Dear Kings and Queens, 

You won’t want to miss our next British-focused Queer/Art/Film on Monday, November 15 when our (extremely fascinating, see below) presenting artist Genesis P-Orridge shares with us the seminal 60s film IF…, and his own personal experiences of high level bullying in the UK public school system. 

The evening likely to sell out, so buy your tix in advance at:

http://www.movietickets.com/pre_purchase.asp?house_id=9598&movie_id=16602&rdate=11/15/2010

What: Genesis P-Orridge presents IF….

When: 8:00pm Monday, November 15

Where: IFC Center- 323 6th Ave at W. 3rd St.

31 years prior to the Columbine Massacre, rebellious Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) witnesses horrific ritualized torture at his British boarding school before leading a bloody anarchistic revolution against the school’s tormenters. A still-shocking social satire of repressed, fascistic British mores, Lindsay Anderson’s If… received an X rating in Britain upon its release but went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes the following year. The film’s messages of insurrection and anarchy held special meaning for this evening’s presenter Genesis P-Orridge, the pandrogynous founder of the equally shocking and anarchistic industrial electronic bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. Genesis also underwent many years of brutal, hellish torture at British private schools, so the film’s depiction of what s/he had been through resonated deeply with he/r.  As s/he says “My main complaint when watching it is that it not nearly as vicious, and appallingly sick psychologically as it really was for me, and hundreds of other victims of institutionalized brutal bullying.” 

Hope to see you at the cinema.

Ira & Adam

WHO IS GENESIS P-ORRIDGE?

Genesis  P-ORRIDGE is a true legend of the Anglo-American underground, an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of work reminds us that what is dangerous and what is important are never far apart—and that, when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too.

P-Orridge first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performancecollective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. (P-Orridge would, in 1981, found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV.) By the time COUM disbanded in 1976, it had helped push the boundaries and shatter the definitions of performance and contemporary art, paving the way for later transgressive work. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper, used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators “Wreckers of Civilization.”

In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship.  The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work.

P-Orridge was an early participator in Fluxus and Mail Art, applying the theories of John Cage (upon which the foundations of Fluxus are built) on the pressed recording “Early Worm” in 1968, and exchanging works with Ray Johnson among others. Responding to P-Orridge’s Mail Art, the British General Post Office charged h/er in 1976 with sending “indecent and offensive material” through the mail, including desecrated images of the Queen. Like many artists at this time, P-Orridge rejected market-driven work, choosing instead to maintain an artist-centered creative nucleus in which work was shared within a community, and was never intended to enter the commercialized art world. 

In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced again by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, “pandrogynous” character, “BREYER P-ORRIDGE”. they embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like

eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in order to resemble one another as much as possible. Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE.

Visit Genesis’s fascinating website here:

http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/bio.html

View a short film portrait of Genesis here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSPEuZBAXXU