It is with shock and great sadness that we report that Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge died on the 8 October 2007. Lady Jaye, Miss Jackie as we knew her, was with Genesis the creative force behind the Breyer P-Orridge pandrogenic project, a member of PTV3 and a friend. The Centre of Attention showed her work with Genesis P-Orridge in both exhibitions and screenings. We would like to express our warmest sympathy to Genesis. A condolence book is here; The Independent Newspaper in London published the following homage on 23 October:
Lady Jaye Breyer P-orridge
Psychic TV keyboardist and singer
Jacqueline Breyer (Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge), nurse, keyboardist
and singer: born 1969; married 1993 Genesis P-Orridge; died New York 9
October 2007.
The self-proclaimed "cultural engineer" and conceptual artist
Genesis P-Orridge has been creating controversy since the mid-Seventies,
first with Throbbing Gristle, pioneers of industrial music, and then with
the psychedelic collective Psychic TV.
In 1993, P-Orridge met and then married Jacqueline Breyer. She adopted
the name Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge and the couple subsequently set about
becoming mirror images of one another or, more precisely, through the
repeated use of cosmetic surgery, mutating into a single being they called
"Breyer P-Orridge". "As a couple, we want to become more
and more one," said Genesis P-Orridge in 2004:
I guess I'm dedicated to breaking every inherited mould I can in my private
life, and I am blessed to work with a partner who is prepared to be involved
in that process too. We both went and got breast implants on the same
day, on our 10th anniversary, and we woke up in hospital holding hands.
By chance, we have the same size shoes, but now we can also share lingerie
as well!
He coined the term "pandrogyny" to define this extreme experiment
but, even if it brought the couple greater notoriety in contemporary art
circles, the project often felt like a spin too far on Gilbert and George's
life-as-performance art. The photographs taken during the couple's successive
operations provided material for several mixed-media exhibitions, including
one entitled "Painful But Fabulous" which toured European capitals
and the more liberal American art institutions in the United States.
They lived in Brooklyn, New York, with their two cats, and seemed totally
at ease with their chosen lifestyle. "People often want to ask us
about our sex lives, especially since Genesis had his breasts," said
Lady Jaye. "And I always tell them that we have the life of a normal
married couple."
Born in 1969, Jacqueline Breyer attended a Catholic school and was interested
in religious imagery and iconography from an early age. She became a nurse,
caring for children with terminal illnesses or incurable disabilities,
and also did voluntary work for animal charities in New York. When she
met Genesis P-Orridge, she hadn't heard of Psychic TV, though she was
familiar with the Throbbing Gristle track "Hamburger Lady" and
the group's place in the grandiloquent, Grand Guignol scheme of industrial
music.
In 1995, a couple of years after meeting Breyer, Genesis P-Orridge suffered
dreadful injuries and nearly lost his left arm while escaping a fire at
the Los Angeles home of the producer Rick Rubin. He used the money awarded
in a $1.5m lawsuit against the producer in 1998 to bankroll his further
experiments in photography, collage and sculpture, as well as music and
cosmetic surgery. Lady Jaye altered her nose and chin to look more like
her husband's while he had cheek implants to match her distinctive facial
contours, but the couple drew the line at anything more drastic than their
matching breast implants. "I would really prefer us to not have to
lose anything," Lady Jaye said.
If I could have a penis attached, I would do it tomorrow, but for him
to lose any part of the body that could give pleasure, that's not the
idea. We made a decision not to try to go after a conventional idea of
beauty. We both could have changed our faces to look like some kind of
ideal, but we wanted to look like each other. We're trying to meet in
the middle.
With Lady Jaye's help, Genesis P-Orridge enjoyed something of a creative
resurgence and critical reappraisal of his work. In 1999, he performed
with both Thee Majesty his spoken-word project and Psychic TV at the Royal
Festival Hall in London, and subsequently rejoined his estranged colleagues
to reform Throbbing Gristle in 2004. Lady Jaye also introduced him to
the New York drummer Edward O'Dowd (aka Morrison Edley), who assembled
around the couple a new line-up of Psychic TV under the name PTV3. They
were due to undertake a European and North American tour to promote Hell
Is Invisible . . . Heaven Is Her/e, the group's first studio album in
12 years, which was released in 2006 and featured contributions from members
of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Butthole Surfers, as well as Lady Jaye on keyboards,
samples and vocals.
"We view Breyer P-Orridge as a separate person who is both of us,"
Lady Jaye explained. "Neither of us take credit for the work, the
work is a melding of both of our ideas which we would not have had singly.
Both of us are in all of our art. That third being, Breyer P-Orridge,
is always present."
Pierre Perrone
"Genesis P-Orridge is a by-word for EXOTIC NOTORIETY – but this may be without much foundation. His/her work covers a variety of manifestations including performance/ritual to full-on rock concert as well as painting, installation, object making and video. S/He is sex magick rock n roll personified. The ultimate applied orgasm.
Now a Blonde, with big tits, luscious lips and an 18 carat solid gold great smile, s/he continues to be committed to a vision of freedom and a strategy of provocation, but the employing of a little Aleister Crowley occulture, or more his amplification of the injunction to ‘do what thou wilt’, has cast a long shadow.
Genesis is unconcerned however with the stories and myths that accrue about him/her; in fact s/he relishes the notoriety and ambiguities that such publicity courts. But more than anything, GP-O stands for an evolutionary, proactive and inclusive sexuality, an exuberant hedonism and intoxicant fueled experimentation. The expression of compulsions, fetishes, obsessions, alternatives, wishes and desires and the disintegration of identity...are given free and full rei(g)n.
If you believe in magick or any super natural fallacy, you may find yourself using its accoutrements and rituals as a cloak or pretext to get closer to achieving your own ends, sating your own desires, whether they be sexual, hedonistic, love of ritual or...expressions of inherent selfishness of the human being, made palpable and visual in the case of the Satanist.
Am I calling Genesis selfish and manipulative? Any artist of any repute will always exhibit such characteristics. Some managing this tendency better than others. For your view to supplant all others, to compete with the history of art, to… you have to be a little Machiavellian.
Genesis often works in collaboration with others, a method that injects his/her practice of performance, photography, objects, conceptualism with a variety and freshness hard to compete with, and that creates vital connections across continents and generations.
Evil? It is more that Genesis is not a moralist in the accepted sense. Many would rather s/he was not emulated: sex, ritual, cult, drugs, tattoos even, and most of all, full freedom of expression are not to all tastes.
Individuals don't emulate and they don't expect others to. GPO is an individual questing against repression, for freedom of action, thought and experience, and all at his/her own expense. This attitude has had him damned and opprobrium brought down on him, damaging his standing and reputation in an art world more reassured by the restraint and predictability of other political artists.
Serial killers, murderous dictators, and testosterone fuelled terrorists are treated with more understanding and respect than GPO. (This is not an encouragement to a new phase in his/her practice). So we salute this modern-day de Sade (or Artaud, Crowley, Baudelaire?) who places personal freedom and sexual expression at such a premium. GPO’s deal was not with the devil, but with his reputation, in a search for truth, freedom and experience, in treating adults like adults, and in not giving a fuck, and all this pursued in a unique, sexy, feisty and destructive way.
"YES I am EVERYWHERE and yet still invisible to the ART world with BIG A like ASSHOLES" "
The Centre of Attention catalogue text for Switch on the Power! curated by Xabier Arakistain
Click
here to read the Genesis P-Orridge papers
The gallery is selling two limited editions short CDs that Genesis P-Orridge created with Lady Jackie Breyer for exhibitions at the Centre of Attention: Candy Factory and Gobbledeegook. Editions are limited to 50 units each, priced at 50 pounds. For further information, please email us.
We invite you to visit Genesis' site which is updated regularly and found on http://www.genesisp-orridge.com
updated November 2007