Skip to main content

Genesis & Lady Jaye Breyer P Orridge – Life As A Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and A Search For A Unified Identity) - Summerhall, Edinburgh

August 1st-September 26th

It's almost forty years since Scottish Conservative MP  Nicholas
Fairburn declared those behind COUM Transmissions' Prostitution show at
the ICA in 1976 to be 'wreckers of civilisation'. The artist then known
as Genesis P Orridge, who was the driving force of the artistic
collective that morphed into Throbbing Gristle, still has the power to
provoke, however, as this centrepiece of Summerhall's current
exhibitions programme makes clear.

Life As A Cheap Suitcase (Pandrogeny and A Search For A Unified
Identity) charts the love affair between P Orridge and Lady Jaye
Breyer, who met in 1993 and married two years later on Friday 13th.
Over the next twelve years, before Lady Jaye tragically 'dropped her
body' in 2007, the couple became a living artwork as they attempted to
merge their identities and bodies into a third unified being by way of
cosmetic surgery and body modification. This included having matching
breast implants on Valentine's Day 2003, requesting that they be
referred to as s/he, and wearing matching clothes, hair and make-up.

This first UK solo exhibition since 2003 will feature a series of
collages and paintings by Breyer P Orridge that feature explicit images
of the couple's ever converging bodies, as well as religious
iconography, mirrored patterns and Britain's Royal family who represent
the establishment-based antithesis to Breyer P Orridge's fearlessly
taboo-busting and touchingly frank display. If Breyer P Orridge's
previous work, from early mail art through to COUM, Throbbing Gristle,
Psychic TV and beyond has sought to point up and counter the ugliness
and hypocricy at the heart of society, the images receiving their first
European viewing in Life As A Cheap Suitcase suggest the most intimate
form of revolution.

Breyer P Orridge's show is one of some nineteen exhibitions occupying
the former Royal Dick Veterinary School turned international
avant-garde arts centre that Summerhall has become. These include new
soundworks by Susan Hiller, paintings by the late Caroline McNairn
drawn from work made during a year in Russia in the mid 1990s as part
of a cultural exchange between Scotland and the former USSR
co-organised by former director of the 369 Gallery, Andrew Brown, and
Bosnian war paintings by Peter Howson in a programme that puts the body
politic centre stage.

Scottish Art News - August 2014


ends

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Myra Mcfadyen - An Obituary

Myra McFadyen – Actress   Born January 12th 1956; died October 18th 2024   Myra McFadyen, who has died aged 68, was an actress who brought a mercurial mix of lightness and depth to her work on stage and screen. Playwright and artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, David Greig, called McFadyen “an utterly transformative, shamanic actor who could change a room and command an audience with a blink”. Citizens’ Theatre artistic director Dominic Hill described McFadyen’s portrayal of Puck in his 2019 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London as “funny, mischievous and ultimately heartbreaking.”   For many, McFadyen will be most recognisable from Mamma Mia!, the smash hit musical based around ABBA songs. McFadyen spent two years on the West End in Phyllida Lloyd’s original 1999 stage production, and was in both film offshoots. Other big screen turns included Rob Roy (1995) and Our Ladies (2019), both directed by Mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Passage – Hip Rebel Degenerates: Black, White and Red All Over

Prelude – The Power of Three   Fear. Power. Love. This life-and-death (un)holy trinity was the driving force and raisons d’être of The Passage, the still largely unsung Manchester band sired in what we now call the post-punk era, and who between 1978 and 1983 released four albums and a handful of singles.    Led primarily by composer Dick Witts, The Passage bridged the divide between contemporary classical composition and electronic pop as much as between the personal and the political. In the oppositional hotbed of Margaret Thatcher’s first landslide, The Passage fused agit-prop and angst, and released a song called Troops Out as a single. The song offered unequivocal support for withdrawing British troops from Northern Ireland.    They wrote Anderton’s Hall, about Greater Manchester’s born again right wing police chief, James Anderton, and, on Dark Times, rubbed Brechtian polemic up against dancefloor hedonism. On XOYO, their most commercial and potentially mo...
Post a Comment
Read more