Vice: Hi Cosey, how are you?

Cosey Fanni Tutti:

I named one of my cats after you.

I have two. Her brother is named Sleazy.

So what are you working on these days?

Sounds it. I wish I could have made it over there.

Cosey in Studio of Lust, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, 1975.

I’m interested in the way that TG began as a group. You set out with a kind of willful amateurism, like techno-primitives. But soon enough you became quite good at what you were doing. It seems there was always a tension in the group between developing a technique and stepping aside from that to allow something more primal to pass through.

I enjoyed hearing it. It’s a very remarkable sound that you made.

TG had an ambiguous relationship with technology. On the one hand you used a lot of equipment—gristleizers, electronics, synthesizers—but there was always something incongruous between the mechanized sounds and the messiness of the content. I think of something like “His Arm Was Her Leg.” There’s a constant theme of mechanics being mediated through the body and mutating from your bodies to the bodies in the audience.

Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey in Studio of Lust, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, 1975.

With so much music now being made entirely on computers, the idea of music as a relationship between bodies has almost vanished. But that’s something that really carries through in your music.

Compared with the excessive amount of recordings and documentation of TG, which kind of approximate that experience, part of the beauty of the COUM actions is that they’re gone, that they can’t be reenacted.

But at the beginning you did get very meager subsidies from the Arts Council. Only so much, but never enough. So was it a conscious decision on your part to walk away from that and from the constraints they were placing on you?

Is there a particular action from that time that still stands out for you?

Studio of Lust

And that would have changed the way you related with Genesis?

I also understand that he was very handy at faking wounds, is that right?

Cosey and Genesis P-Orridge in After Cease to Exist No 4, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1976.

There are some pretty gory pictures of the After Cease to Exist action.

So you were contrasting these deceptive or symbolic wounds with what seemed to be someone going through a really painful experience.

After Cease to Exist

But faking wounds is also a way of playing with the emotions of whoever is watching.

When it comes to body art, naked bodies often seem to be used to show that nothing is being hidden and that what you’re seeing is objective and transparent.

From the June and July 1977 issues of British porn magazine Fiesta. Images provided by Fiesta magazine.

How do you relate your nakedness in the live actions to that in the magazine actions?

In the films and magazines, you took on ready-made personas—different names and wigs—giving your body a certain anonymity. Maybe this becomes a sort of mask in contrast to your live actions.

Much of the tension of these actions seems to come from the pressure of the people watching you.

From the June and July 1977 issues of British porn magazine Fiesta. Images provided by Fiesta magazine.

What do you think of the boundary between your live actions and how you act in your daily life?

Have you done actions when no one was looking? How would they be different?

Selflessness

Where did they begin and how do they end?

Selflessness

Selflessness