“Early November 1969: Cosmosis he named me after seeing me just once,” reads an excerpt from Cosey Fanni Tutti’s diary, published in her forthcoming autobiography Art Sex Music. The nickname given to the artist born Christine Newby, one of the founding members of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, is indeed evocative of her life and career. She eventually found harmony and wholeness, alone and with longtime partner/collaborator Chris Carter, following a number of traumatizing periods in her life: a difficult upbringing in Yorkshire, an abusive relationship with her COUM Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle co-founder Genesis P-Orridge, and ongoing backlash to her more transgressive work as a pornographic performer.
As Tutti writes in Art Sex Music, the past few years have found her making peace with her past, via exhibitions of her performance art with COUM and her hardcore magazine collages, as well as Throbbing Gristle’s reunion in the latter half of the ’00s. But Art Sex Music challenges assumptions about Tutti’s radical contributions, sharing the oft-missing humanity of a woman once dubbed one of the “Wreckers of Civilization” by a Tory MP in 1976. The book is a raw, moving testament to how Tutti’s resourcefulness and dedication have helped her end up an avant-garde art icon. We spoke with Tutti about her memories of and lessons from a life spent making brutal noise.
Pitchfork: You write that Genesis P-Orridge tried to control your diary entries. Did that change how you felt about Genesis, or the voice you wrote with?
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Yes, it did. It was quite a shock to suddenly come across a page that had been written in by someone else in a critical way. My diaries weren’t about hiding anything. They’re about the everyday. It was quite crushing.
What was it like to return to some of the more difficult moments in your past, like your relationship with Gen?
It wasn’t too difficult at all. A lot of people have asked me why I put up with it, instead of asking why did [Gen] do it. I have to excuse my behavior, because of someone who behaved to me in a way that they shouldn’t have. It’s almost like victim blaming, although I never felt like a victim. I always felt pretty strong. I’ve taken it as a challenge, to turn it around into something positive. TG came out of all of that.
**Genesis and Cosey circa 1969. (Photo by John Krivine)
Your father and Genesis both assumed a position of authority over you, and your art is often about breaking apart those established systems. You’ve said that conflict was essential to the success of Throbbing Gristle, but I still have to wonder how you made music in such a difficult setting.
I just transcended that. Other people’s problems with me weren’t my problem. I was on a different trajectory. It was about creating and being myself. Whatever people did to me along the way, that was their problem, not mine.
That’s not easy for a lot of people. How do you transcend something like that?
A belief in yourself and a belief in the reality that you are equal to other people, and you have the right to do what you want to do, as long as you don’t harm anyone. Even in my childhood I had to deal with that kind of oppression and expectation. But I had the mindset of a male entering into the world—that it was my oyster. I attribute that to my father treating me more like a boy than a girl. I don’t think he intended that to happen. It was a side effect of how he brought me up.
You describe growing up in Hull, England, with all the bombed-out houses and post-war rubble of the 1950s. It was as though you were born into a kind of violence, which became a big part of your work. Do you still need an element of that when creating?
I suppose I’ll always need it. That element in my work is a foundation of what we’re all made from. Our base instincts of survival, sexuality... when you take away all the superficiality of the internet, consumerism, and everything else we’re given, we are just beings who need to interact with one another, to physically feel one another. That’s what I always tap into. I love technology—and I would embrace anything if it would help me do what I want to do—but I don’t see it as a lifestyle. As far as accessing the dark side of the human condition, which is what I’m really talking about, it’s all over the internet. If anything, it’s in our faces more than ever.
What do people misunderstand most about Throbbing Gristle and industrial music as a whole?
There was a lot of irony in TG. “Hot on the Heels of Love” was a Donna Summer meets Martin Denny kind of thing. Industrial music for us was about being industrious. It wasn’t about industrial sounds, literally, which is what I think people interpreted it as. The amount of cassettes we got sent of people doing so-called industrial music… you’re sort of thinking, “Well, we’ve done that. Why would we want to hear someone else trying to do it?” It’s not the sound—it’s the attitude and approach to their work. I’d like to hear some music in the industrial genre that keeps with what it should have been and was originally—it doesn’t even have to sound like TG.
TG songs like “Hamburger Lady” and “Hit By a Rock” evoke disturbing imagery in their language, but it’s the hisses and other noise that become even more abject. How do you strike a balance between work that’s both inherently mechanical and attempting to recreate visceral sounds that affect the body?
You do it by creating sounds that are visceral to you and actually express how you feel physically about the subject matter. Playing a guitar and never being taught to play a guitar is a bit of a bonus, because it just becomes an instrument of sound for me. Lately, it’s become an extension of myself.
When you’re dealing with those kinds of subjects that are really dark, they’re about the deepest feelings that people internalize. To externalize those feelings, you have to use very basic language like we did with the lyrics and deliver them in a way that’s uncompromising. On top of that, you bring the sounds with it that express all the vomiting-inducing feelings of the horrendous moment that you’re trying to tell people about. You have to connect on that very base level. It’s exhausting at times, but it’s also really fulfilling.
After COUM Transmissions’ infamous Prostitution art show at the ICA in 1976, there was kickback from feminist circles regarding your work. They didn’t necessarily see you posing in pornographic photos as reclaiming your body and image. Were you conscious of those reactions at the time?
I didn’t think about it at the time at all. Feminism of the ’70s was very different than how it is now. It didn’t cater to the differences amongst women. It tended to focus on hating men, and I’ve never hated men. It seemed pretty divisive to me, rather than bringing people together on the same equal standing. It didn’t do it for me back in the ’70s.
____ TG’s first gig, at the Prostitution art show. (Photo by Paul Buck)
How does it feel to find acceptance in circles that weren’t so welcoming initially?
When you do something that is regarded as unacceptable, extreme, or transgressive, it is that very thing, because it’s out of its time—before its time, even. So there has to be logically a point at which it meets with people’s minds and understanding. That’s not a problem for me.
My biggest problem is that if I do something now and it’s accepted straight away, I think, “Oh my god, what have I done? I’ve betrayed myself.” [Laughs] Acceptance doesn’t figure in when I’m at the point of making anything. I want to get across how I feel and hope that someone has some kind of… not even empathy, but that they find it interesting.
How does a transgressive artist avoid cliché once people think they have them pegged?
In the early ’80s, I did a performance piece in Holland. I came out on stage, and it was quite late at night. I immediately picked up on the fact that they were waiting for me to strip off and do the cliché thing that they were expecting. So I did the opposite, because I thought, “I’m just not here to pander to what you want to see me do. I’m here because I have something to say.” And so I ended up doing a piece where I destroyed images of everything they were expecting instead. It was like an exorcism, really.
You write about how live shows were essential to fostering your love of experimental music. When you went and saw who was actually listening to this music, did you ever feel disconnected from that scene?
Audiences affect something, for sure. The only time I felt like that was when I saw John Cale at the Hammersmith Odeon [in London] in the ’70s. I went to see him, and it was just like, “Who the hell are these people?” He was trending at that point. I thought, “They don’t even know about his early material, his history, or anything.” I was quite disgusted, so I walked out.
** Recording TG’s ‘Journey Through a Body’ in 1981. (Photo by Chris Carter)
Art Sex Music is out May 1. Tutti launches the book today (April 26) in conversation with Lenny Kaye at NYC’s McNally Jackson.
