How Genesis P-Orridge Turned the Post into Protest

On 11 September 1974, a manila envelope made its way via air mail from the UK to Canada. Addressed to “Genital Pyrhea” at 241 Yonge Street in “Torontoe”, the mailer is covered in ink stamps of an armillary sphere – a globe-like instrument once used to chart the heavens. On further inspection, the red stamp reveals itself to be shaped like a baby pacifier, inscribed with the words “Global Infantilism.”

The envelope’s intended recipients were AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, the three members of self-professed “glamorous” art collective General Idea. Founded in the late 1960s, the influential trio made witty, conceptual work that critiqued mass media and gender conformity – notably the high drollery of their parodic beauty contest Miss General Idea Pageant (1971).

Genesis P-Orridge was the sender of the bedazzled package, its goofball insignia and wordplay characteristic of the British artist and musician’s taboo-obliterating sensibility. A founding member of confrontational performance art collective Coum Transmissions, groundbreaking industrial music group Throbbing Gristle, and gender-expression/body-modification project Pandrogeny, throughout the 1970s P-Orridge maintained a robustly conspicuous art-correspondence habit that would eventually land h/er in legal hot water.

The impetus for the international exchange between P-Orridge and General Idea first came in 1972, when the Toronto-based group launched counterculture FILE Magazine. A pioneering zine that solicited contributions from its network of readers, issues of FILE included a directory connecting sympatico artists and writers around the world, bolstering an already flourishing mail-art scene.

“Mail art was particularly important in Canada,” says Dallas Fellini, who curated the current show of P-Orridge’s correspondence with General Idea, now on view at Art Metropole. “Canadian museums were not showing contemporary art in the same ways that it was being shown in other geographies; artists saw mail art as a way to circumvent institutional gatekeeping and disseminate their own work.”

The call for creative exchange was eagerly heeded by P-Orridge, who wrote about London punk band Alternative TV for FILE’s 1977 Punk ’Til You Puke issue, and spent roughly half a decade posting copious amounts of material from Hull, then London, to FILE headquarters in downtown Toronto. Along with letters, h/er personalised packages included photos (graphic pornography; Genesis in a ‘Fetish’ T-shirt), negative press (“I wish I’d gone home” reads the title of a Throbbing Gristle show review) and stickers (“COUM Guarantee Disappointment”). All were delivered in envelopes adorned with DIY symbology, non-sequiturs and the odd dripping penis.

“For Genesis, it was significant that s/he had faced a great deal of censorship for h/er art,” Fellini says, referencing P-Orridge’s regular run-ins with the law, booking agents and the press. Swapping ideas and materials with other artists through the post was “a cheap, democratic way to make and collect art without having to conform to the commercial market.”

In a letter from 1977, featuring h/er usual substitution of ‘E’ for ‘I’, P-Orridge reflects on a can of Campbell’s soup signed by Andy Warhol that s/he received as a gift: “E know he’ll sign ANYTHING which is why E like it cos its worthless.” Another letter, this one from 1974, captures a more poetic side of P-Orridge, as s/he shares sensory reflections from a recent trip to Brussels: “Green blood spilling into first class corridors, musty smell of Wild Beuys in locker rooms, lit by flickering arc lamps.”

A 1976 clipping from The Guardian shared by P-Orridge reports on h/er first-of-its-kind conviction for posting seditious postcards through the General Post Office – a trial satisfyingly referred to in the press as “GPO v GPO”: “…Orridge (‘a transvestite when I feel like it’) went down for £20 on each count in spite of comparing [h/er] cards (one satirised Her Majesty, and another contained extracts from a pretty mild sex story) with the works of Rubens, Modigliani, and seaside postcard artists.” In the accompanying letter, s/he laments not yet receiving the latest issue of FILE, and alludes to h/er court fine:

“We never saw the Glamour Issue of FILE, nor thee New York issue. Still E guess its cos wee haven’t paid. Thee enclosed press cuttings wee thought might be of interest too you. Is it one of thee first prosecutions of this type of mailartists? E don’t know butter it costs me £300 altogether, which is why we are not able to send you any money for a FILE glam wham.”

In 1974, Bronson, Partz and Zontal established Art Metropole, now the world’s longest-running artist-led bookstore. The non-profit venture is also an exhibition space, publisher, and home to tens of thousands of books, magazines, video, multiples, posters and ephemera.

“General Idea’s FILE and Art Metropole became the archive that preserved the legacy of mail artists like Genesis,” says Fellini. While the General Idea/P-Orridge exchange seems to have lasted between 1973 and 1979, Fellini is quick to mention that “Genesis often intentionally misdated many of the materials s/he sent, so h/er artwork is particularly difficult to date.”

FILE ran for 26 issues between 1972 and 1989, with cover stars including Debbie Harry, Tina Turner and Mr Peanut (probably not the real one…). And while the Yonge Street address on P-Orridge’s manila envelope now houses a Money Mart, Art Metropole celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2024 at its current College Street location, where the rebel spirits of FILE, General Idea and P-Orridge live on.

Correspondence by Artists: Genesis P-Orridge is on at Art Metropole until 31 May.