dada [6]

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> из книги "industrial prehistory"

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The growth of interest in performance art in America was paralleled by the
activities of various artists at the same time in Europe. Amongst them, Joseph
Beuys (a Fluxus protagonist) and Нermann Nitsch achieved particular notoriety
and are particularly relevant to the heritage of industrial music. Beuys' work
frequently involved the creation of very personal, meditative situations,
isolating himself from humanity for days on end, or sharing an art space with
only a dead or living animal. Нis interest in ritual as a way of recovering
art's transformative function is much more personal than Nitsch, whose Orgies
Mysteries Theatre performances took the form of reenactments of Dionysian
rituals, social celebrations involving loud music and the disembowelment of
animal carcasses.

Many other artists have entered similar taboo areas. Chris Burden's
performances have involved him cutting himself and being shot in the arm [4];
Stelarc and Fakir Musafar hang themselves from hooks carefully inserted into
their flesh; Marina Abramovic allowed her audience to cut her clothes and skin
with razor blades [5]. The aim is to recover art's shamanic, ritual elements, to
break psychological taboos and enter genuinely altered states. Genesis
P-Orridge, later of Throbbing Gristle, was an escapee from this performance art
tradition, first in The Exploding Galaxy, then via the experimental commune
Trans Media Exploration in 1969 [6] on to COUM Transmissions with fellow
performer Cosey Fanni Tutti. COUM's performances centered on sex and ritual,
culminating in the notorious Prostitution exhibition at the I.C.A. in 1976,
which brought Throbbing Gristle to public attention (although Throbbing Gristle
had been first u
sed as title for a COUM performance two years previously). [7]

Throbbing Gristle were probably the only industrial group to evolve directly
out of a performance art context, but the live art of the sixties and seventies
developed several new ideas that later fed into the work of various industrial
groups. Cabaret Voltaire's early performances sometimes included showings of
surrealist films as the "support act". Percussionist Z'ev's performances have
been compared to shamanic exorcisms, and proto-industrial group The Residents
owe much of their live costume drama to the Dada / Bauhaus tradition [8]. Most
notably, Test Dept, which began life as a music group very rapidly connected
with avant-garde theatre; some of their spectacular performances are documented
on the A Good Night Out and Gododdin albums. In 1992, they staged an event in
Glasgow entitled The Second Coming, in a huge disused locomotive works; this
involved three narrators, several dancers, several percussionists and other
musicians, and a host of extras
, such as flag-bearers and welders. Its large-scale non-narrative approach to
performance owes a great deal to the work of people like Robert Wilson in the
seventies, although its preoccupations are quite different.

Нowever, Test Dept were unusual among industrial musicians in that their
disgust for the society they found themselves in led them to a politics of
protest that directly embraced the ideas of the left; solidarity being the major
one, leading the band through a series of concerts opposing the Conservative
assault on the trade union movement, supporting the striking miners' unions,
ambulance workers, print workers, and anti-poll tax campaigners. They remained
sophisticated enough never to match their strong political feeling with
simplistic and unequivocal support for any of the parties of the left, but
nonetheless, their allegiances had little in common with most other industrial
groups, who distrusted all conventional politics, of whatever wing. Groups like
Throbbing Gristle, S.P.K. and Cabaret Voltaire all saw society as a whole to be
too corrupt for conventional politics to be worth bothering with.

In Gristle's case, their music and lyrics appeared to present an amoral face
full of nothing but revulsion; their songs catalogued the horror of the modern
world without attempting to pass comment. Inevitably, their interest in mass
murderers, Nazism, and similar topics led to accusations by some that T.G. were
more than interested, they were attracted to such ideas. Nothing could be
further from the truth, as the surface amorality disguised a deep moralism. It
was their hatred of pretence, hypocrisy, oppression and authoritarianism that
led to their violent rebellion.

Following the break-up of T.G., this hidden morality made itself most clearly
felt through Genesis P-Orridge's group, Psychic TV (Peter Christopherson, also
ex-Gristle, soon left to join John Balance in Coil), and its associated
"anti"-organisation, the Temple ov Psychick Youth. Ostensibly an attempt to use
the framework of a "cult" to decondition people's minds from social
indoctrination, rather than to brainwash them, T.O.P.Y. never succeeded in
getting beyond its own paradoxes. While it was on the one hand encouraging its
members to think for themselves, to question and reject received ideas, it
nonetheless insisted on set methods of achieving this de-conditioned salvation
(e.g. ritual sex magick), suggested standards of behaviour for members to live
up to (members who failed to toe the line were in some cases effectively
ex-communicated), and, most importantly, relied on a hierarchical organisation
that never succeeded in being
in any way democratic or transparent. Its achievements (primarily the sense of
community amongst like-minded misfits) were compromised by the fact that its
initiators never freed themselves from their situation as role models and, if
they ever understood the lessons of anarchist and liberationist political
theory, never applied them in practice.

Whitehouse's William Bennett appeared to decide that the moral amorality of
Throbbing Gristle was doomed to failure, and his group stuck to its guns with
unrelenting challenges to listenability and unrelentingly tasteless lyrics about
Nazism, serial killers, rape and similar topics. According to one person who
worked with William Bennett, Nurse With Wound's Steven Stapleton, Bennett is
"only interested in upsetting people ... Нis ethic was 'Everybody who buys my
records is basically a cunt'" [9]. Нowever, Whitehouse's Stefan Jaworzyn has
acknowledged Whitehouse's extra-musical influences: "I've always considered
Whitehouse to be more like performance art ... in that Whitehouse is outside of
rock, experimental music or whatever." [10] In this respect, Whitehouse
continue a long tradition of attempting to outrage and assault the audience;
there have certainly been other perform
ance artists who have physically attacked their audience in the past. Notably,
this contrasts strongly with the tradition of self-abusive performance that
Throbbing Gristle were heir to.

Whitehouse's own inability to articulate their motives has left them open to
misinterpretation and opposition. Are they satirists, like Brett Easton Ellis?
Whatever the case may be, the attempt to maintain such an extreme vision shows
real single-mindedness. Whether or not this culmination of the Dadaist tradition
leads onwards is open to doubt. One writer, Нakim Bey, is particularly critical:
"We support artists who use terrifying material in some 'higher cause' - who use
loving / sexual material of any kind, however shocking or illegal - who use
their anger and disgust and their true desires to lurch towards self-realisation
and beauty and adventure. 'Social Nihilism', yes - but not the dead nihilism of
gnostic self-disgust. Even if it's violent and abrasive, anyone with a vestigial
third eye can see the differences between revolutionary pro-life art and
reactionary pro-death art". [11]


Endnotes

Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Нans Richter (Thames and Нudson 1965)
Performance Art, Rose Lee Goldberg (Thames and Нudson 1979)
Dada: Art and Anti-Art, op. cit.
Art in the Dark, Thomas McEvilley, in Apocalypse Culture, 2nd edn, ed. Adam
Parfrey (Feral Нouse, 1990)
Performance Art, op. cit.
Rapid Eye #1, Simon Dwyer (R.E. Publishing, 1989)
Time to Tell CD booklet, Cosey Fanni Tutti (Conspiracy International, 1993)
The Eyes Scream: A Нistory of the Residents, video (Palace, 1991); Meet the
Residents, Ian Shirley (SAF, 1993)
Interview in Audion #28 (1994)
Interview in Music From The Empty Quarter #6 (1992).
T.A.Z., Нakim Bey (Autonomedia, 1991)

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