The bible of psychic rebellion

In that strange and sinister year that was 2020, marked by so many untimely deaths, the artist, musician and

performer

Genesis P-Orridge (Neil Andrew Megson)

also died in New York

.

His taste for the subversion of body and art forms, and sometimes outright provocation, led most of Genesis's career to pass through underground canals and on the fringes of the art and music scene.

His death has left pending the task of evaluating the importance of his figure and his thinking in recent decades.

The publication in Spanish of

La biblia psíquika,

which collects his most important texts from the 1980s and 1990s, is a perfect starting point to learn about the theoretical background that gave birth to much of his work.

Genesis P-Orridge was a deliberately unclassifiable artist.

Friend and disciple of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, tireless researcher of communal ways of life, alternative lifestyles and charismatic leaders, pioneer in the resurgence of psychedelia in the late eighties and godfather of various currents of experimental music , his career presents an appearance of dispersion that in many cases is due to his rabid refusal to obtain the approval of the system or simply to allow himself to be pigeonholed.

Around 1970, he became known as a visible figure of COUM Transmissions, a

performance art

collective

that fused a taste for blood and fluids of Viennese actionism, confrontation with the public, the subversive potential of pornography and sometimes body modification. violent

When at the end of the decade the scandal caused by his performances threatened to turn him into the enfant terrible of the tabloid press, Genesis decided to transfer his work to the

art-rock

scene

, already considerably shaken by the arrival of punk.

His next project, the industrial rock band Throbbing Gristle, had an essentially Burroughsian inspiration.

Defined as an

antimuzak

that interferes with the control frequencies of civilization, Throbbing Gristle's music was not intended to be pleasant or pleasing to the listener, rather the opposite.

His goal was to interfere with the transmissions of social and political institutions and especially of the media corporations;

and he was trying through sensory shock.

But perhaps the most unique move of Genesis's career was the one to come.

In its pages there are texts of cultural history, meditation techniques based on the "magic sigils" of the occultist Austin Osman Spare and plans for the 'deconditioning' of sexual identities

Around 1981, and his band already dissolved, Genesis was looking for alternative ways to put into practice his artistic ideal of de-conditioning the individual from the mechanisms of social control.

The entire Genesis career is basically an attempt to answer the Burroughsian question: "Is it possible to short-circuit our social behavior?"

Whether in the form of an internal process of the

individual

performer

, or a collective experiment in the adaptation of charismatic cults, social deconditioning is the key to understanding the work of Genesis.

His next project, much more ambitious than the previous ones, was called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (Temple of Psychic Youth).

Originally conceived as a network of alternative living centers, the Temple enacted forms of self-managed isolation from society.

Each center, conceived as a laboratory of alternative forms of sexuality and mental revolution, would be financially supported by the artistic (and propagandistic) activity of its members.

Externally, the Temple, which would have thousands of members in the United Kingdom, continental Europe and America, assumed an aesthetic inspired by charismatic sects such as the Church of the Process or the Jim Jones People's Temple, with military paraphernalia, bands, skinheads and occult symbols.

His “media arm” would be another music band, Psychic TV, conceived as an ambitious intervention in mass culture that would serve the fans as a gateway to the Temple and turn them into adherents.

Psychic TV had some projection on the pop music scene of the eighties and early nineties, although not enough to guarantee the survival of the Temple.

The organization disappeared in the early 1990s amid sexual scandals, internal fights, and behaviors that mimicked charismatic sects, not necessarily as a conceptual artistic action.

In his last years he surgically altered his body to acquire morphological characteristics of both sexes

The psychic bible

collects the vast majority of P-Orridge's texts from the time of the Temple of Psychic Youth, along with other of his collaborators and exegetes of the period.

Conceived as a great compendium or bible of the ideas and influences of Genesis, it is without a doubt one of the most (explicitly) countercultural works of its time.

Its axis is a sequence of proposals for cultural intervention designed to change modes of perception and reprogram inherited patterns of behavior.

Although this goal may not distinguish it enough from other foundational works of its time, it is the radicality and creative exuberance of the collected texts that make this work completely unique.

In its pages there are texts of cultural history;

developments of the Burroughsian

cut-up

method

;

meditation techniques based on the “magic sigils” of the artist and early 20th century occultist Austin Osman Spare;

plans for deconditioning sexual identities;

Treatises on Hindu-Buddhist Tibetan Symbology, Shamanism and Syncretism;

texts on the subversive potential of television;

and theoretical formulations that would lead to

Pandroginy

, the most important work of Genesis in the 21st century, a long performance of a decade during which the artist surgically altered his body until he acquired morphological characteristics of both sexes (or perhaps a third).

A formidable manual of social and artistic rebellion that is also an open window (the best) to the work of a creator who always fiercely inhabited the margins, eccentric among eccentrics and certainly not for all tastes, but whose capacity to fascinate and particularly inspiration is more alive than ever.

Converted with the passage of time and the successive editions into a cult work (and a magnificent example of drip sales), it is more appropriate that The Psychika Bible reaches our bookstores hand in hand with that magnificent catalog of counterculture and mental rebellion that is the Editorial Caja Negra.

Javier Calvo

is the author of novels such as 'Silver Skin' and 'The Hanging Garden'.

The psychic bible

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

Editing by Jason Louv.

Translation by Juan Salzano.

Black Box.

576 pages.

29.50 euros.

Look for it in your bookstore