Art Sex Music

Cosey Fanni Tutti has spent much of her life making the boundary between art and scandal look like an administrative error. In Art Sex Music, she recounts her journey from an unhappy childhood in Hull through performance art, pornography, industrial music and electronic experimentation, demonstrating that a respectable career path is largely a matter of refusing to take the interesting turning.

Born Christine Newby, she grew up in a conventional post-war household whose expectations did not include becoming Cosey Fanni Tutti, exhibiting used tampons at the Institute of Contemporary Arts or helping to invent industrial music. Her early rebellion brought her into the orbit of Genesis P-Orridge and the performance collective COUM Transmissions, where art ceased to require attractive pictures and began involving bodies, bodily fluids, confrontation and increasingly concerned public officials.

COUM rejected the polite distinction between art and life, partly by making both extremely difficult for anyone nearby to ignore. Its performances explored sex, identity, violence, taboo and social control, often placing Cosey’s own body at the centre. Admirers called the work radical. Critics called it obscene. The British press, delighted to discover a cultural emergency requiring large headlines, eventually produced the phrase “wreckers of civilisation,” thus supplying the group with better publicity than any sensible arts grant could have purchased.

The notorious 1976 exhibition Prostitution at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts displayed material from Cosey’s work in pornographic magazines alongside photographs, objects and documentation of COUM performances. It caused outrage in Parliament and the newspapers, because Britain could apparently tolerate pornography or publicly funded art but regarded their appearance in the same room as a constitutional crisis.

For Cosey, modelling and performing in the sex industry were not separate from her art. She used pornography as material, method and investigation, turning the commercial representation of her body back upon the culture consuming it. This did not make the work safe, simple or comfortably empowering. Art Sex Music is alert to exploitation, agency and contradiction—the troublesome reality that a woman may exercise control inside structures that are themselves designed to control her.

From COUM emerged Throbbing Gristle, the group whose abrasive electronics, disturbing imagery and determined hostility to conventional entertainment helped establish industrial music. Cosey played guitar, cornet and electronics, contributing to a sound that resembled machinery suffering an ideological breakdown. Audiences expecting songs were instead given noise, repetition, confrontation and the opportunity to reconsider whether enjoyment was strictly necessary.

Throbbing Gristle’s records and performances became enormously influential, though influence is often the reward given to artists after everyone has finished complaining that the work is unbearable. The group created its own methods of recording, distribution and presentation, operating beyond the mainstream while quietly supplying future generations of musicians with an entire vocabulary of unease.

After Throbbing Gristle’s first dissolution, Cosey and Chris Carter continued as Chris & Cosey, later Carter Tutti, developing a more rhythmic and electronic body of work without becoming suspiciously normal. Their creative and personal partnership forms a vital part of the memoir: a relationship built through sound, technology, performance and the comparatively revolutionary discovery that collaboration need not require domination.

The darker counterpart is Cosey’s long relationship with Genesis P-Orridge. She writes candidly about coercion, manipulation, jealousy and abuse within their personal and artistic lives. The mythology surrounding radical artists can encourage the belief that cruelty is merely another avant-garde technique. Cosey dismantles that excuse with the clarity of someone reclaiming her own history from a person who had become accustomed to narrating it for her.

This is therefore much more than a memoir of an unusual music career. It is an account of class, gender, bodily autonomy, motherhood, art and survival. Cosey describes how work made at the cultural margins was shaped by ordinary practical matters: rent, childcare, relationships, equipment, illness and the persistent need to continue functioning after the performance had ended and the audience had gone somewhere quieter.

Her voice is direct, unsentimental and often dryly funny. She does not attempt to make every decision look wise in retrospect or every provocation look heroic. Instead, she presents a life in which creativity and damage frequently occupied the same space, leaving the reader to consider who benefited, who paid and who ultimately gained control of the story.

Art Sex Music will appeal to readers interested in experimental art, feminist history, underground culture, Throbbing Gristle, industrial music and unconventional lives. It is also suitable for anyone who suspects that the official history of an artistic movement may change considerably when the woman previously described as somebody’s girlfriend is allowed to write the book herself.

This copy is in Good condition, showing ordinary evidence of previous handling but remaining fully prepared to trouble another household. Offered by Crappy Old Books, it is a fearless, absorbing and frequently startling memoir from an artist who turned sex into art, noise into music and public outrage into an unexpectedly durable career. Civilisation, despite the warnings, appears to have survived.

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