curated by Thomas Mießgang
In cooperation with VIENNALE – Vienna International Film Festival and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, born in Manchester in 1950, lives and works in New York.
1969 Member of the Exploding Galaxy/Transmedia (w/ David Medalla, Derek Jarman); Founding of COUM Transmissions (w/ Cosey Fanni Tutti); 1973 Begins Mailart, regular contributor to Fluxshoe; 1975 Founding of Throbbing Gristle (w/ Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Chris Carter); Co-edits Contemporary Artists (w/ Colin Naylor); 1981 Founding of Psychic TV (w/ Alex Fergusson); 1982 Co-curates the Final Academy (w/ William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin).
Selected exhibitions: 2011 Readykeulous: The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondance Issue, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; You and Now, Balice Hertling, Paris; 2010 Spillage…, Rupert Goldsworthy Gallery, Berlin; Marathon Map, The Serpentine Gallery, London; Decadence Now! Visions of Excess, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague; I Punk, You Punk, We Punk, Galerie Ahlers, Göttingen, Germany; Dead Flowers, Participant Inc., New York; Brooklyn is Burning, P.S.1, New York; 2009 30 Years of Being Cut Up, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; 2008 It’s Not Over Yet, INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Punk. No One is Innocent, curated by Thomas Mießgang, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Keeping Up With the Joneses, Schroeder/Romero Gallery, New York; Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years, Barbican Art Gallery, London; 2007 Believers, Mass MOCA, Massachusetts; The Perfect Man, White Columns, New York; Womanizer, Deitch Projects, New York; 2006 We Are But One…, Participant Inc., New York; 2004 Painful But Fabulous, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; None Of The Above, Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York; 2002 Violence The True Way, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; 2001 Candy Factory, Centre Of Attention, London; 2000 Volume, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Live In Your Head, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London.
In the 1970s, a British MP described Genesis P-Orridge and his band Throbbing Gristle as “wreckers of Western civilization.” What was intended as an insult became an artistic principle. For 45 years now, Genesis P-Orridge has been at the front of aesthetic extremism. His microcosm includes the atonal noise attacks of Industrial Music granddaddy Throbbing Gristle, the post-psychedelic sound garlands of Psychic TV and performance activities, whose pleasure in breaking taboos is reminiscent of the Vienna Actionism movement.
