P-Orridge memoir is a story of pushing boundaries in art, life.
“Art is supposed to be about the constant process of change,” musician, visual artist, provocateur and self-proclaimed “rejectionist” Genesis P-Orridge writes in the memoir “Nonbinary.” Art is about “pushing the envelope with perception so that you get closer to understanding what existing is.”
Certainly P-Orridge has challenged the status quo throughout the artist’s working and personal life. With the band Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge essentially invented the industrial music genre, then formed Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth collective to explore occult philosophies and heightened sensory experiences of various cultures. Psychic TV became POrridge’s musical and performance art vehicle to promote various TOPY ideas. Participation in the book project “Modern Primitives’’ signaled
P- Orridge’s early adoption of now more accepted practices of tattooing, body piercing and scarification. And before the artist’s death in 2020, P- Orridge spent years focused on the Pandrogyne
Project, repudiating the either/or foundations of gender and societal norms.
“Nonbinary” seeks to put P-Orridge’s life of deep defiant searching into context. A prologue draws readers in with all the surreal details of the 1972 meeting with “Naked Lunch” author William S. Burroughs in London. By the end of their long, strange day, Burroughs proclaims, “Genesis ... your task from now on is to tell me ... HOW DO WE SHORT-CIRCUIT CONTROL?” This manifesto of sorts guides many of P-Orridge’s artistic explorations and life decisions thereafter and also establishes a pattern of being spurred on by a fascinating array of friends, associates and collaborators.
P-Orridge hardly glosses over a childhood in post-World War II England, though, before discussing an atypical career as an artist. Much of the upbringing proves relevant and inspiring in terms of P-Orridge’s art, from the family’s frequent moves, to discovering forms of safety and invisibility in solitude and in nature, to dichotomous school experiences of being artistically nurtured in one and brutally bullied in another. Meanwhile, the artist’s father swung between supporting his offspring and subjecting POrridge to angry outbursts and strong disapproval.
From there, artistic growth is charted chronologically, with a great deal of time spent on P-Orridge’s group COUM Transmissions. Focused primarily on performance art, the collective found itself lauded by progressive British art critics in the early 1970s. But what some observers found inspiring, curious or just unusual, others found offensive and disturbing — a lifelong situation P-Orridge encountered when presenting practically any work.
With the music of Throbbing Gristle, POrridge found another way to circumvent the expected. Singing in different voices based on lyrical content, and creating unconventionally created and structured pieces that were analogous with Burroughs’ “cut up” style of writing, P-Orridge aimed to make expectation-shattering music: “That’s what matters,” the artist writes. “Not whether you made a piece of art that’s on somebody’s wall or in someone’s record collection. It’s about the impact it has on liberating other people.”
P-Orridge’s later projects zeroed in on such goals with even greater emphasis. And while “Nonbinary” certainly shares quite a bit about TOPY and the Pandrogyne Project, those sections lack some of the detail and focus of the first half of the book. P-Orridge worked to finish the memoir after a diagnosis of leukemia and clearly did not fully complete the manuscript; that said, great care has been taken to thoughtfully edit the text and bring it to an appropriate and largely satisfying conclusion, including an explanatory afterword by writer Douglas Rushkoff.
In a section of the book discussing the purpose of music, P-Orridge actually makes a case for the meaning behind a lot of great art: “If it’s not about telling us something, preferably something we didn’t know before, then it’s not really worthwhile.” In living up to that credo, POrridge likely offended and scared as many people as the artist inspired. That seems a fitting testimony to the power of the work by someone who constantly pushed personal boundaries in service of questioning what society too often insists people take for granted.