Igor Kropotov (Photo: Michael James Murray).
About halfway through Vice’s video about the hallucinogenic-honey harvesters of Nepal, correspondent Abdullah Saeed, dressed in a beekeeper suit, complains to the camera: “There’s bees everywhere. As soon as we got to the top of the hill our camera guy Billy [Voermann] got stuck in the back, so I know he probably hates holding that camera right now.”Â
(Art Work by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge)
There might be no other artist breathing today who lives their art as deeply and consistently as Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The renowned occultist and “wrecker of civilization” has repeatedly taken a spiky club to the larger culture, even to h/er own body, as a means of dismembering ingrained mores. S/he did this first as a founding member of Throbbing Gristle– a band whose embrace of bristling, harsh sounds and antagonistic politics sought to dishevel the status quo, and sparked the inception of industrial music– and subsequently with Psychic TV. With h/er new exhibition, Try to Altar Everything (opening March 11), P-Orridge will transform the Rubin Museum into a participatory “shamanic space,” inspired by h/er travels to the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. “We’re developing this bouncing conversation between the mundane and the sacred,” Genesis explained. “Everything can be sacred, and if you start to look for the sacred, you will find it.”