From October 19 2012 to October 28 2012

The Eyes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Exposition 19 au 28 octobre, 2012
Vernissage vendredi 19 octobre, 19h
 

The Eyes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is the first Montreal exhibition of an artist whose four decade, taboo-shattering career has consistently been at the leading edge of culture where art making encounters and transforms popular culture, political activism and spiritual practice.

For four decades Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has maintained an artistic practice that can be well described as seminal. Situating itself, in the best occult tradition, at a kind of crossroads – one where art-making, popular culture, politics and spiritual practice meet and hybridize – Breyer P-Orridge’s diverse and complex practice is vastly influential while simultaneously shattering taboos and expanding the cultural discussion.

Embracing collage, performance, body modification, sculpture, video, writing, music and/or sound work the artist’s corpus has attracted attention, comment, admiration and, on a number of occasions, official censure, and has been widely exhibited across the globe.

The Eyes of Genesis Breyer P-Orrdige, curated by Mathieu Beauséjour and Peter Dubé and presented in conjunction with Festival Phénomena, is the artist’s first Montreal exhibition and provides the community with a unique opportunity to discover the work of a visionary creator.

La Centrale is proud to welcome Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and three events are being organized around this rare visit to Montréal: the exhibition The Eyes of Genesis Bryer P-Orridge at La Centrale, a performance by Thee Majesty as part of Festival Phénomena, Saturday, October 20th at the Cabaret Mile End, as well as a screening of the documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, premiereing Sunday, October 21 at 1pm

In the presence of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and filmmaker Marie Losier as part of the Festival du nouveau cinéma. (Screening at eXcentris from 21 to 26 October 21st to 26th).

La Centrale is very proud to co-present these events with Festival Phénomena and the Festival du nouveau cinéma.

Curatorial Essay by Peter Dubé:


The Eyes of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

If Korzybski’s famous dictum “the map is not the territory” has the value it clearly does, it is at least partly due to the fact that it may be profitably extended to a whole range of cartographies, genealogies and narratives. (And, certainly it has been thus extended; variations of the idea are prominent in a good deal of contemporary criticism.) However, the obvious corollary to this extensibility is that a kind of moral and intellectual responsibility falls to us as artists, writers, intellectuals or citizens to navigate very carefully, reading and rereading those cartographies, taking them apart and remaking them when necessary because the “maps” are what we have, and the territory all but impossible to grasp in its entirety. Few have taken that responsibility more seriously than Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

In a career spanning more than forty years Breyer P-Orridge’s pointed, witty and visionary investigations have questioned all manner of such constructions with great deliberation and a telling application of the “cut up,” a tool they borrowed from William S. Burroughs, who developed it in collaboration with Brion Gysin for the very purpose of dismantling the broad cultural narratives of all kinds of power. This radically analytical (in all senses of that word) technique, originally envisioned as a literal cutting up and reassembly of printed texts, was enlarged and adapted by Breyer P-Orridge. Expanding the cut up’s focus on dismantling phenomena that appear naturalized (language, media), they took apart and recombined actions and taboos, ritual and social role with Coum Transmissions, the categories and boundaries of “sound,” “noise,” and “music” as well as the pop “industry” with Throbbing Gristle, and a host of other bulwarks of culture and “control” with other collaborators, other groups.

But what remains constant in Breyer P-Orridge’s practice from actions and mail art to collage and video, and from rock ‘n roll to magic(k), is a focus on the interstitial not as a blank space, but as a space of encounter. A space in which seemingly unlike things meet and reconfigure in a process most properly described as alchemical. And certainly his recent visual and “Pandrogynous” body art foreground this investigation in a dazzling, and moving, exploration of the nature, function and status of gender, indeed of identity itself.

Of course an artistic practice so dedicated to the blurring of categories has presented many challenges to those who make the “maps” and genealogies of art history itself. Faced with a creator whose decades-long practice has invariably combined the breaking of new ground with a critically acute synthesis of underground culture(s) that condemns debates about the line between “high” and “pop” culture to a well-earned irrelevance – some critics hesitate. Though much discussed and admired, the artist’s work has – perhaps – received less serious, sustained attention than it deserves. This is a grave omission, one in which once again the “official” map seems far from covering the actual cultural territory. The most vital, complex places are difficult to reduce to outline and notation. Still, any map on which no space can be found for the kind of lavish, dangerous and smilingly perverse Eden towards which Breyer P-Orridge points might not, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, be worth glancing at. And The Eyes of Genesis Breyer P-Orrdige provides, we hope, Montrealers with a unique opportunity to discover that fabulous destination for themselves.

Peter Dubé, Co-Curator

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