When the performance art collective COUM Transmissions staged their exhibition Prostitution at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1976, a predictable moral panic ensued. The week-long show of bloody tampons, rusted knives and pornographic images of its group member Cosey Fanni Tutti prompted pearl-clutching parliamentarians to debate the future of art in parliament.
How little has changed. Fifty years later, right-wing politicians still decry contemporary art as a portent of civilisational collapse.
COUM folded in the same year as their ICA show and reformed as the experimental music group Throbbing Gristle. This anarchic, industrial music band, fronted by Genesis P-Orridge, helped to define the dirty underbelly of the UK post-punk scene with its jarring lyrics and sludgy electronica.
A film made during this liminal period bridges the two projects. After Cease to Exist (1977) features images of Tutti simulating the genital mutilation of her partner in art and life, Chris Carter, interspersed with scenes of Throbbing Gristle performing a concert wearing Nazi uniforms. (The band often donned the clothes of controversial and extremist figures as a means of rejecting their power.)
The film was screened earlier this year at the Paris project space Judy’s Death, located in the Montmartre studio apartment of the curator Hugo Bausch Belbachir. He funds Judy’s Death through loans from private foundations, with Fluxus Art Projects having covered most of the costs for this show. Their team members “were horrified watching the film”, he says. “I am surprised by how triggered people still get by COUM.”
Bausch Belbachir says that it is refreshing to engage with art that is “unapologetically impolite, which doesn’t make a case for itself”. Indeed, in an age where art workers must source funding for their work by emphasising its supposed virtues—as platforms for good politics, bridges between cultures, fundraisers for noble causes, or its status as an asset class—it feels all the better to indulge in something that is provocative, obscure and downright rude.