On Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s Solo Exhibition S/he Is Her/e

I’m generally perplexed when famous musicians, trained or not as visual artists, express an avid need for art world approval, showing work that appears dated or flimsy in relation to their musical practice. There’s something disjunctive and contrived about such bids for legitimacy, especially given the fact that everyone knows the art world will do anything to exploit fame for money à la Jay-Z’s now notorious performance/video, Picasso Baby, which had everyone a-twitter last summer.

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (BPO), who has achieved more of a cult status than fame, is a vivid exception to this tendency, her art and music having evolved coextensively since the beginning of her career.  And as her recent survey at The Warhol Museum brilliantly conveys, the objects she’s produced have always served a larger function, emerging out of ritual and performance-based actions that are deeply visionary in nature. 

Take Blood Bunny (1997-2007), a life-sized rabbit carved from wood found in Mexico, rubbed with both the blood of the artist and her other half, Lady Jaye, who “dropped her body”—as BPO describes her passing—in 2007.  Attached to the strange talismanic object is Lady Jaye’s pony tail, the entire work radiating sacrificial energy under a glass bell jar. The blood, purchased on a trip with Timothy Wylie (founder of The Process Church of the Final Judgment) comes from the residue of ketamine injections taken for astral travel in 300 consecutive “trips”, a number determined by Wylie to best retrieve and harness the knowledge gained during what he calls “glimpses into the miraculous.” When I ask about this work, Gen shows me a series of scars on her arm that represent cuts made by Jaye to bring her back into her body.  

Breyer P-Orridge, Blood Bunny – Ketameaner Kat, 1998 – 2011, Talismanic Pandrogeny Object: wood, blood (Lady Jaye), blood (Genesis), hair (Lady Jaye), cloth, adhesive, bell jar, 13 x 6.5 x 6.5 inches, Courtesy INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

Similarly, Alchymical Wedding (1997-2012) consists of three hand-blown glass globes laterally hung in a steel frame, each full of the hair, nails, and skin of the two artists, suggesting an ongoing powerful engagement with ritual magic. Influenced in the mid-70s by writings about Western magic, namely those of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare, BPO saw in ritual the possibility of making things happen, whereby magic became a form of cutting up behavior.

Both Blood Bunny and Alchymical Wedding span the period of Pandrogyny, the remarkably prescient project in which the couple began undergoing various plastic surgeries to resemble one another, seeking to dissolve boundaries between self and other in an ultimate manifestation of true love....