La Liaison Érotique: Genesis P-Orridge Cut Up

     P-Orridge (right) and his late wife Jaquline Breyer, 2007 Photo: Laurie Leber

On display at Invisible Exports in the L.E.S this month is "30 Years of Being Cut Up;" Over 80 pieces of mixed medium work from controversial & avant-garde anti-hero, Genesis P-Orridge. (Pronounced pee-orridge)
In addition to this recollective collection spanning three decades of collage work, photomontage, and Expanded Polaroids, P-Orridge has fashioned himself into becoming his late wife Jaquline Breyer through a long term transformation entitled "Pandrogeny," emploring Lady Jaye's strategy of "cutting-up" to use "plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, 'pandrogynous' character, 'BREYER P- ORRIDGE;'" a focus on the fiction of self.

“We fell in love the minute we saw each other, and as we became more and more obsessively in love, we had that whole feeling of ‘I wish I could eat you up. I wish I could just take you, and I become you and you become me,’ ” he says of Lady Jaye.

Frustrated by the limitations of language in expressing true love, both received matching sets of breast implants, continuing on with over $200,000 worth of facial reconstruction and hormone therapy from 2003 - 2007. For them, 'Pandrogeny' meant absolute resemblance and complete immersion of identity, mirroring each other in every aspect, from mannerism to hairstyle to everyday dress.  "The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousness; a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union."

Tragically in 2007, Breyer died of stomach cancer, and the project of a lifetime had become an impossible completion. In the words of friend, Katy Paycheck "To me, preformance art is the same as a painting. There's no difference at all. So you're in the middle of a painting that you'll never finish...and it's just this twilight for the rest of your life."
It is undeniable that Lady Jaye and P-Orridge finally found a form of devotion to express their unique 'Language of Love," which in the end could be the most important accomplishment of all.