30 Years of Being Cut Up

The catalog for the acclaimed 2009 retrospective at Invisible-Exports, New York, 30 Years of Being Cut Up surveys three decades of collage by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950–2020) — photomontage, Expanded Polaroids, and early mail art, much of it published here for the first time.

Drawn largely from the artist's own archive, the Lower East Side gallery's fall survey (through October 18, 2009) showed works previously seen only in P-Orridge's home, the same year Tate acquired h/er papers. The work extends the cut-up method of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs from the page to the photograph — and, in the pandrogyny project undertaken with h/er late wife Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, to the body itself, pursued through matching plastic surgeries as a single merged identity. The unpaginated 128-page first edition, bound in boards patterned with the diamond-lattice photomontages, includes a folding color poster and two loose color postcards.

Before being recognized as a visual artist, P-Orridge founded the COUM Transmissions collective and the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle in 1970s Britain, later fronting Psychic TV museum recognition followed with S/he is Her/e at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2013) and Try to Altar Everything at the Rubin Museum, New York (2016). This is the library's first P-Orridge title, joining the collage holdings alongside Stezaker, Linder, and the cut-up tradition the collection traces.