Breyer P-Orridge: What am I reading…

“In the ’90s, the artist embarked on a startlingly extreme project to erase gender boundaries and reach a state of ‘pandrogeny’ with h/er (to use the preferred pronoun) wife Jacqueline Breyer, known as Lady Jaye. Together they became Breyer P-Orridge, a single unit that dressed alike, acted alike and, thanks to a series of cosmetic procedures including twin sets of breast implants and nose jobs, eventually looked alike, as documented in Marie Losier’s 2011 film The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye.”

http://www.factmag.com/2013/09/26/genesis-breyer-p-orridge-on-life-art-and-the-quest-for-pandrogyny/

I was looking up bio-artists after today’s class too, and I discovered Breyer P-Orridge, who is actually incredibly relevant to a lot of my themes. Breyer P-Orridge, as a single unit of being manifested in two people (I’m actually not sure which pronouns I should be using to refer to them), reminds me a lot of a physical manifestation of Castor and Pollux, except with way more of a relation to pop culture.

The interesting thing is that Lady Jaye, one half of Breyer P-Orridge, passed away in 2007, but Genesis Breyer P-Orridge continues to live the pandrogeny project they birthed together. In summary, they underwent surgery to look more and more like each other and began adopting the same kind of clothing and styling to transcend the limits of separate bodies.

I quote from the article,

“P-Orridge’s absolute dedication to erasing the boundaries between life and art, and between man and woman, is palpable in the freestanding soliloquys that seem to tumble out of h/er mouth at will, reaffirming the self-directed narrative; a legacy of many years of public speaking, shouting and acting up.”

This is terribly fascinating also because it could help me form some answers to the question I was exploring in my dictionary project – what happens to Pollux after Castor is killed by Lynceus, and how does he deal with that grief? I’m not entirely sure that that’s the core focus of my FYP any more, but it’s still a fact of the myth itself and it might still be productive to keep this as a consideration.

I wouldn’t delve into Bio-Art myself but I’m looking it up right now as a source of visual and conceptual inspiration.

Gorillaz: Rise Of The Ogre

Gorillaz_band_photo

I had an idea recently about how to flesh out my theme for my FYP. After doing the Gemini project I’m still keen on exploring duality, but instead of confining it to the realm of mythology I’m thinking of expanding a little into something a bit more contemporary.

My favourite band as a teenager was Gorillaz, and I followed them all the way from their Demon Days period up till now. (Gorillaz is a band consisting entirely of animated characters – none of them actually exist as figures in the real world.) I’ve always thought it was cool that Gorillaz concerts involved holograms of the fictional band members, but it was only recently that it struck me that the entire Gorillaz phenomenon is a perfect example of when fact and fiction start to blur.

In the Gorillaz autobiography, Rise Of The Ogre, an unnamed interviewer has conversations with all four Gorillaz members about their personal histories, their music and how Gorillaz’s look (or rather how Jamie Hewlett draws them) and sound has evolved over the years. The personal histories of the Gorillaz members are so deep and rich in authenticity and character that it’s almost too easy to believe that Murdoc, 2D, Russel and Noodle really exist and are having a conversation with the interviewer, and are not just the brainchild of Damon Albarn and Hewlett.

A band whose members don’t even exist (then again, how do we define existence? By the very fact that the Gorillaz members are now recognizably pop culture icons does that not pull them into existence in this world? And what is celebrity anyway, if the media plays along with Albarn and Hewlett and interviews cartoon characters they created? Marge Simpson has been in Playboy magazine, after all) has sold what is presumably hundreds of thousands of dollars in albums, concerts and merchandise and has successfully kept fans’ attentions on said fictional members instead of immediately associating Gorillaz with the images of Albarn and Hewlett. They’re not synonymous with one another (at least not to me), nor are any of the Gorillaz musicians personas of any of the creatives behind them. Is that not just mindblowing?

Gorillaz and their music have inspired me for the past seven years and I love how a work of fiction has given rise to real-life effects (i.e. Gorillaz may not be real in the same sense that Emma Watson is real, but their albums certainly are real and have given me countless hours of listening pleasure. I also have their band t-shirts and their autobiography, so there) on people and maybe even on modern music. I’d love for my FYP to play with the same kind of fact-fiction divide and blur it so much that people start believing in whatever it is that I create. That would be a wonderful kind of power.