+book review+

Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing
Gristle
by Simon Ford
(Black Dog Publishing, London)

Leafing through a record bin one day in the late '70s, I came across an
album called Twenty Jazz Funk Greats. The cover showed a cheery bunch of
four hipsters, posed in a pastoral setting, with fog lapping at the edge
of a cliff. It looked like the sort of cheezy early 70s fusion music in
which I had an ironic interest at the time. I bought it, took it home,
and found that its makers were way ahead of me. This was one of the
classic works of Industrial Music. The maker's name should have tipped
me off: Throbbing Gristle.

The album design itself was a great example of media art. It was
designed to sit in record bins, and snag the casual browser with its sly
ambiguities. This was a time when record stores were a feast of 12'
square artworks, so the competition for attention was intense. The
packaging of Twenty Jazz Funk Greats was a masterpiece of pop art
semiology. The cliff on which the band posed, I discovered was Beachy
Head, a well known English suicide spot.

One of the more interested problems with electronic art is composing for
it a genealogy. What exactly are the ancestors of an art that stakes so
heavy a claim on its own novelty? A first instinct is to rewrite the
traditional art histories, making the new appear to grow out of the old,
thus reaffirming art's established canon, with a few art-historical
nuances to make the careers of a new cadre of historians. Another option
is to see the claim to novelty as a chance to overthrow the canon for a
time, and revive another kind of past, a prehistory of singular and
monstrous artworks, resistant to easy narratives and institutional
cooption.

Throbbing Gristle, and its predecessor, COUM Transmissions, are worth
recalling in precisely this context. Both were genre-defying moments of
messy, chaotic, confrontational release from the formalities of the
authorized art declensions. Simon Ford's Wreckers of Civilisation
provides a useful guide to these great exemplars of art without
categories.

Ford starts the story with Genesis P Orridge, a callow youth growing up
in the provincial city of Hull, England, reading Kerouac and Burroughs,
hip to Cage and Warhol, Fluxus and Happenings. Genesis joins a group
called Transmedia Explorations, which formed in London in 1967. It's
leader, the Filipino artist David Medalla, organized the group on the
principle of transmedia art practice, which made no distinction between
art and everyday life, and saw the artist as someone who could work in
any medium. People may have come in to the group as dancers or painters,
only to become transmedia artists.

In 1969 Genesis formed his own group, along not dissimilar lines. COUM
could stand for communications, come, cum, or any number of things. Its
manifestations hovered somewhere between music and performance. That it
is not a particularly well known example of early "performance art" may
stem in a large part from its formation in the provincial city of Hull.

Enter the second character of Ford's story: Cosey Fanni Tutti. Her name
a detoured Mozart title, Cosey is a hardcore Carol Lee Schneeman, whose
work over many years pushes the boundaries of performance art, body art,
avant garde music and media art. She deserves a biography all to
herself.

Being based in Hull had its limitations, and COUM would find themselves
hounded out of town in 1973 by police harassment. But not before making
a contribution to the development of mail art–another overlooked
precursor to exchange-based practices of net art today. As Ford notes,
mail art was godsend to provincial artists everywhere, enabling them to
form networks the bypassed the major centers. Its marginal status today
no doubt also stems from this challenge to centralized art history.

Ford's narrative concerns itself mainly with those members of COUM who
went on to form Throbbing Gristle. Many interesting characters get left
out of this account. COUM is more like a tangled knot of lint than the
narrative thread of this book makes out. Ford does however mention Tim
Poston, COUM alumnus who went on to become a significant author of
mathematical works of chaos theory. The connection between COUM's
chaotic practices and the more rigorous theory of same positively begs
for closer study.

"COUM is defined by total inclusion," says Genesis, in a typical
manifesto. It's a challenging principle. Every bad review, every bit of
gossip and rumor is part of the art. COUM are pioneers of the multimedia
happening, employing tape recorders, cameras and an increasing amount of
home-made technology in their shows. But they are also media artists in
a much wider sense, seeing any and every surface or event in which they
might cause a ripple to be part of the work.

COUM's resonance in the British artworld really begins with the move to
London, where Genesis met Burroughs, a significant influence, and caught
up with the canonization of Fluxus. The quasi corporate rhetoric of what
would become Industrial Records, the mail order catalogues and the
merchandising of Throbbing Gristle can all be seen as a further
extension of Fluxus, but an extension that takes Fluxus principles of
art making beyond the bounds of the art world.

A typical COUM performance might be the ones involving the "Duchamp
harps." Duchamp's bicycle wheel mounted on a stool made a functional
object over into a useless art object. COUM produced them as multiples,
and played them as musical instruments, providing them with a function
again. It's almost a realization of Duchamp's "reverse readymade"–"turn
a Rembrandt into an ironing board." Something the old man himself never
quite managed. Or perhaps the Duchamp harp dissolves the special
category of altogether, replacing it with a much more dispersed notion
of what might constitute the aesthetic moment.

An unrealized proposal, suggested in a grant application, suggests the
creation of Window Music–a score for photoelectric cells triggered by
passing birds or cars. The dependence on the alternative gallery
circuit, the knowing citations of avant garde art history, and what
Genesis would call "grant addiction" would all come to appear as
limitations to COUM, and are part of the impetus for its transformation
into Throbbing Gristle. COUM were quite successful at getting grants,
but the Arts Council baulked at the idea of "unauthorized performances"
taking place outside of the emerging alternative gallery circuit.

Two new characters join Genesis and Cosey and will go on to become the
core members of Throbbing Gristle, or TG. Peter Christopherson,
nicknamed Sleazy, was an assistant at Hipgnosis, the design shop
responsible for Pink Floyd's '70s album covers. He introduced new
technological, musical and sexual adventures to COUM. His calling card
was his photos of boy models with simulated injuries. Sleazy was a
member of the Casualties Union, a volunteer group that simulated crash
victims for training exercises by the emergency services–a pastime
worthy of a Ballard novel.

After Christopherson joins COUM, its performances become more
aggressive, more sexual, influenced perhaps by Vienese actionism. COUM
probably pioneered the use of dildos and anal sex in performance art.
Cosey began working as a nude model and a stripper, partly for the
money, but partly out of growing sense of indifference as to the
distinction between the art industry and the sex industry. That
strippers are artists was a typical liberal view of the time. That
artists are strippers was not.

COUM's explorations of sexuality and art climaxed with the Prostitution
show at ICA in 1976. It's not clear which element of it triggered the
moral panic–the tampons or the pictures of Cosey culled from porno
magazines. The show was a national scandal and led to a court case in
which a judge famously described COUM as "wreckers of civilization."
COUM were a bit nonplussed as to how one could be a wrecker of something
already in such steep decline.

Chris Carter was working as a developer in a Soho photolab, specializing
in porno pictures. He brought to the group an extensive interest in
electronics, and was crucial to the formation of TG as a group that
would push out from the shores of the art world, and explore the
formless space in between electronic music, punk, art and performance
that was characteristic of TG.

TG came into existence in 1975. The name Throbbing Gristle is working
class slag for an erection. As Genesis says, "gristle is tough but
human." The key medium in which TG worked was the rock scene. As Genesis
put it: "we're experimenting with it in a structural way, almost as a
medium in itself." The statement is uncharacteristically tentative, but
it is part of a longstanding relationship in English culture between art
and popular music. "We wanted to apply the analysis of the art world to
popular culture and not frighten off the kids." Which is more or less
what every British popular music movement has in part been about, from
trad jazz to ambient house.

TG was interested in both the physical and psychological aspects of
music and performance. As Genesis says, "people forget. They think music
is for the ears. They forget it goes into every surface of the body." TG
performed and recorded "metabolic music," exploring sound as experience
rather than music as form.

Where other groups rehearsed, TG researched. Theirs was "Industrial
Music for Industrial People," produced on what Chris Carter called a
"sound assembly line." The working methods of TG are an interested
precursor to later practices in experimental sound art. As Genesis put
it, critiquing the slogan of the punk movement, "why start with 3
chords? You can start with no chords."

Lyrically, TG introduced violence as an explicit subject matter. Serial
killers and death row inmates figure prominently in TG material. So too
does what Genesis called "information war." One way of reading TG is as
a recognition of the terminal state of alienation and an attempt to turn
it against its causes, a world of spectacle and simulation.

Their record label, Industrial Records, and the whole Industrial Music
scene emerged at just that moment when industrial Britain was in
terminal decline. In hindsight, they appear as an interesting precursor
to the whole "new economy" moment, and a reminder that all old economies
were once new economies, that all economies decline, and take down with
them their cultural expressions.

Where COUM tended to look like any other bunch of hippies, TG perfected
a tough, cool, glamorous style. Everything from the record covers to the
stickers and sunglasses exuded a menacing look, something like the
uniform of a subculture. Industrial music did become a subculture, and
this too was part of the art. Through its mailing lists and
merchandising, TG brought a whole urban tribe into existence, a feat
rarely duplicated in the world of performance art.

TG built a lot of their own equipment, such as the famous Gristleizer,
which Carter described as "a cross between a fuzzbox and a ring
modulator on acid." The making of the equipment here becomes a part of
the art, as well as giving TG a very distinctive sound. TG occupied a
place somewhere between high and low electronic music, at a time when
the boundaries between them were not yet fixed. Theirs were certainly
not your average rock concerts. For a time, TG blasted the audience with
bright halogen lamps, confronting the punters with the spectacle of
their own reaction, visible in the mirrors behind the band upon the
stage. Or as Nirvana would later say, "here we are now, entertain us."

TG started falling apart in 1978. One explanation is a resistance on
Genesis' part to the absorption of TG into the rock industry. Another is
the affair Cosey was having with Carter. In any case, like all good
things, it unraveled in slow motion and was over by the early '80s.
Chris and Cosey split off as Chris and Cosey, "the Sonny and Cher of the
suicide set" in the words of the New Musical Express. Christopherson
joined the group Coil. Genesis started Psychic TV.

The Wreckers of Civilisation is an excellent resource for thinking about
the place of COUM and TG in the worlds of art, music and performance of
the '70s. Ford is content mostly to narrate rather than analyze his
subject, but has done us all a favor by bringing the documentation
together in a coherent if partial narrative.

["Wreckers of Civilisation" is available for purchase in the Rhizome
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