Art Metropole

28 Sep. 2002

Bootleg Series: Genesis P-Orridge's G.P.O. v G.P-O Mail Action

Artist

Genesis P-Orridge

In this Series

28 Sep. 2002
CD launch for CCMC and Christian Marclay

30 Nov. 2001
Bootleg Series: Sonic Death #1-7

19 Dec. 2002
Bootleg Series: Scott Treleaven's This Is The Salivation Army

19 Mar. 2005
Bootleg Series: Dave Allen

h1.The Bootleg Series #2

G.P.O. v G.P-O Mail Action by Genesis P-Orridge

In the spring of 1976 Genesis P-Orridge was charged by the General Post Office of Great Britain for sending “indecent and offensive material” through the post. His postcards contained collaged pornographic imagery, erotic texts, and images of the Queen. The contents of this book reprint the artist’s collection of official investigation documents from the post office, the police, the courts, and correspondence from artists, writers, lawyers, and friends; including extensive communications with William S. Burroughs. Opinions of the international mail art scene are revealed. Includes many photos of the artist and supporters attending the trial, for which wedding-type invitations had been issued, and reproductions of the original postcards.
Originally published in 1976 by Ecart Publications, Geneva.

Art Metropole’s “Bootleg” of the original is available as a regular edition, and as a limited edition of 23 copies with signed and numbered colour copies of the artist’s postcards, and a rubber stamp bearing the text “Unsolicited Pornography”.

105 pp., 21.5 × 28 cm., paper
$25.00 regular editon
$70.00 special edition

The cultural engineer Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of underground work reminds us that when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too. In 2007 h/er partner Lady Jaye BREYER dropped h/er body. Since that time Genesis continues to represent the amalgam BREYER P-ORRIDGE in the material “world” and Lady Jaye represents the amalgam BREYER P-ORRIDGE in the immaterial “world” creating an ongoing interdimensional collaboration. Their work documents the physical alterations s/he and the late Lady Jaye, endured within their project Pandrogeny, about re-union and re-solution of male and female to a perfecting hermaphroditic state. Genesis is one of the most rigorous and relentless agents of the postwar Anglo-American vanguard, interrogating the meaning and substance of identity in a peerless half-century program of willful reincarnation and shape-shifting. Embracing the body as not simply the vessel but the site of the avant-garde impulse, BREYER P-ORRIDGE has reinvented and reintroduced h/erself again and again—as Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of industrial music, “wrecker of civilization,” essayist and theoretician, and, most recently, as pandrogyne.