S/HE IS HER/E
In 2000 Genesis P-Orridge published S/HE IS HER/E: Poems for Thee Majesty, 500 copies printed in Kathmandu during Bada Dashain and bound in red Nepalese paper. Copy 161 came to the archive this autumn, from the collection of James Birch.
On its title page it is signed “Genesis P-Orridge”. Three years later, in New York, the copy was reworked by hand. On its rear pastedown, beside a collage and an ink drawing, it is signed again, in red crayon, “Breyer P-Orridge”, followed by “NYC 2003”.
Between the two signatures one artist has become two. Between them, too, sit three men who never appear in the book’s text: Brion Gysin, Endre Tót and James Birch. Each is present in it all the same, as a dedication, a rubber stamp and a provenance.
The book is dedicated, among others, to Brion Gysin. P-Orridge met Gysin in the 1970s and took from him the cut-up: texts sliced and recombined until they belonged to neither author. Gysin and William Burroughs called the result of their collaborations “the Third Mind”.
Breyer P-Orridge said plainly where Pandrogeny came from. If two writers cut up together produce a third, they reasoned, two people might do the same with themselves. “We cut ourselves up,” Genesis later put it, to make “a third entity”.
Copy 161 is that idea in small. Its pastedowns hold a found children’s-book illustration torn in two: schoolchildren on the front, a chained, Krampus-like demon leading them away on the back. The book’s own pages are what separates the halves. The second signature does the same with a name: “Breyer” in Lady Jaye’s hand, “P-Orridge” in Genesis’s.
On the first leaf is a rubber stamp: “IFYOUREADTHISWEWILLHATEYOU / Endre Tót & Genesis P-Orridge”. Tót, the Hungarian conceptual artist, built much of his work from rubber stamps carrying short declarations. In the 1970s he and P-Orridge were correspondents in the international mail-art network, the postal circuit through which artists exchanged work outside the gallery system.
The network left another mark here. The title page is stamped “From the Files of Scotland Yard”. It recalls G.P.O. versus G.P-O, the 1976 case in which the Post Office prosecuted P-Orridge and COUM Transmissions over their mail art.
Whether the Tót stamp records a joint work or was cut by P-Orridge alone is not yet known. Either way, it carries that circuit into a book signed in New York nearly thirty years later.
James Birch met Genesis in London in the early 1980s. In June 2003 he gave Genesis and Lady Jaye their first UK survey, Painful but Fabulous, at his A22 Gallery in Clerkenwell. It included new work under the name Breyer P-Orridge.
The invitation reproduced Transgendered Sacred Heart (2003): a found prayer card of the Sacred Heart, reworked with a Polaroid of a bandaged, tattooed torso holding a glass vessel of blood where the heart should be. The same image is inside copy 161. The same “With Everything / Limited” blind stamp marks both the book and an envelope of the pair’s 2003 Prayers for Pandrogeny & Breaking Sex cards. Each card closes with the book’s title, “S/HE IS HER/E”.
So how did a book signed in New York reach a London dealer? In 2003 Genesis and Lady Jaye lived in Ridgewood, Queens. Was it sent through the post, like the mail art it quotes? Was it made with the A22 show in mind and left out of it, or given to Birch afterwards as thanks? The book holds no postmark or address. Birch himself may hold the answer, and we have written to ask.
Three Men, One Third
Gysin supplied the method, Tót the circuit, Birch the room where it was shown. None of them made this book. What they share is the idea it carries: that a work, like a name, can belong to no single author.
One of the book’s stamps reads “It would be a mistake to think E was ever really alive.” The “E” stands where an “I” should be.
Thank You for Reading
And something new is on its way: a physical home for the archive. More on that soon.
Private View
Your 15 Minutes Just Became Eternity
Genesis P-Orridge, 1988–2004, in six objects.
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709 OBJECTS · 1922–2026
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