Month: October 2017

← Part 1

A few months ago, I attended the launch of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography Art Sex Music at London’s Rough Trade East. To my frustration, and much like during the COUM exhibition’s opening weekend, I had a cold. The receiving and transmitting of bacteria, never mind art, makes me reluctant to open my mouth to speak in case I breathe on anyone, stifling my attempts to communicate. After a Q&A and book signing, I spend an hour on the bus home. I learn through an opening Author’s Note that the book is intrinsically entangled with the conception of the Humber Street exhibition itself:

As I was researching for an exhibition, going through some of my old diaries to fact-check, I got totally distracted and drawn into my past and ended up reading for hours. I finally closed the diaries and put them back in the cupboard, all chronologically lined up, like my story in waiting. I knew at that moment what form my book would take. If I was going to enter the lion’s den of my past, it would be by using my diaries as my primary source. They offered an unblinkered view into my mindset of that time, and I could avoid the misty goggles of retrospection. [1]

Bringing the reader right up to the present, the Humber Street exhibition is discussed on the book’s final pages:

A combination of what seemed unrelated factors had come together, fulfilling all the necessary conditions for me to begin work on writing my autobiography. I’d come full circle: from Hull, the place where my life and my art began, and where my book would begin, and now back there, marking where my book will end as I enter into a new dialogue with Hull, in recognition of my life and art. [2]

Elsewhere, Cosey details the extent to which she has been sidelined and undermined throughout her artistic career due to sexism (amongst other things). She details many personal and private attacks—most shockingly made by Genesis P-Orridge whose track record of emotional and physical abuse towards her is truly abhorrent—as well as elaborating on the curatorial decisions made on her behalf. Discussing curatorial decisions made prior to Prostitution’s opening, she explains:

it was decided that my sexually explicit magazine works could not be shown on the main gallery walls for legal—and what was described as ‘diplomatic’—reasons. Not just that, but they would be housed in boxes and form part of a members-only exhibition in a separate room at the back of the main gallery—to be viewed ‘on request’ and only by members of the ICA. […] I always felt this was, intentional or not, like relegating the magazines to a place comparable to their original context—in a back room, an under-the-counter situation like a Soho sex shop. Sex shop to gallery to back room. All it needed was a dusty velvet curtain in the doorway. [3]

The atmosphere at the Humber Street Gallery could not have been more different. The police were apparently called to the gallery during the opening weekend but, in contrast to Prostitution, “as soon as the police heard the word ‘Tate’ it was alright.” [4] Chased from the city for their old associations, now welcomed back under the wing of their new friends, the disjuncture of COUM’s newfound acceptance has not been lost on Cosey:

“[…] I don’t like acceptance, I distrust it completely, I think I’ve done something wrong, like I’ve gone off on a bad tangent and need to get back on track.” She pauses. “I mean, I understand why certain things have found their place in history, so I can accept that. But I don’t see it as acceptance of what I did then, because it wasn’t. It’s still loaded with that unacceptance.”

Still following Paul Mann’s thought, he notes what he calls Bataille’s “second death”: following his first death; his physical death, ending the immediate and literal continuation of his thought, his second death occurs at the hands of the reifying thesis mill of accepting academia:

Even as it is theory’s task to disrupt every system it has proposed, even as we depend on it to do so, it is also theory’s task entirely to close off the ruptures on which it entirely depends. This endless, exhaustible circuit constitutes the fatal exhaustion of theory. There is no means of taking transgression into account that does not endorse it as a restricted economic term in the first place and subject it to a perpetual, garrulous, undying death. And since this cycle repeats itself compulsively: still the mute and irrecuperable trace of the second death. [5]

I wonder if this folding of the unacceptable within COUM’s newfound acceptance results in their “second death”—or perhaps a second life. Prostitution was their first retrospective; their first death—a self-immolation that the press sought to extinguish and disembowel on their own terms, making COUM martyrs for their cause and engendering decades of misunderstandings. The Humber Street exhibition is a second retrospective for which COUM’s restless corpse has been reanimated so that it might continue to wander with the gait the group had intended for it. Is the exhibition successful in this regard? To rephrase Mann’s questions, do the visitors to the Humber Street exhibition become the coummunity the group envisioned by being present at their second death? Or does this exhibition reassemble COUM for another use, ruining them for good?

Continue reading “Industrial 2: Coumtamination”

COUM’s notoriety hit its height just as the British economy hit an all time low. Was there any connection? Some newspapers thought so. With the economic and social crisis identified at the end of 1973 refusing to go away, commentators kept themselves busy looking for the latest signs of the Nation’s declining standards. By the end of 1976 both COUM and the sinking value of the pound would be taken as proof of the near terminal condition of the once Great Britain. [1]

COUM Transmissions were a performance art group formed in Kingston-Upon-Hull in the late 1960s. At once a self-engineered artistic success and failure, the group’s reputation ricocheted between rising stars of the art world and hated arbiters of moral panic. Their most notorious work, Prostitution, was exhibited at the ICA in London in 1976. Billed as a retrospective of the group’s work prior to moving onto new projects, the exhibition became a national scandal after being denounced in various newspapers and magazines, even triggering a parliamentary debate on the acceptable purview of public funding for the arts. During the debate, Nicholas Fairbairn, the Conservative MP for Kinross and West Perthshire, called the group “wreckers of civilisation”—a label that affectionately stuck. Fairbairn has since been posthumously accused of child sex offences.

As discussed by Simon Ford in his history of the group, quoted above, many saw the group’s performances as just another symptom of national socio-economic and moral decline, but this is to downplay COUM’s cunning approach towards their art practice and its reception, and their thoughtful subversions of the political conventions of British society at the time. The group consistently stayed one step ahead of their audiences, hurling all their hopes and fears back at them with a wicked sense of humour and a grim sincerity. Despite the diverse and spontaneous nature of their performances, the group are best known now for their controversies. COUM founding member Cosey Fanni Tutti addressed this reputation in a 2013 interview with The Quietus:

There were no shock tactics. That would imply a kind of script, a contrivance that would be incompatible with our improvisational approach. Public self-discovery in the form of art actions or music performances can shock. That’s just the way it was/is. […] The fact that people called what we did transgressive was at times surprising. We were just doing what we found interesting and putting it out there… communication, but not in its usual format. A more interesting way to instigate dialogue.

Continue reading “Industrial 1: Coummunication”