Nonbinary: A Memoir

by Genesis P-Orridge, Douglas Rushkoff (Afterword)

Overview

A revealing and beautifully open memoir from pioneering industrial music artist, visual artist, and transgender icon Genesis P-Orridge

In this groundbreaking book spanning decades of artistic risk-taking, the inventor of “industrial music,” founder of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, and world-renowned fine artist with COUM Transmissions Genesis P-Orridge (1950–2020) takes us on a journey searching for identity and their true self. It is the story of a life of creation and destruction, where Genesis P-Orridge reveals their unwillingness to be stuck—stuck in one place, in one genre, or in one gender. Nonbinary is Genesis’s final work and is shared with hopes of being an inspiration to the newest generation of trailblazers and nonconformists.

Nonbinary is the intimate story of Genesis’s life, weaving the narrative of their history in COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, and Psychic TV. It also covers growing up in World War II’s fallout in Britain, contributing to the explosion of new music and radical art in the 1960s, and destroying visual and artistic norms throughout their entire life.

In addition to being a captivating memoir of a singular artist and musician, Nonbinary is also an inside look at one of our most remarkable cultural lives that will be an inspiration to fans of industrial music, performance art, the occult, and a life in the arts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419743863
Publisher:	ABRAMS
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	202,925
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Genesis Breyer P-orridge (1950–2020) was a legendary singer-songwriter, musician, writer, occultist, cultural engineer, and visual artist. P-Orridge rose to notoriety as the founder of the COUM Transmissions art collective, which operated in Britain from 1969 to 1976. P-Orridge cofounded and fronted the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle and the experimental multi-media outfit Psychic TV, paralleled by P-Orridge’s cofounding of the communal network Temple Ov Psychick Youth. In 1996 P-Orridge and partner Lady Jaye embarked on the Pandrogyne Project, a living art concept that blended physical and psychological mediums, creating the unified “Breyer P-Orridge.” In recent years, P-Orridge performed with their spoken word project Thee Majesty, which in the past included such collaborators as William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Timothy Leary, Monte Cazazza, Aaron Dilloway, Merz-bow, Tony Conrad, and countless others. P-Orridge also continued performing sold-out shows all over the world with PTV3, an iteration of Psychic TV that spanned almost two decades. Over the past 50 years, P-Orridge’s artworks have been exhibited in hundreds of museums and galleries across the world, cementing P-Orridge’s prolific career of contributions to Fluxus, mail art, collage, sound poetry, and conceptual art. The archives of Genesis P-Orridge were acquired for the permanent collection of London’s Tate Britain in 2010.

Editorial Reviews

2021-05-05
A posthumous memoir from the multimedia artist, a "transgender icon” who transcended more than mere gender categories.

P-Orridge, who died from leukemia in 2020, was born Neil Andrew Megson in Manchester, England, in 1950. Considering their birth name a "temporary tag," P-Orridge believed that a name change was "a really potent form of magic.” Their overriding goal in a lifetime of art- and music-making was to "short-circuit control," a directive given to them by William Burroughs. The author’s early years in British schools, where they suffered from verbal and physical abuse from classmates and authority figures alike, "taught me who my enemy was." Their early experiments in performance art and street theater set the tone for their career: “Does anything have to exist just because it did before?...Who does it serve?” Throbbing Gristle, the seminal industrial band P-Orridge co-founded, used "the tools and the toys of the military-industrial complex" as musical instruments to subvert “their original intent, which was, of course, control.” Confounding expectations, the author’s next band, Psychic TV, aimed to “seduce the audience rather than alienate them.” Using esoteric rituals, fetish objects, sacred figures, and shamanic tools, their music conjured spiritual states and aimed to "make the occult trendy again.” For another conceptual art project, P-Orridge served as one half—with dominatrix and partner Lady Jaye Breyer—of a "pandrogyne" fusing male and female beings into a "third being,” a further breakdown of the binary model. They erased differences between them with body modifications and medical techniques, applying cut-up methods to "our problematic bodies.” They considered this project the "egalitarian integration of two artist explorers, this third being Breyer P-Orridge," a proposed "end of either/or" that is "essential to the survival of the species." As much a manifesto as a memoir, this wild life story is dedicated to the breakdown of categories: "End gender. Break sex. Destroy the control of DNA and the expected. Every man and woman is a man and woman.”

An entertaining and thoughtful book about a remarkable life that consistently embraced transformation.

Kirkus Reviews

Part narrative, part philosophy, this outré memoir is a remarkable experience.

Booklist

Genesis P-Orridge—a mystifying vanguard with a gift of prophecy. Nonbinary is thee definitive oracle from the heart of the indefinable.

musician, poet, and author - Wesley Eisold

Genesis was continually breaking new ground and developing new projects with the aim of short circuiting received ideas, chipping a hole in the carapace, questioning everything: religion, education, nationality, sexual identity to find the reality behind the society of the spectacle. Gen was always going forwards. It is fascinating to read the back story, finally told.”

bestselling author - Barry Miles

Genesis had a profound impact on me as an artist and then a dear friend. Reading this illuminating and radically open memoir is an honor. The echoes of such a strong creative voice unveiling the experiences of the proverbial climb to becoming a true artist and later cultural icon is mesmerizing.

actor, director, and author - Asia Argento