease, playing to the audience and ending up rolling on the floor naked in the spilled fake blood left from TG's set. People loved it. LSD then took over from Shelley and thrashed out a punk set, to the cheers of their friends (including pre-Banshees Siouxsie Sioux). Their little crowd were all garbed out in their punk outfits, some undoubtably bought from SEX or even John's shop, BOY, and as expected were rather stand-offish about the art.
There was a lot of alcohol consumed that night, including Gen who liked a good tot of Whiskey prior to performing. The bar had been very busy, the evidence of which was all over the floor of the gallery. We'd put our equipment to one side and as far away as we could from the main hub of party people, and went to join our friends. We were no strangers to violence or trouble so we thought nothing of the agitated atmosphere. I was glad to see Kipper Kid Brian — I always had such fun times with him. He was very drunk when he walked up to me and Gen accompanied by Ian Hinchcliffe, who was also drunk as a skunk.
By this time Ian had gained a reputation for his spontaneous, aggressive verbal and physically violent outbursts, either against property, himself or others. He had issues with Gen. Ian hated pretension, and had previously squirted Gen in the eye with washing-up liquid. As he approached I could see blood on his mouth: he was in the throes of his glass-eating trick. I don't know who threw the first punch at Gen but the language was vitriolic against Gen's 'use' and deplorable treatment of me. All hell let loose as fists, feet, bottles and glasses flew in all directions, and they all ended up in a writhing heap on the floor. People stepped back, some left, Ted Little tried to intervene and in the tangled web of fury, got kicked in the balls so hard that he had to be taken to hospital.
Gen sustained a suspected broken finger and we ended the evening with a visit to Charing Cross A&E department. The doctors were immediately attentive to Gen's bloody face fearing serious injury, only to discover the blood was fake. They became rather dismissive about his finger, which turned out not to be broken. While I was at the hospital with Gen, Chris and Sleazy stayed at the ICA to pack away the gear and load it into the van. When me and Gen returned we all drove back to Martello Street, unpacked the gear, carried it down the narrow basement steps into our studio, locked up Doris and trudged across London Fields back home to Beck Road.
We thought that the previous night's dramas would be the end of it, but we were in for a rough ride. The show opened officially the next day, Tuesday 19th October, and that's when the eruption of press 'outrage' began. Me and Sleazy were due to perform together at the ICA on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. We'd decided on a kind of demonstration of casualty make-up, in part to disappoint the press who were expecting a nude sex action, and thereby remaining true to our COUM slogan, 'COUM, We Guarantee Disappointment'. When we arrived at the I.C.A on Wednesday for the one o'clock action, the audience, including artists and a heavy contingent of the press were already in place. We only did the one performance.
20th October 1976
Fucking ridiculous today at the ICA. So many reporters and so aggressive. Can't do any more performances now, it's impossible, they'd all be there again. Three pics were broken today, reckon there'll be none left by next Tuesday. The reporters chased me through the gallery and nearly broke the door down. They punched Chris and called him a cunt. We had to be sneaked out of the back way, and went off to have some lunch with Paul (Buck). He's been so good to be with."
The explosive media response to the exhibition was totally unexpected but ironically fed well into our show which was primarily based on how COUM was perceived by others and how our image was at times distorted. What a gift, what a spontaneous collaborative work, forming itself via the media day after day after day. We seized on the new material and me and Chris went to the ICA each day to collect the press cuttings, photocopy them and pin them to the wall of the gallery alongside the existing documentation. What had set out to be a retrospective exhibition had been transformed into an evolving show that was increasing in size as the press fed their own hysteria.
It was my and Chris's closeness during the harassment and intense stress of the ICA that cemented our relationship. The ICA show was pivotal in determining all our futures. It proved to be not only the end of COUM and the beginning of Throbbing Gristle but also the beginning of the end of my relationship with Gen as Chris and I fell deeply in love, and also through chance meetings that led to Gen's pernicious liaisons with a girl called Soo Catwoman. It also caused the end of my relationship with my Mother and Father.
Excerpted from ART SEX MUSIC © 2017 by Cosey Fanni Tutti. Published by Faber & Faber. All rights reserved.
Ben Handelman is art-hunting on Twitter.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Art Sex Music – book review
Written by Simon Tucker4 April, 2017
26797.books.origjpgCosey Fanni Tutti: Art Sex Music (Faber & Faber)
Published: 06/04/2017
9/10
Art Sex Music is the autobiography of artist Cosey Fanni Tutti. As a member of the infamous COUM Transmissions collective, industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, and leading lights in the world of electronica with Chris & Cosey, Cosey has been at the vanguard of modern art for over fifty years. Simon Tucker reviews. (Cosey Fanni Tutti will be in conversation with John Robb in July – details here)
Cosey Fanni Tutti is, it is safe to say, someone who has lived a thousand lives. Through her various works she has pioneered the use of ones own body as art, helped create and entire genre of music whose influence is still resonating to this very day, and has been a powerful force for change towards the general perception of female artists. The USA has Yoko, we have Cosey.
Art Sex Music is a brutally honest read, no stone left un-turned. Aided by her diaries Tutti takes us through her life from her birth and upbringing in Kingston upon Hull during the fifties and sixties, to her meeting with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and subsequent work with the once notorious now celebrated COUM Transmissions performance and mail art collective, through the forming, disbanding, and reformation of Throbbing Gristle, right up to the present day. Cosey is an artist, a partner, a mother and every section of her life is described in unflinching detail making Art Sex Music an enjoyable, uplifting, sometimes unbearably raw read.
At its very core, Art Sex Music is a book solely about relationships. Tutti takes us through her childhood which is far from serene as she is raised by a distant and sometimes abusive father. Her rebellious nature is nurtured by the sixties counter-culture. Music and recreational drug use help to open Tutti’s mind up to the possibility that there is a better life for her outside of the suffocating walls of her home. Upon meeting P-Orridge, Tutti’s path is set as she leaves home and begins to explore deeper her desire to create art. What starts as mail-art and performance pieces soon turns darker as Cosey begins to explore the world of adult magazines and the pornography industry. Make no mistake, nothing here is about cheap titillation and the situations Cosey put herself in whilst studying this industry is often very tense and unsettling as whilst she explains in perfect detail why she did what she did and what purpose it was serving you worry about her (Tutti’s writing style is so relaxed and matter-of-fact that you feel yourself developing a bond with the narrator on a deeper level than just admirer/reader). There are moments where events get particularly tense which can twist your gut. The relationship between Tutti and her own body is the core of the earlier sections of the book and obviously this is the highlighted Sex aspect of the books title.
During the sections on Tutti’s involvement with COUM it becomes horribly apparent how even during the so-called free times of the sixties and the counter culture attitudes towards conformity how cliched and conformist a lot it actually was. Being the only female member of the collective, Tutti is still expected to serve a patriarchal system where she cooks and cleans for the men even though she is pushing herself to the extreme in her art and working jobs to keep money coming in for the rest to use for food etc as they live in dilapidated building. Outwardly COUM were forging new paths and subverting attitudes whilst in doors the woman was still to know her place. It is also worrying how the mental and physical abuse by P-Orridge escalates over time. Tutti paints the picture of someone who is manipulative and self-serving, taking credit for others ideas and always desperate to be seen as the “leader”. It comes as no surprise that P-Orridge was fascinated by such men as Charles Manson and Brian Jones, both mercurial and persuavive individuals who used physical and mental abuse on those around them. Some may see this as Tutti using the book to “point score” but this is why it is so vital that she speaks so plainly and honestly as she does. The story of P-Orridge has been told so often it is about time we got the other side of the coin. Yes, Gen is vital to all that went on and was incredible in her ability to create contacts and push COUM and TG on but if you can read the book and still hold her in some kind of exalted position after he’s just nearly killed Tutti with a paving slab then you are seriously missing the point.
For many, it is the section focusing on Throbbing Gristle that will be the biggest draw. Arguably the most influential band to come out of the UK in the seventies, TG created a whole genre, system, and philosophy. They were never just another band, they were a movement. With TG comes another two relationships vital to the story of Tutti. The first being Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson who joins COUM as is there as it morphs into TG and Chris Carter a wizz with electronic instruments and soon to become Tutti’s “heartbeat”. The blossoming relationship between Tutti and Carter makes for excellent reading as they are first frustrated by the extenuous circumstances keeping them fully from being a couple before the damn breaks and they fully embrace their life together. This is a traditional love story at its very essence (though the couples activities and performances are anything but) and the love Tutti has for Carter absolutely leaps of the pages. Carter is the opposite to nearly every other male depicted in the book. He is supportive, encouraging, loving and most importantly never tries to control Tutti’s life in any way shape or form. The union between the pair is where real light breaks into world of Cosey and it leads to a relationship that creates a son and is strong to this very day. The fact the pair manage to work together (Chris & Cosey, Carter Tutti, Carter Tutti Void) and live together, never displaying any resentment or aspects of control, shows what a true union of two souls this is. Even during the TG reunion, where old traits reappear and old tensions come back to the surface, the closeness of the pair is what serves as the biggest aide to get through it all.
Throughout the rest of the book we taken through Tutti’s various art projects, illnesses, achievements,and losses. It is the latter which turns the screw in the reader especially when she discusses the loss of John Balance and her dear friend Sleazy. These deaths are treated with nothing but respect and fondness for the departed whilst very carefully never turning them into martyrs and talking about the various aspects of their lifestyles that ultimately lead to their lives being cut tragically short.
Art Sex Music is an essential read for anyone interested in the human condition. It’s a book about connections and how we as humans meet people, relate to them, and how they affect our lives. It is a book that encoragues free thinking, rebellion, family and friendship. Tutti is a lighthouse for anyone looking for change in their life and a beacon of hope for anyone who is trapped in the old-fashioned nature of patriarchal society. Fearless, powerful, humorous, warm and intelligent, Cosey is everything and this book is a manual for anyone wanting to be the same.
~
Faber & Faber can be found via their website or via Facebook and Twitter where they tweet as @FaberBooks
Cosey Fanni Tutti can be found via her website or via Twitter where she tweets as @coseyfannitutti
All words by Simon Tucker. More writing by Simon on Louder Than War can be found at his author’s archive. You can also find Simon on twitter as @simontucker1979.
skinned by Giuseppe Zevolli April 5th, 2017
“We were outsiders and we commented from the outside looking in” Cosey Fanni Tutti told ‘The Wire’ in 2007, reflecting back on the spirit of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle in the mid to late 1970s. “And that’s what a lot of people have difficulty doing nowadays. There is no longer an ‘outside’”, she added. Throbbing Gristle’s “post-war kids” idealistic commitment to change the world informed their unique approach to theory, music-making, and distribution in ways that feel weirdly unimaginable today: starting from scratch with very little money; establishing a record company and information channels; confounding listeners’ expectations to the point of ‘self-sabotage’; breaking new ground in the process. Is there really no ‘outside’ anymore? Is it because everything has been tried and done before, or is it our chronic interconnectedness that makes it nearly impossible to imagine a rupture effect of the same magnitude? These and other questions are likely to obsess the reader of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography Art Sex Music, a fascinating document of her more than forty years work at the intersection of the three titular domains.
This book certainly is a treat for fans of Throbbing Gristle, adding much information to what is already in print, notably Simon Ford’s monumental Wreckers Of Civilisation and, more recently, Drew Daniel’s 33 1/3 monograph on Throbbing Gristle’s classic album 20 Jazz Funk Greats. The band’s story, although well-documented and meticulously archived, bursts with myths and alternative versions, especially with regard to their 2004-2010 reformation era and the complicated relationships between Genesis P-Orridge and the other members, the late Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, Cosey herself, and her partner and collaborator Chris Carter. In Art Sex Music, Tutti’s clarity and poise help set the record straight on many episodes in the oft tormented life of the band. Yet, it would be wrong to posit the ‘Throbbing Gristle connoisseur’ as the implied reader of her memoirs. Tutti’s recollections, triggered by the rediscovery of her diaries, touch on so many aspects of her personal life, her solo and collaborative work in the fields of performance, photography, pornography, and music, that they succeed in welcoming the casual reader just as much as the Throbbing Gristle completist. Art Sex Music will captivate anyone with an interest in the evolution and contradictions of cultural value: the ways what we regard as “good” art and/or music can be challenged - a risky business often rewarded only much later on, when acceptance brings the revolutionaries of yesterday straight into the canon. In the introduction to the Industrial Culture Handbook, published in 1983, two years after Throbbing Gristle’s announcement that “The mission is terminated”, V. Vale wrote: “These are not gallery or salon artists struggling to get to where the money is: these are artists in spite of art. There is no standard or value left unchallenged”. Between being hailed as a musical innovator and having her art bought by the Tate and continuously exhibited all over the world, you can definitely say that Tutti’s work has by now received all the recognition that it deserved both from the music and the art world. But as her book exposes in great detail, the journey has been all but straightforward.
It began in Hull, of all places, “The most violent city in England”, she writes, where Cosey was born Christine Newby in 1951. Still scattered with post-War debris, Hull offered very few escapist routes to youngsters, but rebelling against the reprimands of her strict father, Christine soon began to find ways to express herself through art and music. While the much-hated piano lessons worked more to lay the foundations of her career-defining distrust for learning how to play an instrument, her father’s home experiments with radios and circuit boards, she points out, must have had an impact on her future fascination for “unorthodox sounds”. Against the background of her late teens, American hippy ideas and music started to filter through to the UK: Tutti immersed herself in the counterculture of the time and expanded her music taste, appreciating anyone from Joni Mitchell to the Velvets and Captain Beefheart. By 1969, her “pivotal year”, Hull had transformed into a creative hub of sorts. Indulging in gigs and drugs led to a final confrontation with her dad, who threw her out despite her mother’s attempts to make it work. It was at a gig that recent Hull Uni-dropout Genesis P. Orridge, “the archetypical revolutionary-cum-bohemian artist”, she recalls, took notice of Christine, baptised her Cosmosis, and eventually found his way into her heart. It would be the starting point of a turbulent artistic and personal “adventure”, one that for all its achievements in the pursuit of art and an alternative lifestyle often degraded into a draining and at times plain abusive affair for Cosey, who joined Gen’s commune (but in a room of her own) at the start of 1970. Make what you will of the story of their relationship up until their final breakup and its repercussions on her and Throbbing Gristle’s life, but Genesis’ impact on Cosey’s life and work is a pervasive, inescapable undercurrent in Art Sex Music. It must have been an impossibly complicated task to recollect and account for such a concoction of conflicting emotions and destructive behaviours. It's uncanny how mutual respect and appreciation seem to transform into disrespect and resentment in the space of a few paragraphs. Theirs was a gripping dynamic, for sure, but it can also make for a rather frustrating and shocking read.
In 1970 Cosey became a core member of the COUM Transmissions art collective, whose ‘happenings’ were influenced by Dada and surrealism as much as Genesis’ interest in Aleister Crowley’s occultism and ideas shared with certain strands of the avant-garde/experimental music field. “Total freedom of expression and interpretation” were key to the COUM ethos, which led to a constant challenge of social conventions and ideas of what an artist is. Freedom to explore without prior skills or expectations made the collective experience of COUM an ever-expanding, anarchic project, epitomised by slogans such as “COUM. We guarantee disappointment” and live actions that merged music accompaniments with disorienting, but (at least initially) rather playful performances. Through mail art COUM garnered much more visibility and established an international network that ultimately led to familiarisation with festival circuits, the Arts Council grant scheme, and a strategic use of the ‘performance art’ category to be acknowledged within its system. Nevertheless a critique of all things bureaucratic (government forms, unemployment benefits requests, grants) ended up playing a big part in COUM’s 'attack' on cultural value, perhaps culminating in the mock questionnaires and application forms distributed to their audience during the 1973 performance ‘The Ministry of Antisocial Insecurity’.
In the COUM chapters Cosey achieves something noteworthy. Not only does she describe and contextualise the collective’s countless performances across the UK and Europe, but also correlates the ideas and spontaneity of the project with the reality of being artists on the dole. Right from the start her role as photographer, props-builder, theorist, and designer went hand in hand with working full-time jobs. Recounting the story of her personal struggles to make ends meet and take care of the household, she reveals the effects of the gendered division of labour and the rampant sexism that even hippy communes and art collectives of the 1970s couldn’t shake off. The inventively adorned pram used as a prop in some of the earlier ‘deCOUMpositions’, just to give on example, turned into a sculpture called ‘Wagon Train’: “That was all very well”, she writes, “But the pram was my only means of transporting our bags of dirty washing to the laundrette, which was a good four-mile walk from Prince Street”. It’s in light of details of this kind that Cosey exposes the easier-said-than-done nature of what would become her motto: “My Life Is My Art. My Art Is My Life”.
That phrase came to be extremely pertinent when Tutti approached the world of nude modelling via photography. She had already been using cuttings from sex magazines for her own art when she realised she could be the very subject of her own collages. Modelling, and later on, pornography, became work and covert “research” at the same time. She was infiltrating the two worlds, but learning their inner workings and experiencing them in the first person. More so in London, where Genesis and Tutti moved in 1973 to boost their COUM activities, initially settling in a basement studio on Martello Street, Hackney and later dividing their time between the studio space and a squat on Beck Road. Tutti’s ventures into the sex and modelling industry propelled COUM’s exploration of sex and nudity in their live actions. In the London performance ‘The COUMing of Age’, for example, (where they met future COUM and Throbbing Gristle member Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson), Cosey appeared on a pink swing hung center stage, embodying the ‘innocent girl’ fantasy, until she started to pee on the audience through a heart-shaped hole cut in the swing seat. In ‘Studio Of Lust’, performed in Southampton, Genesis, Cosey, and Sleazy, each in separate corners of the room, would start to play with objects and their own bodies, including cutting and urination, only to later unite and get entangled into action at the center of the room. COUM’s unorthodox methods garnered them more attention and a peak of recognition when they were chosen to represent Britain at the 9th Paris Biennale and in Milan for the ‘Arte Inglese Oggi 1960-1970’ exhibition. In Paris they presented a Perspex box filled with soiled tampons, maggots and pieces of red meat: Cosey had been collecting her used tampons in preparation.
Cosey’s narration of this shift to sex and the naked body raises questions on the nature of transgressive art and the limitations of ‘transgression’ as a concept. Caught in the moment of recollection she still seems in the process of figuring 'transgression' out. “I didn’t think of my work as acts of transgression”, she writes. “They were a means to an end and gave me an overwhelming sense of freedom, self-achievement, confidence, strength, and belief in myself”. Only a few pages later we find her stating “I was transgressing rules - feminist ones included”. Far from merely contradicting herself, she seems to point at the possibility of reading her work both ways. There is no definitive answer here, and that, I suspect, is key to the Cosey methodology. Tutti was working with modelling and pornography at a time when feminism saw the two domains as inherently degrading for women and antagonistic with the feminist cause. “But I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation”, she says “I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes, to subvert and use them to create my own art”. In this sense, especially by presenting her modelling work in actions and galleries, away from its original context, Tutti confounded and continuously challenged the subject/object distinction, short-circuiting simplistic ideas of exploitation and power and anticipating positions that came to be seen as 'feminist' only much later.
In theory, it might not have been ‘transgression’ so much as the process of exposing how boundaries worked and how they could be challenged. In practice, though, you know you’re effectively transgressing when sanctions come at you from every angle. Genesis’ use of nudity in his mail art led to a trial for dissemination of pornography, some people (some peer artists too) stormed out of their performances in disdain, and when the legendary COUM retrospective exhibition PROSTITUTION took place at the ICA, the press reacted with a torrent of scandal. Tory MP Nicholas Fairbairn infamously exclaimed: “These people are the wreckers of civilisation” in ‘The Daily Mail’ on 19 October 1976. The title of the exhibition, where Cosey presented her magazine work as her ‘action’, was not just a reference to the association of the sex industry with prostitution, but it also represented, she writes, “our thoughts about the art world - talent being touted and sold for a price”. It seems all the more ironic that PROSTITUTION prompted a discussion on the public funding of arts in the House of Commons.
PROSTITUTION was a farewell to COUM and the official launch of the musical entity (“we weren’t a band”, Cosey points out) Throbbing Gristle, the synergetic encounter of Cosey, Genesis, Sleazy, and gear mastermind Chris Carter. By the time of the ICA event, Chris and Cosey’s love relationship, despite the many frictions with Genesis and Chris’s ex-wife Simone, had officially begun. The press coverage of the event, on the other hand, signified the end of Cosey’s relationship with both her parents. Tutti’s narration of the Throbbing Gristle years is a page-turning epic of trial-error achievements and brutal honesty. “Throbbing Gristle was dysfunctional and always on the brink of collapse”, she writes. “Much like the equipment, it teetered on the edge of breaking down from being pushed to the limit”. Tutti traces the evolution of their sound, pays due credit to ‘who came up with what’ in terms of ideas and instrumentation and explains the ‘moral’ urge behind Throbbing Gristle's use of vivid imagery and references to the darkest corners of humanity, like the Nazi death camp used as a logo for Industrial Records, their slogan ‘Music From The Death Factory’, or the continuous references to systems of control and manipulation (including, of course, sex) in songs like Persuasion or Convincing People.
Tutti makes a distinction between mere shock value (the kind of sloppy symbolism you’d often find in punk, for example) and Throbbing Gristle’s idea to “address the full spectrum of human behaviour”. The transgressive potential of Throbbing Gristle's work is not so much mythologised here as thoroughly contextualised and even deconstructed in the process. By 1977 it was clear that Throbbing Gristle had nothing to do with punk, let alone with the ultimately rockist essence of its sound. Technology was always key to the band, with Carter’s self-built synths and special-effects units (such as the Gristleizer) being center stage. They showed a predilection for machine rhythms, improvisation, heavily saturated sounds at the intersection of noise, and ambient – the kind of factory sounds which, perhaps simplistically, ended up being associated with industrial as a genre. The result was a tough listening experience, even more so during their live performances, which were both a way to challenge their audiences and to stimulate them to find their own entry points. As Matmos’ Drew Daniel eloquently put it, Throbbing Gristle “literally were no fun: after my first encounters with Throbbing Gristle, I felt exhausted and oppressed, as if I’d inhaled antimatter. It was a bummer to listen to, but you somehow felt stronger afterward because you could take it”. Cosey played guitar with whatever objects she could find, filtering it through the arsenal of pedals and units set up by Chris. She also started playing the cornet and on 'Hot On The Heels Of Love' (1979), her voice appeared in full sensual splendour, singing “I’m hot on the heels of love / Waiting from help from above”. It was a particularly key Throbbing Gristle moment for Cosey, as the track seemed to channel, musically and lyrically, her experience as a stripper, which started in late 1977. Under the pseudonym Scarlet she developed a “love-hate relationship” with stripping, finding power in her own desirability but dreading, as you'd expect, the often obnoxious folks she had to perform for. Tutti would soundtrack her go-go dancing to "good" disco as well as Beefheart or Pere Ubu. In that sense 'HOTHOL' much anticipated what, after Throbbing Gristle's implosion in 1981, Chris & Cosey would explore musically in the field of experimental dance music. Her singing alone predicted the mystifying, breathy vocal delivery adopted on many C&C tracks: 'Synaesthesia', 'Driving Blind', 'Rise', you name it. There’s a peculiarly Cosey way of interpreting a track halfway between sensuality and disaffection, resulting in something which is steamy, ominous, and ironic at the same time. If there’s anything I would have loved her to expand on in Art Sex Music is exactly that: her ever-puzzling vocal style.
Compared to the Throbbing Gristle story, the Chris & Cosey chapters are a balm. The founding of their own label The Creative Technology Institute (also a moniker for any collaboration and non C&C project); the unexpected success and critical acclaim of their first records; the birth of their child, Nick, whose heartbeat featured on the title track of Heartbeat (1981); the retreat to the countryside; the countless collaborations and live sets that continue to this day under the names Carter Tutti and Carter Tutti Void (with Nik Colk Void of Factory Floor). Cosey depicts an unstoppable creative process facilitated by freedom, the belief in artistic independence, the embrace of technology, and an absolute complicity with her partner. Of the cover of their much celebrated record Trance (1982) she writes, it was “as easy-going as the music”. And that's something to celebrate here, that ‘easy-going-ness’, to the point where you could say that a certain openness to love and joy is what Chris & Cosey have kept investigating in their music and the source of resilience that kept them going in spite of economic setbacks, illnesses and personal losses. Her story of the genesis of their iconic track ‘October (Love Song)’ is probably one of my favourite passages in the book. While laying down the vocals for the track, communicating with Chris through her headphones, Cosey started to reminisce about their love story: “You took my hand on the stair / You said we could be lovers / I just had to say the word”. Less than 10 years before, Cosey could be seen ‘castrating’ Chris in the film After Cease To Exist, with some help from Sleazy. Now they'd whisper eternal love into each other's ears in a quintessentially kitsch music video. Coming full-circle, no value or expectation left unchallenged.
Art Sex Music is published by Faber & Faber on the 6 of April. For more information, visit Cosey’s official website.
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The fourth best book of 2017: Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti
Kiran Dass | Guest writer
All week this Christmas week we countdown the best six books of 2017. Number four: Art Sex Music, the memoir by musician Cosey Fanni Tutti, whom reviewer Kiran Dass describes as ‘a staunch, fearless woman with backbone’.
“I don’t like acceptance. It makes me think I’ve done something wrong.” – Cosey Fanni Tutti.
In the last few years there has been a welcome wave of vigorous autobiographies from strong, independent pioneering women in music who are finally telling their stories. The best ones have come from Viv Albertine, Grace Jones, Kim Gordon, and this year from my favourite woman in music, Cosey Fanni Tutti. I love that these books are enjoying a wide readership across age and gender. A friend recently told me he loved Tutti’s book so much that he gave it to his teenage daughter in the hope that it would inspire her to form her own band.
Cosey Fanni Tutti is a musician, artist, former striptease artiste and pornographic model. I have to say, in my job as a bookseller I lost count of the times I saw middle aged male customers pick up this book and flip straight to the photos. A few cracked spines there. When Steve Braunias invited me to write this review he asked if I’d read the book “by the woman in awful 80s band Throbbing Gristle.” But I think he was just being funny because Throbbing Gristle (which Tutti played guitar, cornet and sang in) was a brilliant, exciting group – confronting, reactionary, uncomfortable and sonically adventurous. Their record 20 Jazz Funk Greats is an absolute blinding classic, and hilariously, is neither jazz nor funk. To this day, I still crack up about the time when I saw a book about that album shelved in the jazz section when I used to work at Unity Books in Wellington. I like to think it was just somebody being subversive, in the spirit of the group.
I first got into Throbbing Gristle and Cosey’s work when I was still living at home in Ngaruawahia as a teenager. Probably via the Hamilton Public Library. It wasn’t long before I made friends with a chap from Lancashire, who bizarrely enough used to be Throbbing Gristle “leader” Genesis P-Orridge’s (now Genesis Breyer P-Orridge) butler. His responsibilities included feeding P-Orridge’s pet snake and walking his daughter Caresse to and from school. When she was six-years-old, Caresse, with her father’s later group Psychic TV, recorded a mildly disturbing version of Jimi Hendix’s ‘Are You Experienced?’ It’s on YouTube if you’re interested.
But out of all the members of Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge was the least interesting to me. And, an egotistical, lazy diva, he does not come off well in Tutti’s book. He was the “frontman” and I have an aversion to frontmen. It’s always the band members behind them who are more interesting. It was Tutti who I thought was cool.
Who is Cosey Fanni Tutti? She was born Christine Newby in dreary suburban post-war Hull, England. She has been working in art and music since the 1970s in avant-garde/experimental circles and she’s had a singular, influential career right on the edgier margins of popular culture. Her first art collective COUM Transmissions was influenced by the Dada art movement and they constructed incendiary performances which straddled the line between music and art. As they gained more popularity and showed their work in some of the most prestigious galleries in the UK, people started getting pissed off. They famously provoked the uptight Tory MP Sir Nicholas Fairbairn to declare them as being “the wreckers of civilisation”.
Art Sex Music is frankly written with such stunning forensic detail. The detail is extraordinary and she explains that when she was researching for an art exhibition and went through the diaries she had meticulously kept throughout her life, it was all there, laid out chronologically. A story waiting to be told. It’s a great insight into her life, and the diary entries benefit from the lack of hindsight and retrospection. In that way, it feels very immediate, immersive and raw.
The first half is enlightening because we learn so much about her growing up in bleak Hull in the 1950s, and what was an especially difficult family dynamic. Her firefighter father had rejected her. There’s an upsetting scene where years after he has thrown her out of the family home, he turns up to put a fire out at the squat where she is living.
Tutti is a proactive do-er. But for all their right-on commune squat living, it’s apparent that the misogyny and patriarchy of the times dictated things. She was the only one in her gang of friends who would hold down a full-time job in admin or some other spirit-crushing mundane job, while hand-making all the props and costumes for their art shows, do the admin and bookings, as well as all of the domestic and emotional labour of keeping a home. And what comes through clearly in Tutti’s book is that typical scenario that comes to light: the woman being the engine room and enabler of getting stuff done, but not necessarily being in the limelight or being the frontperson. Tutti writes about the tensions in the group Throbbing Gristle, the control that her then partner P-Orridge had over her, becoming a mother and balancing domestic life with her art and music practice.
Tutti writes in detail about her work as a striptease artiste and pornographic novel, and how she used these as platforms to challenge people’s perceptions and assumptions about morality and erotica. And remember, this is in conservative pre-punk Britain.
I loved this book. It’s my favourite non-fiction book of 2017. I ripped through it but didn’t want it to end. I love Tutti’s voice, warmth and sharp observations. Art Sex Music is hugely inspiring, endlessly fascinating and it doesn’t matter a jot whether you are interested in her music or art. It’s a strong story that stands alone. Personal, anecdotal and invigorating, it’s a clear-sighted (and importantly, never bitter) narrative of a staunch, fearless woman with backbone who isn’t interested in being liked or accepted by any establishment, and who has created some of the most groundbreaking art and music to emerge from the last four decades. And these are exactly the kind of positive and exhilarating stories that we need.
Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti (Faber, $40) is available at Unity Books.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/19-12-2017/the-fourth-best-book-of-2017-art-sex-music-by-cosey-fanni-tutti/
Postcards From The Edge: Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “Art Sex Music”
Posted on July 20, 2017 by Emily Colucci Leave a comment
If Cosey Fanni Tutti’s life and work could be summed up in a quick sound byte, it would be, “My Life Is My Art. My Art Is My Life” (115). From her performance art and musical work in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, and Carter Tutti to her solo performance work and her jobs as a stripper, nude model and porn actress, which made frequent appearances in her photo collages, Cosey has, since the 1970s, successfully blurred the lines between art and life.
And, as she shows in her recently published memoir Art Sex Music, this aesthetic dedication is not an easy road to take. Through 500 pages, Cosey documents, with unwavering honesty, the highs and lows of the uncompromising creative life from disownment from her family over her art to her unstable relationship with COUM and Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis Breyer P-Orridge to her continued creative collaboration and love affair with her partner Chris Carter.
In an interview with Rich Juzwiak on Jezebel’s The Muse, Cosey observed, “Art was my life. A career, as such, has never entered the picture for me ‘cause that would be a consideration and a responsibility. I’d have to consider and then compromise my work. And I don’t like doing that.”
The Birth Of Cosmosis
“‘Yours was a difficult birth,’ my mother told me. I was born with my left elbow bent and my fist firmly wedged against my chin like Rodin’s The Thinker. Then she added with a smile, ‘You’ve been difficult ever since’” (1).
In many ways, Art Sex Music begins disarmingly typically with Cosey’s birth in the city of Kingston upon Hull, which she describes as, “then the most violent city in England.” In retrospect, it’s no surprise that Cosey would become a founding and essential member of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle as she grew up playing around the bombed-out shell of a city. “The sheer destruction,” she recalls, “caused by the bombings of Hull meant that bombed-out buildings were everywhere me and my friends wandered as children. These bomb sites, which held such fascination for me, were our playgrounds and we’d fantasize about the people who had once lived there” (6).
As she gets older, Cosey begins to explore the psychedelic music scene of the late 1960s to the ire of her overbearing father, becoming more and more alienated from her family: “I continued to disobey Dad, with invaluable and much-appreciated assistance from Mum. She’s the one I thank for being who I am now. She believed in me and encouraged me by finding ways around the restrictions imposed by him, and smoothing things over whenever possible. She was in a difficult and unenviable position, in the middle of a battle of wills between two headstrong people” (34).
Cosey describes these moments with a blunt clarity. Rather than reveling in her struggles, which range in the memoir from a miscarriage and an abortion to an ongoing heart condition to her violent relationship with Genesis, Cosey lays these events out point blank, drawing largely on her diaries and filling the rest in with very little analysis. In some ways, this makes reliving her experiences through text feel more present; the writing lacks the historical revision that can happen often in memoirs.
Speaking of Genesis, the memoir picks up steam once Cosey meets Genesis in early November 1969–another birth of sorts when she acquires her pseudonym Cosmosis or Cosey. Her diary entry reads: “Cosmosis he named me after seeing me just once.” During an acid test at Union at Hull University, Cosey recalls, “As I went to leave, I saw what I thought was a hallucination–a small beautiful guy dressed in a black graduation gown, complete with mortar board and a wispy, pale-lilac goatee beard” (50). Leaving without meeting him formally, Cosey later remembers:
“About a week later, I was out with Rick and another friend, Wilsh. We were at a gig-cum-disco event, laughing and dancing to ‘Sugar, Sugar’ by the Archies, when a guy came over to me and said, ‘Cosmosis, Genesis would like to see you.’
‘What?’
It was explained to me that a guy called Genesis had seen me and named me Cosmosis and wanted us to get together. I didn’t know what to think of it.
‘Oh. OK, then,’ I said, meaning to deal with it later’ (50-51).
“To Say The Least, An Adventure”
Throbbing Gristle in 1980
Now, I’ll admit Genesis does not come off particularly well in the book. In a relationship with Gen during COUM and Throbbing Gristle, until she left Genesis for fellow Throbbing Gristle band member Chris Carter with whom she’s still partnered, Cosey depicts Genesis as clearly manipulative and, at worst, abusive. However, she also refrains from labeling herself as a victim or Gen as an abuser. Cosey frankly states, “My relationship with Gen was, to say the least, an adventure” (57).
The book is sometimes hard to take as violence pervades their relationship. “Gen’s moods and sometimes violent outbursts were a feature of our relationship and because I loved him so much at that time I accepted them as being part of who he was–alongside his intimations that I was usually to blame for his anger and sadness,” she reveals (99).
It’s no surprise that Cosey and Gen’s relationship–both personal and creative–takes up a significant part of the text. Now, the criticism of Gen, particularly toward the end of the hefty tome, becomes a bit tiresome, especially when getting into the details of the later Throbbing Gristle revival in the 2000s. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t warranted or fair, especially when Genesis seems hell-bent on usurping Cosey’s role in these historical performance groups. But even I, a lover of all things gossipy, was ready to cry uncle.
And this isn’t to say Cosey doesn’t participate in some shady behavior herself, namely in the pronoun usage in reference to Genesis. Throughout the book, even after Genesis transitions into the pandrogyne with Lady Jaye, Cosey refers to Genesis as “he” rather than “s/he,” which is h/er preferred pronoun. I’ll refrain from passing judgment since I know Cosey has her reasons.
Despite their rocky relationship the book, though, the creative collaboration in COUM and Throbbing Gristle was beyond fruitful and remains wholly influential. Beginning with COUM, Cosey, Genesis and a roving band of other performers and musicians put on surrealist, subversive performances that transcended the boundaries of discipline and often good taste. “I’ve often been asked what COUM meant–to explain it,” Cosey writes, “The definition of COUM was intentionally elusive. That allowed for total freedom of expression and interpretation (including by the ‘audience’), which was a core value of COUM and created a forum for debate and sometimes brought new members. COUM was not just a ‘group’ but also more of a movement, a collective family of diverse people from all walks of life, each of us exploring and living out our fantasies or obsessions with the aim of achieving creative and self-awareness and confidence as artists regardless of, and in opposition to, the convention skill sets and criteria by which ‘artists’ are defined. COUM was about giving free reign to ideas, about not being limited by rules or self-doubt–which lead to some confrontational situations as we challenged and broke established rules and cultural and social conventions” (81).
COUM’s performances became more and more extreme, moving from hippie dippie “fantasy costumes and frivolity” to more sexually confrontational works. In one performance, Cosey remembers, “I strode on stage dominatrix-style, in high heels and naked save for a strap costume that didn’t cover much. I’d made it from strips of black PVC and gold buckles I’d found in a bin outside a handbag factory nears Martello Street. I felt the part as I stood watching a naked Gen being chained and tied to a large wooden X-shaped cross that was placed centre stage, where he would await my treatment. I daubed him in flour past and chicken’s feet and whipped him hard. He pissed on my legs, I inserted a lit candle in my vagina, cracked the whip and left the stage.” (167).
Sounds unforgettable.
COUM was even too much for so-called performance art bore Chris Burden who “stormed out in disgust” at a late COUM performance in which, as Cosey reflects, “I syringed my pussy, stitched my arm. We ended up all locked together lying in Gen’s piss, blood and vomit” (214). Burden could handle getting shot, but apparently, even he had limits. Cosey remarks, “I don’t know what they expected, but they shouldn’t have assumed anything other than the unexpected” (214).
Eventually COUM transformed into Throbbing Gristle, a paramilitary-uniformed industrial band more focused on the physicality of sound: “As TG we wanted a sound that hit people between the eyes and swirled in grinding, growling mayhem between their ears. A sound that caused and involuntary physical response in the body that would make people feel and think rather than just listen, dance and get drunk. In the studio, we experimented with extreme frequencies; one of us stood at the ‘kill switch’ to cut the power if the effects became too much. We experienced tunnel vision, our stomachs going into spasm, and our trouser legs flapping” (241).
Writing Her Own History
In many ways, Art Sex Music feels more than a memoir. It’s not just a record of her experiences, but a seminal female performer’s reassertion of her own place within art, music and performance history. Sometimes, women in the arts have to do this–it’s up to us to write our own history.
This isn’t to say Cosey isn’t widely respected or institutionally renowned. She is, but let’s be honest, not as much as her counterparts. In particular, COUM and Throbbing Gristle have been largely attributed to the singular genius of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (then, Genesis P-Orridge). While Gen is, of course, a Filthy Dreams favorite, that is not the entire story.
Asked about writing her own place into history by Rich Juzwiak, Cosey admits, “That wasn’t my main priority, but it was one of the reasons why did it. On a day-to-day level, as everything unfolds, you can see my role within whatever I was doing. It was instrumental in what happened it was one of the main role in everything we did. And that has been written out. That in itself reveals the sexism. I do mention it just in case people can’t see it. It’s pretty clear.”
The Art Life
Flyer for ‘Prostitution’
Ultimately, though, Art Sex Music documents the tough yet gratifying realities of the complete merging of art and life from her near constant financial troubles to her daily life at collective dwellings like the Ho Ho Funhouse. “Contrary to what others may have said, the Hells Angels never had three-day parties at the Funhouse, they just popped round now and again. But their visits did upset our fellow housemates and some of the locals,” she bluntly recalls (71). Ok then…
In particular, Cosey’s work as a stripper, nude model and porn actress became the epitome of combining art and life. A natural progression from the sex magazine collages she was already making, Cosey decided to get into her own nude modeling: “This all fitted in with me using more and more sex-magazine images in my collages and diaries. As I sat cutting around the naked bodies, the idea of cutting around my own body and collaging myself as a nude model from a sex magazine struck me as having an honesty and potency that I felt could be the embodiment of a consummate artwork. I would have created the very image that I then used to create a work of art. That approach and process seemed to epitomize what I wanted from my work–‘My Life IS My Art. My Art Is My Life.’–and I’d get to enter a world that intrigued me and was (at that time) shrouded in mystery” (115).
These pornographic images would continue to enrage institutions, who clutched at their pearls for decades. The most infamous being the 1976 COUM exhibition Prostitution at the ICA, named for Cosey’s “first appearance in a sex magazine…but it also represented our thoughts about the art world-talent being touted and sold for a price, the relationship between high art and money” (198). Because of Cosey’s collages, the ICA became entrenched in outrage for “exhibiting ‘pornography”(201). The institution decided to remedy the situation by hiding Cosey’s work in a back room, to her own delight: “I always felt this was, intentional or not, like relegating the magazines to a place of comparable to their original context–in the back room, an under-the-counter situation like a Soho sex shop. Sex shop to art gallery to back room. All it needed was a dusty velvet curtain in the doorway” (202).
Even though Prostitution was decades ago, her collage work still comes under fire now and again, even in 2005: “Everything had gone so well, then on the eve of the opening an ICA moment raised its ugly head. One of the museum staff took exception to the framed work in particular as being too controversial and said that the museum could be closed down by complaints. I couldn’t believe that revisiting the ‘Prostitution’ works and resulted in the same censorship issues. Me and Andrew remained calm but firm and suggested a warning sign stating that the lower-floor area of the library contained pornographic material, and that there was no access to anyone under the age of sixteen. What made the situation worse was that there was a retrospective of a male Dutch artist in the main museum space, which included pornographic collages. There was no demand that he install warning signs for his work. That male/female artist hierarchy prevailed. Just one guy had caused the unnecessary angst. The other museum staff and the director were very apologetic and supportive” (390). Nothing really changes, does it?
It’s these occasional controversies that show just how transgressive it can still be to be an uncompromising artist. Overall, the book reads as a necessary reminder for our currently stagnated art scene (I’ve been around Chelsea. SNORE) that truly experimental art can and does happen, but you have to be willing to throw yourself into its abyss. Cosey emerges as a role model for those of us who still want to push boundaries beyond the fleeting and empty concerns of career, social capital and financial gain. As Cosey says, “It’s not an easy life, just living off what you create, but it’s so rewarding and fulfilling. I couldn’t live any other way.”
Tags: Art Sex Music, Carter Tutti, Chris & Cosey, Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, COUM, COUM Transmissions, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Genesis P-Orridge, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, Prostitution, Throbbing Gristle. Bookmark the permalink.
Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti
September 19, 2017 / ballyroanreads
art sex music
As much as I love books about music, I can sometimes approach them with trepidation since the fact that the authors are successful musicians, doesn’t necessarily mean that they can write a book.
However, Cosey Fanni Tutti has an excellent, engrossing way with words that surprised and delighted me. And of course, Cosey is much more than just a musician.
Art Sex Music tells the story of her life – from her difficult childhood (and eventually complete separation from her parents) to meeting Genesis P-Orridge at a young age and how her life changed; her becoming a part of the artist collective COUM Transmissions, and a founding member of industrial band, Throbbing Gristle.
I came to this book as a huge fan of TG, and having read Simon Ford’s Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and TG which gets a heavy critical drubbing as warping the story of both projects in favour of one person; Genesis (and interestingly, is being reprinted this year – I wonder if it will be revised in light of this?).
And it is the tales of Genesis and Cosey that are the meat of this book.
You know when you know someone’s public persona, and are afraid that behind it all they are not a very nice person, but you’ve never had any proof. That’s how I felt deep down about Genesis – and Art Sex Music gives that proof in abundance (and I can feel the truth ringing out from the page, as well as that other people, in fact all TG by the end can’t stand Gen). He was hugely emotional manipulative, he was physically abusive, he was an all-round not-nice guy, and while I’m not surprised, I am disappointed. It’s clear in his ego. From what Cosey says, Gen has to be the star, the leader, the founder, the visionary. Never mind that there were others in COUM and TG and Gen’s subsequent projects, the world revolved around Gen, and it was that attitude that killed COUM and Throbbing Gristle (both in its original and more recent incarnations). At every turn, he screwed over his bandmates, was barely there in the studio, or onstage, and it seems, purely concerned with money.
But enough about Gen. This is a fascinating book about Cosey’s life as a musician, as an artist (which I didn’t realise was so expansive, and interesting, until I read this book) and her sex work (she was an adult model, in both print and movies) which she viewed from a feminist perspective, and incorporated heavily into her art work (non-music fans might have heard of her primarily through the furore that accompanied COUM’s 1976 ‘Prostitution’ exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which led to them being called the aforementioned ‘Wreckers of Civilisation’ by a Conservative MP) but also about her decades-long partnership, both personal and professional, with Chris Carter. And I must say, the two of them are very clearly made for each other, and I was SO happy when Cosey finally left Gen for Chris. I was shocked to read about her unfortunate luck with medical issues, which have plagued her throughout her life, and was always delighted when they receded and she was joyous about being able to get back to work.
A fascinating memoir by an utterly fascinating individual in which she tells her own story, clearly, truly, and once and for all. Recommended.
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You can reserve a copy online at South Dublin Libraries’ catalogue here.
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‘I’ve been a rude little girl, haven’t I?’ - revealing exclusive images from her new autobiography, Cosey Fanni Tutti reflects on a lifetime of unflinching art and sound
TextLuke Turner
10May 2017
“I have been a rude little girl, haven’t I?” Cosey Fanni Tutti muses. “I’ve always been into my body and what pleasures it could give me.”
On the evening of March 15, 1974, the controversial performance artist and musician born Christine Newby climbed into a swing on the stage of the Oval House Theatre, London. Wearing a miniskirt that flashed glimpses of her underwear with every surge through the air, she swung higher and higher over the heads of the assembled crowd. As they looked up, Tutti began to piss through a heart-shaped hole cut into the seat, warm micturition raining down over unsuspecting heads. Later that evening, she would perform the role of a photographer’s model, topless in a metal cage, and simulate sex with her then-partner, Genesis P-Orridge, at it doggy style with grossly inflated genitals daubed in fluorescent paint. The show was called COUMing Of Age, and it marked the first occasion that her art collective, COUM Transmissions, had used nudity and sex as part of their practice, inspired by Tutti’s work as a pornographic model. “It was about sex and that didn’t come from nowhere,” Tutti says of COUMing of Age now. “There was always a thread of sex magic going through (our work), but this was just blatant, full-on.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 20178
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
There are few artists who have embraced the expressive potential of the human form as radically as Cosey Fanni Tutti. Revelling in the possibilities of her body as displayed in the pages of porn magazines or onstage with COUM, then later as a vehicle for the creation of extreme music that influenced musical movements from industrial to noise and techno, she remains one of the most revolutionary artists to emerge from the British counterculture of the 1970s. Although Tutti writes in her new autobiography, Art Sex Music – out now via Faber & Faber – that “I didn’t want another set of rules imposed on me by having to be ‘a feminist’,” her fearless experiments with the female form remain a true inspiration for anyone who defies convention in what they create.
Dressed in jet black and sat in the offices of her publisher, Tutti reveals that the process of writing Art Sex Music’s 500+ pages of unflinching memoir has been a curious experience, delving into her past and finding new resonance with her present. Her memories have been augmented by research into her diaries, which she kept since she was a teenager scribbling in notebooks. “I look at everything – the music, the sex work I did, the art – and realise that my life is all those things and they are all art,” she says. “When I was writing the book I thought, ‘Should I be writing about something else?’ I was working through my diaries and I started thinking, ‘A lot of people write autobiographies, what do they write about?’ Because this is my life and it’s non-stop. That’s just it, art is my life.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Corey Fanni Tutti performing at the Westminster Arms, Central London. All images courtesy of Faber & FaberAll images courtesy of Faber & Faber
Tutti says all of this without pretension. In person, her working-class attitude, shaped by a childhood wrangling with an authoritarian fireman father on a Hull council estate, hasn’t lost any of its bite. She can deploy stern glares that might cut steel, yet is warm, welcoming and brimming with wit. It’s this strong and unapologetic voice that runs through the pages of Art Sex Music, an account that is at times brutal in its recollection of what it was like to defy all expectations of class and gender.
“In the 70s the porn industry was so underground. You were on the edge of thinking you were going to get sexually assaulted, if not raped” — Cosey Fanni Tutti
“She has the most amazing bullshit detector I’ve ever seen in action – better than anyone I know and 100 per cent reliable,” says Chris Carter, Tutti’s partner and, along with Genesis P-Orridge and the late Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, a fellow founding member of Throbbing Gristle. “I most admire her intelligence and determination, a combination of female insight and northern grit... Apart from being a fantastic artist, singer, multi- instrumentalist and an incredible dancer.”
Tutti’s focus on her work and no-bullshit approach stems from her formative years in COUM. “I’ve never felt the need to proclaim, ‘This was mine, this was my idea,’ because it was a collective,” she says. “You’d go into it with the idea that what you were doing was for everyone, to make the whole thing work.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti on tourAll images courtesy of Faber & Faber
In COUM, as with Tutti’s entire life, everything was done as part of a performance. There was no demarcation between art actions and posting a letter – “your lifestyle was a COUM-action, even your actions around the house”, explains Tutti. All was valid, everything was art.
In their early years, COUM Transmissions produced art that was playful as much as it was provocative. This was communally created art delivered for the benefit of the community – or, in Tutti’s words, “creating joyful moments for people in the streets”. Much of the physical action of the performances, taking place across Hull, was instigated by Tutti, who sewed surreal and fantastical outfits for them to wear. “It was (about) simplifying it and not making it ultra-highbrow and unreachable,” she says. “Everything is within people’s reach and they can access it readily. There’s not a magic bullet to art, it’s for everybody.”
“She has the most amazing bullshit detector I’ve ever seen in action – better than anyone I know and 100 per cent reliable” — Chris Carter on Cosey Fanni Tutti
It wasn’t to the taste of Hull police, however, who forced Tutti and P-Orridge to leave the city in 1973. It was after their move to London that her work in pornography began – she had her first audition the day after arriving in the capital. Back then, the sex industry was on the very fringes of legality – it was hard, dangerous work. “You didn’t feel safe,” she says. “You were on the edge of thinking you were going to get sexually assaulted, if not raped. In the 70s the porn industry was so underground; it wasn’t like now at all where people are empowered and there’s all sorts of genres of porn. This was very heterosexual, geared to a particular kind of market.” Whenever Tutti did a shoot for a magazine, she would scour the sex shops of London for hard copies. In buying them, she was reclaiming the photographs not only as her own property, but as her own art – the shots would often make their way into her work, collaged and pasted on to the walls of galleries.
Casey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Skot Armstrong and Cosey Fanni Tutti in LAAll images courtesy of Faber & Faber
Selected images from Tutti’s porn shoots were eventually blown up and exhibited at the COUM retrospective Prostitution, held at the ICA in October 1976. Intended as the endpoint to COUM and the birth of Throbbing Gristle, Prostitution was condemned in a storm of tabloid outrage. Tutti’s photographs were removed from the main gallery and hidden in a back room, available only to ICA members. “The fact I couldn’t hang them up on the wall pissed me off, because all of a sudden the main items of the exhibition weren’t there,” she says. “It had a big impact on the exhibition and how I envisioned it. But then it became something else completely – which is very COUM. You run with it and think, ‘Hmm, that’s all right then.’” The show even prompted a debate in parliament about arts funding, which saw the group branded “wreckers of civilisation” by Conservative MP Nicholas Fairbairn (who was later linked to a child abuse scandal).
“I think of the little ‘sheela na gig’ – the ancient icon of a figure pulling her vagina apart that I wear around my neck – which is about the power of the female” — Cosey Fanni Tutti
The vicious criticism came not only from the political and art establishments and press, but from feminist circles. A journalist sent to interview Tutti by radical magazine Spare Rib rang her up a few days later to say that the editors had demanded she change the tone to be an attack on her work. “I thought, ‘What the fuck? You’re supposed to support women, not hold them to an agenda,’” Tutti remembers. “That’s everything that we’re trying to fight against, isn’t it?”
These days, however, she’s held up as an inspiration by writers like I Love Dick author Chris Kraus and pioneering musicians including Factory Floor and John Grant. (Kraus contributed a piece to Maria Fusco’s Cosey Complex, a collection of essays exploring the idea of Tutti as methodology, rethinking her from noun to verb.) Significantly, she’s also cited as a role model by prominent figures in the sex industry, especially those who’ve been able to subvert its power structures, creating space for it in the art world – such as porn actress and musician Sasha Grey, who collaborated with Tutti on Nico covers album Desertshore/The Final Report in 2012. “Her art and music has made an imprint unto several generations of curious minds,” Grey enthuses. “She is the personification of self-empowerment.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Members of Throbbing Gristle in Victoria Park, Hackney, 1981All images courtesy of Faber & Faber
“I think of the little ‘sheela na gig’ – the ancient icon of a figure pulling her vagina apart that I wear around my neck – which is about the power of the female,” says Tutti when asked about the impact of her porn work.“That’s what I was doing in the 70s – going, ‘Look at the power I have here.’” How does she feel about young people exploring the sex industry as part of their artistic practice now? “It’s a fantastic way of discovering yourself. Exploring your sexuality just between boyfriends and girlfriends isn’t quite the same. You’re in a situation where it’s challenging and I think that is what makes you discover things about yourself. It’s quite safe just having a fuck-buddy, isn’t it? It’s like having a wank of convenience.”
“Her art and music has made an imprint unto several generations of curious minds. She is the personification of self-empowerment” — Sasha Grey on Cosey Fanni Tutti
As Tutti points out, her work both in sex magazines and with extreme music wasn’t labelled as subversive back in the 70s. “It wasn’t called transgressive at the time, it was called disgusting and immoral,” she says. “It’s (only) retrospectively that it has become transgressive.” Tutti might not have seen any boundary between appearing naked in an art gallery, in front of a photographer’s camera, or in an east London pub packed with suited men, smoking and drinking, but the art world often saw things differently. “All those things grew out of our lifestyle and our interests – (they were) a way of exorcising different hang-ups we had,” she says. “That’s how the actions operated for us, they were a means to an end and we didn’t think it was anything transgressive or shocking, it was me doing this to myself. If you don’t want to watch it, you can leave.”
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni TuttiAll images courtesy of Faber & Faber
“People were saying, ‘You shouldn’t do that in a public place, not even a gallery’ and I’d ask ‘Why?’, because that place actually gives me no excuse to back out, if you like,” she explains. “That was one of the reasons why we did it. You’d make it into an action pushing against some sort of inhibition or interest that you’ve got, and try out something you’ve never tried before. You have to put yourself in a position which allows that to happen, (because) if you do it at home you’ll always stop short. It’s like an exercise video,” she says with a smile, “if you do it in front of a class you’ll do as you’re told and you’ll do it properly. If you do it at home, you’ll go ‘I’ve had enough’ after ten minutes.”
Tutti and P-Orridge’s relationship ended and, in 1981, Throbbing Gristle disbanded. In Art Sex Music, Tutti gives an unflinching account of P-Orridge’s controlling tendencies, recalling how, when she finally left h/er for bandmate Carter, s/he chased her down the street brandishing a knife with a nine-inch blade with “KILL” emblazoned on to the handle. After the band’s demise, Tutti and Carter found a disused school in the Norfolk fens that remains the headquarters of their operations today. It’s been the base for a romantic and creative partnership that has produced more than 20 albums of wildly diverse electronic music. Beginning with Heartbeat in 1981, they matched a tough synthpop sheen with lyrics exploring love and sexual power dynamics, with Tutti’s own 1983 release Time to Tell an eddying meditation on her work in the sex industry. Throbbing Gristle’s return in 2004 was fraught, ending when P-Orridge walked out, and swiftly followed by the tragic death of Sleazy in 2010. Tutti and Carter paid tribute by following his wish that they complete an interpretation of Nico’s Desertshore, featuring Tutti singing a beautiful version of “My Only Child” alongside collaborations with Gaspar Noé and Anohni.
Cosey Fanni Tutti - spring/summer 2017
Cosey Fanni Tutti at the Acorn Pub, HackneyAll images courtesy of Faber & Faber
There’s a real sense that it’s the indelible bond between them that fuels much of this creativity – a love affair still raging. At their Norfolk home, future plans are written up on the old school blackboard, and projects are coordinated via neat piles of documents in clear plastic folders. Downstairs in the studio, Carter might be tinkering with the unearthly bass that gives their music such sensual, floor- shaking resonance, while Tutti works on her art upstairs. Outside, similar creativity is applied to the sizeable vegetable garden Tutti built on the site of the old Victorian playground.
Tutti is currently working on the public iteration of a series of private performances she terms Selflessness, which took place at notorious suicide hotspot Beachy Head, Sandringham Woods and her mother’s grave. “What I wanted to get across was me talking about the world being self-less. (The actions) don’t have a sense of self. It’s about a mass sense of self, it’s not individual,” she explains. “That’s what the selflessness means, it’s not the normal definition. It’s a criticism of people not communicating with themselves, or working with themselves. So, that’s why each of the actions was very personal, because I wanted to go as deep as I could go. It’s interesting, doing that, especially with the Beachy Head one. I don’t think you can get any deeper than people committing suicide there – their place in the world doesn’t seem necessary any more.”
“You can’t keep a good woman down! When you come across these hurdles every now and again you just negotiate them and carry on. There’s a hell of a lot more left to do yet” — Cosey Fanni Tutti
“I’ve always considered my work as ritual,” Tutti says of her thirst for connection with her audience, be it through the playful acts of early COUM, her gaze from the pages of a porn mag, or her movements stripping on the rickety stage of a smoky pub. This connection was lit once again in March this year, when Tutti conducted a new work called HARMONIC COUMACTION at Hull’s Früit music venue, directly next door to the COUM retrospective at the Humber Street Gallery. In the very streets where she grew up and “scrudged” for discarded vegetables to survive, Tutti performed in front of projections of distorted photographs of her family and friends, COUM actions and magazine work, as she sent scrapes of noise and deep rhythms vibrating through the audience and out into the cold Humberside air.
At no point did this futurist rumble ever feel like cold nostalgia. Instead, it was more like an assertion of self with a shedding of the shackles of historical narratives imposed by others. “You can’t keep a good woman down!” says Tutti. “When you come across these hurdles every now and again you just negotiate them and carry on, because you’re only here once. There’s a hell of a lot more left to do yet.”
Art Sex Music is out now via Faber & Faber
Cosey Fanni Tutti: fearless provocateur, ultimate outsider
A life less ordinary
Branded a ‘wrecker of civilisation’ by the establishment, Cosey Fanni Tutti is a creative force who ripped up the rules in the realms of sex, music and performance art. Now the rest of the world is finally catching up to her.
Cosey Fanni Tutti is sitting on stage in front of a packed-out crowd at London’s Rough Trade East, talking about her distrust of acceptance.
“It makes me feel like I’ve done something wrong,” she says, dressed all in black and exuding a no-nonsense air.
Given that the audience is filled with admiring artists, she may have to get used to the idea. Crammed in-between racks of music are Marc Almond, John Grant, Tim Burgess of The Charlatans, fashion designer Pam Hogg and Nik Void of Factory Floor to name just a few.
They’ve gathered for the launch of Cosey’s tell-all memoir Art Sex Music – not just to pay their respects, but to see her reclaim her own narrative after years of myths, misconceptions and others taking credit for her work.
Posing nude, July 1979. © Laszlo Szabo.
Posing nude, July 1979. © Laszlo Szabo.
Cosey has been a tireless radical in music, art and performance for decades – from notorious collective COUM Transmissions and the groundbreaking group Throbbing Gristle, to her work as a multidisciplinary artist and inspirational speaker.
But that’s also made for a long journey of conflict, controversy and barrier-breaking determination.
Born Christine Newby, Cosey grew up as a rebellious teen in Hull, where she was thrown out of the family home and later cut-off from her parents over her countercultural pursuits.
Police viewed Cosey as part of the city’s ‘troublesome elements’ and harassed her until she left for London in 1973, where she would be threatened with indecency charges over her art.
Recording session for 20 Jazz Funk Greats, London, 1979. Photo by Chris Carter.
Recording session for 20 Jazz Funk Greats, London, 1979. Photo by Chris Carter.
It involved exploring self-image within the sex industry – modelling for top-shelf magazines, appearing in porn films as well as stripping – before feeding those experiences back into her work. But by that point, hysterical reactions had become the norm.
As part of Throbbing Gristle – widely credited as the originators of industrial music (a term they coined) – Cosey made sure their performances provoked audiences into thinking for themselves.
There would be walkouts and brawls, mutilation and police raids, but they came to epitomise music at its most transgressive.
Cosey & Gen by John Krivine, 1969.
Cosey & Gen by John Krivine, 1969.
Behind the scenes, Cosey kept Throbbing Gristle afloat by maintaining various jobs and balancing out the abusive, manipulative behaviour of bandmate Genesis P Orridge.
When that became unbearable, she and partner Chris Carter (also a member of Throbbing Gristle) moved to Norfolk. They continued to record as Chris & Cosey (later Carter Tutti) – a relationship that endures to this day.
Now the world is finally catching up to Cosey Fanni Tutti. Her art has been bought by the Tate, Throbbing Gristle rank among the most important artists of their era, while Chris & Cosey have inspired successive generations of electronic artists. Connecting it all is an appetite for life that, in Cosey’s own words, remains “full-on”.
Reading your book, I got the sense of someone who’s refreshingly headstrong and secure when, from the outside, you had every reason not to be. How did your upbringing shape that?
In retrospect, I think I had quite a good balance: the sensitivities of my mum combined with the expectations of my father, who pushed me into the male world because he didn’t have a son. He travelled a lot in the Navy and so I think that was instrumental in me developing a broad worldview. My point of reference was always outside of Hull.
Growing up in a post-war era, there was a whole attitude of, ‘Tomorrow could be your last day’ – quite literally when it came to the Cuban Missile Crisis. That makes you think, ‘I’ll make the most of what I got. What is there that I might want?’ It certainly wasn’t getting married, settling down and having a house. [Laughs]
'Ritual Awakening Part 2' art action, Amsterdam's Bar Europa Festival, 1987.
‘Ritual Awakening Part 2′ art action, Amsterdam’s Bar Europa Festival, 1987.
You must have been called so many different things throughout your career. The pressure to conform would have been enormous. How did you manage?
I didn’t fit into any lifestyle and I felt the one I made for myself suited me. And because I had to fight to get there, being run out of home and not relying on anyone else, I never thought I’d have to justify the way I am. I wasn’t looking to fit in, so I didn’t feel like I had to defend my stance at all.
There were never any moments where you questioned it? No moments of self-doubt?
As a kid, whatever I did outside the house was considered wrong… and I could never find a good reason why. But because I had a like-minded ally in [childhood friend] Les, we backed each other up. We felt assured in finding our way.
Out and about in Los Angeles with friends Kitten, Eric and Skot, 1976.
Out and about in Los Angeles with friends Kitten, Eric and Skot, 1976.
When Genesis was violent towards you, you recognised him as being lost and felt sorry for him. Most people never get to a point where they have the perspective to frame things that way…
Well, I had feelings for him and I was made to feel like these things were my fault, that his reaction was a response to my actions. Why he did that to me, I have no idea. That’s a problem he had to deal with himself. My problem was making sure my life, and the people around me, were okay.
I was used to fighting. Hull is a tough place. Every day involved confrontation. Looking back, it shouldn’t have been in my own home. But it had been an everyday thing. It was only when I met Chris that it was pointed out to me that it wasn’t a good situation. [Laughs]
TG promo shoot with Jon Savage, Victoria Park, London, 1981. © Industrial Records.
TG promo shoot with Jon Savage, Victoria Park, London, 1981. © Industrial Records.
Do you still consider yourself an outsider?
Yes, I do. Sometimes when I go out, I suddenly feel like more of an outsider than I recognised previously – because I never thought about it. I just did my own thing, which has always been a natural progression. It’s only when you take that from private to public that you discover people find it transgressive.
Doing things like bringing your child to school makes you realise you have a different mindset completely. Once, when Nick [her son] was at junior school, one of the teachers heard that I played music. She said, ‘Would you come in and sing some songs for the children?’ [Laughs] I thought, ‘Eh… no.’
With Skot at the Throbbing Gristle motel, Los Angeles, 1981. Photo by Chris Carter
With Skot at the Throbbing Gristle motel, Los Angeles, 1981. Photo by Chris Carter
Do you think there’s as much of an ‘outside’ to occupy anymore?
Definitely. The situation is worldwide now. There’s so much trouble – religion, racism, everything all in one – that it makes people feel like outsiders more than ever. And what do you do? Everyone is a human being. There should be no prejudice. We should be there to help one another rather than killing each other. But I can’t think of another time as frightening as this.
Against that backdrop, how much does independence matter?
I think independent thinking is so important. The only way you get that is by taking time to find yourself and assimilate things through your own mindset. There’s a tendency for people just to accept other’s opinions as their own. The facts given on the internet are clearly not always facts, as we’ve seen.
You don’t have to accept the overarching bland view of the world or the money orientated attitude to life that people have now. That angers me. I recognise an element of survival that wasn’t there in the ’70s, as you can’t easily squat anymore. Every era brings its difficulties and struggles but I think there’s always a way around it if you’re determined.
Creative independence is especially important. When I hear music or see art, I want to feel like it’s come from deep within that person; that they’re relating something from themselves, not from the consensus. I don’t want a piece of art because it looks pretty and goes with the curtains. That’s boring. I want something that’s going to make me think.
Recording session for 20 Jazz Funk Greats, London, 1979.
Recording session for 20 Jazz Funk Greats, London, 1979.
How have you and Chris been able to balance expression through art with making a living from it?
We’ve been lucky. There have been times when we were really, really broke and had hardly anything. I would easily get a job in a factory to just keep doing what we’re doing. But Chris would always have faith and say, ‘We don’t need to do that. It’ll be fine.’ Somewhere in the middle, we’ve always managed. Maybe it’s as simple as being careful. We never have holidays; we buy equipment instead. [Laughs]
Was it painful that your parents didn’t come to appreciate what you did with your life?
No, because I didn’t seek approval from anybody. It’s nice when it happens but because I’m not used to it, it’s very difficult for me to accept compliments about my work. I’m more comfortable with criticism. [Laughs]
That’s the way it’s been throughout my life. I didn’t expect my parents to understand who I was or what I was going to do. What you need is the relationship between child and mum and dad. That’s what I lost through being what I wanted to be, just because they were a product of their era.
Exhibition poster for 'Prostitution' at London's ICA, 1976.
Exhibition poster for ‘Prostitution’ at London’s ICA, 1976.
Did you feel like Throbbing Gristle was misunderstood?
We didn’t seek understanding. We didn’t want people saying, ‘You’re very good!’ [Laughs] We were just expressing our feelings about the world and other people’s transgressions against humanity. And that is uncomfortable for people. It should be!
What advice would you have for someone who isn’t as fearless and doesn’t feel like they have ownership over their life?
But why would someone think they don’t have ownership over their life?
'Studio of Lust' art action, Southampton's Nuffield Gallery, 1975.
‘Studio of Lust’ art action, Southampton’s Nuffield Gallery, 1975.
I think you’d be surprised! So many people are stuck in bad relationships or dead-end jobs and can’t see a way out to do or be what they want.
Well, I’ve been in that situation… before I left [London]. I had everything there: Throbbing Gristle, Industrial Music [their own label]… but I wasn’t happy. Leaving was a huge sacrifice. It all fell apart. After eight years, I took enough with me to fill half a transit van. I gave up everything that I’d already done to be who I felt I needed to be.
It’s a big ask… so I’m not judgemental if people feel they have to stay in a situation. I’ve seen it a with a friend of mine who stayed in an unhappy marriage for years. Sadly, she’s gone now and never had the happiness she yearned for. We’re only here once! You’ve got to make the best of it however you can.
At home in King's Lynn, Norfolk, 2017. Photo by Oscar Foster-Kane.
At home in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, 2017. Photo by Oscar Foster-Kane.
You don’t want acceptance. But is there any satisfaction in the world catching up to your ideas?
Yeah, it’s weird: most artists aren’t around to see their work recognised for what it was for them when they made it. I’ve been lucky with my art, with Throbbing Gristle, with Industrial Music and with Chris & Cosey. I can’t believe that I’ve had all that in my lifetime. To come back and revisit it through the eyes of people from that time and new fans is quite a gift. I cherish that.
coseycover
Art Sex Music is published by Faber.
This article appears in Huck 60 – The Outsider Issue. Buy it in the Huck Shop or subscribe to make sure you never miss another issue.
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Explore More:
art Cosey Fanni Tutti Genesis P-Orridge Huck 60 Hull music Sex The Outsider Issue Throbbing Gristle
Posted Tuesday 4th July, 2017
Text by Cian Traynor
Photography © Portrait by Oscar Foster-Kane. All others courtesy of Faber.
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http://www.huckmagazine.com/art-and-culture/cosey-fanni-tutti-art-sex-music-outsider-interview/
Noise Innovator and Former Porn Performer Cosey Fanni Tutti on Her New Memoir, Art Sex Music
Rich Juzwiak
4/25/17 12:55pmFiled to: Interviews
18
15
Photo: (c) 1979 by Laszlo Szabo/Cover: Faber & Faber
Lives like Cosey Fanni Tutti’s are practically crying out to be written down. Born Christine Newby in 1951 in Yorkshire, England, she’d eventually be dubbed “Cosmosis” (“Cosey,” for short) by the infamous Genesis P-Orridge, the boyfriend with whom she’d go on to found the art collective COUM Transmission in the late ‘60s, and the noise collective and industrial music progenitors Throbbing Gristle (TG) in the mid-’70s. Along the way, she took stripping gigs to help pay her bills and appeared in porn in the ‘70s, integrating that work into her art—the most outstanding example of which was the 1976 COUM exhibition Prostitution. That show recontextualized her porn work as art and created a sensation throughout England that helped launch TG and define its provocative reputation.
TG’s history is as chaotic as its music—at the height of the group’s notoriety, Cosey left Genesis for fellow TG member Chris Carter; they’d eventually split off as duo Chris & Cosey when TG finally dissolved in 1981. In the time since, Cosey’s continued to make music and art (she’s particularly well known for her performance art). And now she’s written her memoir.
Art Sex Music, out May 1 in the U.S., is as plainspoken as its title, preferring a straightforward telling of the events of Cosey’s life to in-depth analysis. She is blunt about her abortion in the late ‘60s, her miscarriage in the ‘90s, her near-death experience after her cardiac ablation procedure. (On the latter, she writes: “I didn’t see any of those tunnels of white light or have any kind of out-of-body experience. I find it difficult to describe the finality of your own life force other than likening it to turning off a power switch. In some ways, it’s comforting to know it just ends—I felt nothing.”) Her tumultuous relationship with Genesis P-Orridge takes up a considerable amount of space, given their creative history and the fraught nature of their relationship prior to breaking up and after TG reunited in the 2000s. Cosey describes regular emotional manipulation and at least one instance of brutal physical abuse from P-Orridge. The stillness of Cosey’s narrative voice as she recounts these incidents makes them even more harrowing.
Last week Jezebel talked to Cosey Fanni Tutti by phone regarding her memoir, her art, her porn, and her relationship with Gen. A condensed and edited transcript of that conversation is below.
JEZEBEL: Art Sex Music: Is the order of the words in your title intentional? Is it a hierarchy?
COSEY FANNI TUTTI: I thought about the title and I didn’t want anything that could be misinterpreted. My name being Cosey, the minute you put that in the title it sounds like some old woman knitting by the fireplace, nice and cozy with her cat. I didn’t want “Cosey” in the title in that respect. I just thought about what I was writing about and it became really obvious that the three threads in my life were interwoven, and that they were those three things. Art came first with me as a child, and then my sexual awakening [happened] at quite a young age. I was sexually adventurous quite young, well under the age of 10. And then music entered my life—it was already in my life because I had to learn how to play the piano, but then I discovered bands and all kinds of stuff. So yeah, it was in that order.
Going into the book, did you have specific objectives?
The only objective I had was to try and present what it was like for me to be me at any given time throughout my life, from when I was a child right through to 2016. There was some notion of what each day, each week was composed of for me, and the everyday struggles that everyone else has. And to be honest about that.
Was there any sense of wanting to correct misconceptions, especially when it comes to having your role downplayed in COUM and Throbbing Gristle because you’re a woman?
That wasn’t my main priority, but it was one of the reasons why I did it. On a day-to-day level, as everything unfolds, you can see my role within whatever I was doing. It was instrumental in what happened it was one of the main roles in everything we did. And that has been written out. That in itself reveals the sexism. I do mention it just in case people can’t see it. It’s pretty clear. Even people I reconnected with during the COUM [retrospective] said how sexist it was and how they regretted their attitude at that time. I think we tend to forget in 2017 how difficult it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s for women. It was still a huge battle on a day-to-day level.
In that respect, it strikes me how brave it was for you to appear in and exhibit the porn work in the Prostitution exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts over 40 years ago, risking alienating your family (which it did) and whomever else for the sake of art. Forget the sex, that was hardcore.
I didn’t think of it like that. I was just living, doing the work I did in response to how things got presented to me in opportunities or exciting explorations, if you like. I’d already been rejected by my father, but yeah there were my mother and sister to consider. They were quite supportive of me, even though they didn’t know about that at the time, and my sister is supportive of me now and she knows all about that. She’s read the book and everything.
I didn’t think of it as being anarchistic or, “I’m gonna make a big splash in the art world doing this.” That wasn’t my motivation at all. It was about expressing myself and presenting it in a gallery. I was invited to do it by Ted Little. I think also there’s a tendency to forget in the ‘70s that the art scene was pretty lively with alternative ways of being an artist. You didn’t have to subscribe to a gallery or an art institution. In fact, that would be art as a career and I was totally against that. Art was my life. A career, as such, has never entered the picture for me ‘cause that would be a consideration and a responsibility. I’d have to consider and then compromise my work. And I don’t like doing that.
Cosey at the ICA (c) Faber & Faber
One of the book’s themes is the financial struggles you’ve endured as a result of being uncompromising.
Yeah, and a drive to be as totally independent as I could, which led to me gaining skills I wouldn’t have gained if I hadn’t had to do things myself, because of money reasons.
You must have seen people around you doing less bold work and being paid more for it. Was that ever frustrating?
I just looked at them and I’d be like, “Oh fuck, someone’s doing that now. Whatever.” What was the value in work that had no intrinsic value and honesty about it? It was done for a reason that was just ego, career, or money. I find that kind of thing very empty. It doesn’t have the integrity or the power that I look for in art.
“What was the value in work that had no intrinsic value and honesty about it?”
Did you find yourself completely able to divorce your ego from your work?
Yeah… I don’t think I have an ego. That’s a weird thing to suddenly realize. I struggle with people who look at me—in inverted commas—as “Cosey Fanni Tutti.” I don’t want to have to start thinking about, “As Cosey Fanni Tutti, I should behave this way or that way.” That’s just absolutely no way to live your life.
I found your writing here to be very matter-of-fact. You seem to resist psychologizing or analyzing. You’re more interested in showing than telling. I wonder if that was conscious on your part.
Yeah, I didn’t want to do an analysis of my life. I’ve done a lot of writing on my art and analyzed different parts of it, the magazine work and things like that. That’s academic writing, that’s not me talking to someone about my life in a personal way. The matter-of-factness is part of me being born in Yorkshire, ‘cause that’s the way we are. We just say it as it is and you make of it what you will. But that creates a great forum for discussion because even with my art actions when I did them, they were presented matter-of-factly. The sex itself was: well, here it is then. The matter-of-factness was deliberate. I wanted it to be like I was just writing an email to someone: This is how it went down and I’m not going to try to analyze anyone’s behavior on my behalf.
I got that, and yet it was surprising to get to the section on 20 Jazz Funk Greats and to read only about two paragraphs on an album that many consider to be among the finest released in the ‘70s.
20 Jazz Funk Greats has had loads of analysis done about it—a book was written about it. I didn’t want it to turn into that kind of book, where I took every album and broke it down into how it was recorded, who did what, what it meant. At the time it didn’t happen like that. What’s been analyzed subsequently is something else. How it actually was recorded and happened was nothing like the analysis. We just had an idea and we went and did it. And it was quick and it was fun and we never thought it would have the influence or the response it has over the years. Not at all. I think that’s what’s nice about it—you don’t build into something something you expect from it later on. Like I was saying about people who do art for a career or for financial reasons. That gets in the way of why you wanted to do it. We wanted to do it because it would be fun.
Was fun as a motivator a through line in your work?
Fun, irony, and seriousness are all equal throughout. I don’t do anything that’s frivolous. It’s kind of thought out in a way, in so much as when I sit and think about something or something presents itself and the different elements just come together, that’s an amazing moment, but that’s as far as I like to take it. From that point, I like for it to almost create itself.
In the book, when you talk about doing porn and the Prostitution exhibit, you talk about how that work put you at odds with feminists in the ‘70s. Some feminists have embraced sex work and pornography since then. Where are you with feminism today?
I embrace equality, I don’t embrace a title for something that has so many divisions in it. There’s a need for it, and the fact that it has had a presence hopefully will take us somewhere toward equality. The government here has called for a general election out of the blue and the guy [on the news] referred to Theresa May as “Mrs. May.” I said [to Chris], “We can’t get equality until the language is less loaded and divisive.” There is no alternative to Mr. As soon as you say “Mrs.” or “Miss,” you’re defined as married or unmarried and paired off with a male. I’m not saying you have to police language, but that simple thing hit me today. She’s defined in terms of being married to a guy who isn’t the Prime Minister of the UK.
When I heard about Prostitution, it sounded like feminist art to me.
There’s a lot of opinions on how to negotiate or demand equality. The whole world is in such a stinking mess at the moment. We’ve got to work our way through this situation we’ve found ourselves in. Feminism, as well. This is where equality does come into the picture. We’re all in it together, whether we’re male or female. We’ve got to save the fucking world, for Christ’s sake.
TG April 25, 2009 USA, photo by Sarah Johnson
When you refer to your relationship with Gen, you never actually use the words “abuse” or “abusive” even though given the violence and emotional manipulation to describe, it sounds like that’s exactly what it was from the outside.
That’s because when I was in the relationship, I was just dealing with things as they happened. That was his personality and it was my situation. I felt strong enough to deal with it. It wasn’t a huge problem to me. It was upsetting at times and I couldn’t understand it, but it wasn’t something that I couldn’t deal with. There’s people who’ve been in far worse situations than me. That’s all I think about.
When you talk about Gen lashing out physically/emotionally, your response in the book is generally to pick up the pieces and not retaliate ever.
What was I supposed to do, give everything up? My problem was making sure I could carry on. The fact that it facilitated him being able to do the same thing was a byproduct of me getting through everything. It was an extremely complicated situation and I was out there on my own. I had no family or anything. That relationship was my family, so I protected it. And the way I protected it was to get through the difficulties that were presented to me off and on or daily or whatever. In the end you get very tired of that. Especially when I met Chris, he was the only one who saw it for what it was, or told me. He was quite shocked by it. Everyone else accepted it for what it was, but he didn’t think it was acceptable.
Is Gen aware of the contents or existence of this book to your knowledge?
He knows it exists, but I don’t know anything other than that. He hasn’t spoken to me about it.
It seems pointed that you don’t name Psychic TV.
Don’t I?
No, you refer to it as “his other band.”
I was never involved with it, anyway. It was after I’d left. It’s not part of my story.
I’m curious about what you say about Gen’s gender identity. I didn’t think Gen was transgender (note: Gen identifies as pandrogyne and uses the pronoun “s/he”), but you write that Gen is. (“We knew he was transgender—he’d ‘come out’ some months earlier…”)
I don’t think I say he is—I say he told us he was.
Well, I guess that begins to explain a question I had about the words you put in quotes in the following sentence: “In my opinion, as someone ‘now transgendered,’ his spurious claims against me (a woman) didn’t cut the mustard as far as ‘true sisterhood’ was concerned.” Is that to say that you doubt that identity?
Mmm… I don’t know, I don’t want to get into his transgender thing. I know some transgender people and they’re not like Gen. He stands out on his own as something. I don’t know what his agenda is with that. But like I said, in my book, this sisterhood thing is lacking. I don’t know what else is lacking there.
I wonder about the pronoun use. Do you call your transgender friends by their preferred pronouns?
I would if it was personally really important to them, yes, and it was definitely who they identified as. I respect anyone’s choice to be who they are. Everyone should be able to just be. I have full respect for that and I would of course call them what they wanted to be called. Because that’s who they are. It’s not a problem.
Gen takes up a considerable amount of space in your book, and I wonder what you think about that, looking back. You wrote something that made me think of why that is, in a different context: “I’ve always found it easier to handle criticism than praise, so much so that I can recall and deal with the bad things people have said far more readily and easily than the good.” This is a documented phenomenon that may have roots in our biology.
His presence in the book is because he entered my life and it was the beginning of both of our artistic careers, so that had to have a huge sway, to explain how it began, what it was, and how it ended. It was of interest to people and of interest to me to sit down and work out how it all progressed and fell into place. Of course, there was Throbbing Gristle and then a huge gap and then we regrouped. The bit in between was like, I mean, I’ve been with Chris for over 40 years. How many pages do you want me to take up saying, “I’ve got a lovely life and it’s really happy and we’re in love”?
“I’ve been with Chris for over 40 years. How many pages do you want me to take up saying, ‘I’ve got a lovely life and it’s really happy and we’re in love’?”
You said you don’t have an ego. What sense do you have of your artistic importance or even greatness?
I accept that there’s a place for me now in the art world and art history. As I go back and rework and revisit things, that’s how I’ve understood that place has emerged. It’s interesting for me to work with that.
Have things gotten easier financially over the years?
It’s off and on, really. Feast and famine, I suppose that’s what you’d call it. It’s not an easy life, just living off what you create, but it’s so rewarding and fulfilling. I couldn’t live any other way. I have done jobs to tide me over and they serve their own purpose because I’ve met some interesting people and had some great experiences. And it took me away from the stresses of daily life as well. I don’t have a dogma that I will never do a job. I do what I need to do at any given time to continue to be able to have a creative output. That works well for me, and it works for Chris, as well. We are doggedly determined in a way just to be ourselves.
Cosey Fanni Tutti will appear at McNally Jackson in New York on Wednesday, April 26, to discuss her book.
Cosey Fanni Tutti's memoir ends with an unexpectedly conventional romance
Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti reviewed.
By Jude Rogers
November 1969. “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies is number one for the month. The Beatles’ Abbey Road is just out, the band’s beautiful swansong. At a Hull students’ union, an 18-year-old girl spots a 19-year-old boy. She is ferociously bright, getting into the late-Sixties swing. He has the look of a Greek Orthodox priest and carries a “wooden staff, the full length of which he’d carved by hand into a continuous interwoven spiral which converged at the top with the yin-yang sign, above which were small horns for his thumb to hold the staff firm”. His mother named him Neil. He is now known as Genesis. He decides that her name is Cosmosis, abbreviated to Cosey when they become a couple. It is helpful to note that they meet at an acid test, where people are playing with a bathtub full of coloured jelly and where someone’s skronking free jazz on a saxophone makes Cosey run away.
Rock autobiographies are generally conventional tales of excess but Faber has published some properly alternative takes in recent years. And the great thing is that many of the most recent ones have been by women on the margins of pop culture, such as Viv Albertine of the Slits (who unwrapped the messy world of punk in Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys) and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, who described the death of her relationship with Thurston Moore in Girl in a Band. And now comes Cosey Fanni Tutti, a founder member of the radical music and art collective COUM Transmissions and later Throbbing Gristle, an important influence on the darker side of electronic music. She is far from a household name but her book Art Sex Music arrives laying out huge concepts in its title, confidently, as it should.
We begin with a story of an ordinary, ramshackle family living in the north-east. Christine Newby is born with her left elbow bent and fist wedged against her chin, like Rodin’s Thinker, at a hospital standing between a prison and a cemetery. Her female role models are caring and strong; her cold and detached father certainly isn’t.
This section is full of other seeds of portent, but buds of creativity, too. Hull’s bombsites become playgrounds where stories are made among “toys, pianos, kitchens left almost intact”. Aged seven, Christine and a friend find photographs of Belsen victims in a book. (“We should not have been looking at those images,” she states. Years later, Throbbing Gristle make Music from the Death Factory and put a picture of a Nazi death camp on the cover.) She is ten when the Cuban missile crisis reaches the Humber: “It was a frightening, life-changing moment to be told in my junior-school assembly that we could all go home early to our families because the world might end tomorrow.” Cosey’s tone throughout is full of such matter-of-fact tenderness.
Despite fascinating details, this part of the book is a tough read. The timeline darts haphazardly and it is hard to keep track of prominent and incidental players alike. The feeling extends through Cosey’s early forays into art and music: we are left with scattershot impressions of lives, moments and ideas. But perhaps that was the point. COUM’s work was about rejection of conventions, after all – they sent art through the post by direct mail, and proclaimed seven years before punk that “the future of music lies in non-musicians”. Still, their work was also about being accessible, and a firmer editing hand would have helped.
But then comes the sex. Cosey was a pornographic model and stripper in the middle of the 1970s and second-wave feminism, using her body in artworks to comment on the sex industry. “I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation,” she writes of that time, persuasively and fearlessly. “I was exploiting the sex industry for my own purposes . . . I wanted a purity in my work, to push against existing expectations and my own inhibitions, and to understand all the complex nuances and trials it imposed on everyone . . .” COUM’s 1976 exhibition at the ICA in London also featured her bloodied sanitary towels in installations, more than two decades before Tracey Emin’s much gentler, Turner Prize-winning My Bed. You boggle at how bold Cosey’s work is, even when its extremity puts it on the edge of parody – unless you and your boyfriend have ever ended an onstage performance by being penetrated with either end of a nail-studded pole.
The boyfriend (yes, the same one we met earlier) gets his comeuppance. Genesis P-Orridge throws a breeze block at her head and cats down the stairs, and reminds us of the darker sides of sexual liberation (“Gen says to gain more power I am to screw each cock that I don’t want,” reads one of Cosey’s particularly grim diary entries from 1976). But she rebels, settling down with her fellow bandmate Chris Carter (“my heartbeat”, as the dedication to the book reads) and continuing her avant-garde explorations in music and art with him, and their son, by her side. If there is any conventional narrative to this memoir, it’s this: here’s a life in art spurred by a meeting with a manipulative man, over whom the heroine triumphs. But it is unquestionably Cosey’s story, however radical and riotous a read it may be.
Jude Rogers is a music critic and broadcaster
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This article first appeared in the 27 April 2017 issue of the New Statesman, Cool Britannia 20 Years On
Cosey Fanni Tutti – Art, Sex, Music
Faber and Faber
Cosey Fanni Tutti - Art, Sex, MusicA long time ago, I wrote that Genesis P Orridge singing “marmalade” in Throbbing Gristle‘s “Hit By A Rock” on D.O.A. was the key moment in industrial music, a moment that most of the “industrial” artists that stomped around in the wake of TG utterly missed. You couldn’t imagine SPK or Clock DVA or Nine Inch Nails or whoever having “marmalade” in their lyrics, but TG’s perfection, and what set them apart from all those ‘My Dad’s Bigger Than Yours’ copyists, was in understanding that the small, prosaic, details of life was where the Devil really was.
TG was life-affirming not death-seeking. Reading Cosey‘s long-awaited autobiography clarifies this and makes this take on the world clearly emanate from her. This is her understanding of life, of art, of Art and what’s beautiful about it is that she’s continually paying attention to the smallest details, rather than drowning in nostalgic glows or theatrics. The people in this book are utterly human. All too human, in some cases.
Blink 23 times and this could be a David Peace novel.
All the way through this book there’s an (un)steady lurch between High Art and spectacular ordinariness. London in the 1970s, in particular, is really brought to life in these pages. Blink 23 times and this could be a David Peace novel. It’s interesting now close everything is; the underworld, the overworld, the world of celebrities crashing into the world of Art, settling next to the world of stripper parties and sleazy (not Sleazy) camera-shoots. The shadows are full of life. This book is full of sights and sounds and smells. Cosey as a kid playing in the wreckage of a bombed-out Hull, the creeping fear of hospitalization and illness, stripping for a bewildered David Thomas, eating crayons on a concrete floor, Mick Ronson mowing the lawn, flashers and fissures bleeding into solemn, beautiful reminisces of family life and loss…
You also get some understanding that the Art of Cosey is in the mind of Cosey — which is perhaps why others can’t always see it, and her work keeps being either devalued, denigrated or regarded with terrible suspicion. It’s not pornography and yet it is pornography; it’s high Art and it’s low art. It’s a subtle thing, and you get a sense of it through these pages, even if you also get a sense of the frustration (and eventual vindication) that she feels when she’s misrepresented. Even Genesis claims not to get it, or pretends not to, but we’ll come to him later.
mulch and murk, well there’s plenty of that in here, but there’s also a massive amount of light and love and a gentleness
There’s some of the tropes we might expect from such a girl: sexual precocity / pre-Cosey-ity in the imagined flashlight of Nuclear War (Now), memories of being spanked by her uncle; what would now be patronisingly called “daddy issues” — as a great woman once said: “It’s not me that has daddy issues, but my piece-of-shit father might have.” That said, it’s no surprise that her true love, her (erratic) heartbeat, is also an electronics fan, like her dad, and her love for Chris Carter and her family just glows through this book. If you’re expecting mulch and murk, well there’s plenty of that in here, but there’s also a massive amount of light and love and a gentleness that perhaps the casual listener or watcher (you get the sense that Cosey always had her fair share of close observers) might have noticed only subconsciously. She’s not scary; she’s lovely. She might be injecting blood and milk into her vagina, but you also get the sense she’d be lovely company for a chat and a cup of tea. More milk, vicar?
I say that “marmalade” was the key moment, but this is not to say Genesis was the key figure. This book is clearly about Cosey and it’s her attempt to set the record straight, to make her (and Chris’s, and Sleazy’s — she is as immaculate with her praise as she is with her gentle, disappointed, scorn) position at the forefront of TG clear. She’s brimming with ideas from the very beginning; she sees Art’s electric charge, the way it’s possible to life a life of purity, even amongst a life of dissolution, even amongst the emotional wreckage of communal living in Hull during the ’60s and ’70s. But, she’s also clearly disappointed with some of the people in her life, which brings us back, briefly, to Genesis. It’s hard to comment on this book without commenting on GPO. He’s ghastly, almost from the beginning, and Cosey does brilliantly to keep things together, sensing that Coum and TG will outlast this iconoclastic but disastrous little bully, this emotional vampire. She gets that the Art is the thing, the project is important, more important even than, at times, her own happiness. She sticks with Genesis — they all stick with him, actually — way longer than normal people would suffer.
proud but never comes across like she’s full of herself
As a memoir it works all ends up. We find out new things, old truths are clarified or batted away, like irritating wasps. Cosey holds her head high throughout, is majestic at times, but she’s also very self-effacing; she’s behind a lot of the best things that TG, for instance, does, but she wears this influence lightly… she’s proud but never comes across like she’s full of herself. For someone with an (imagined) fearsome reputation as an “out there” artist, this memoir succeeds because the details unfold at a gentle pace… you don’t get any sense of bitterness about the things that have gone awry, just a sense of wonder related to the things that have gone right. That kind of positivity, in these awful times, is exactly what we need.
-Loki-
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20 April 2017 | Tags: book review, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Loki Category: books, reviews