The retrospective that ended the collective and started the genre.
The Bureau files Prostitution as a manifesto because it functioned as one. It was not advertised as a manifesto. Its catalogue contained no list of theses. Its participants did not, in October 1976, think of themselves as founding a music; they thought of themselves as closing a chapter of performance art, with a retrospective at a publicly-funded London gallery and arguably as committing organisational suicide. The closing chapter became a founding chapter by accident; the organisational suicide became a birth by the same accident; and the document that this manifesto file describes is not, strictly speaking, a document at all but an eight-day occupation of three rooms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the press response to that occupation and the artefact that the press response was eventually folded into.
Some background. COUM Transmissions formed in Hull in 1969, around Genesis P-Orridge, then a Hull University student. Cosey Fanni Tutti, then Christine Newby, joined the following year. The group's earliest work was street-theatre adjacent: deliberate-misuse-of-public-space performance pieces involving costume, body modification, sexual material, ritual gestures and the kind of slow, calmly-administered transgression the British underground had been practising since the late 1960s and the Vienna Actionists had been practising for somewhat longer. By 1975 COUM had been funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, commissioned by the British Council and selected to represent Britain at the ninth Biennale de Paris. By autumn 1976 the work had reached a velocity at which a retrospective was both inevitable and the wrong idea.
Peter Christopherson, a designer at Hipgnosis (the studio responsible for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin album sleeves), had drifted into the group's orbit over the preceding eighteen months. Chris Carter, an electronics technician with a converted bedroom studio in Hackney, had joined just before the opening. The four of them, in the days before the show opened, decided that the opening-night live performance would take place under a new name. The new name was Throbbing Gristle. The name had been suggested by P-Orridge several months earlier and was, by mutual agreement, the worst available option. They went with it.
The exhibition itself was three rooms at the ICA, hung with photographs from Tutti's modelling work for adult magazines (Curious, Park Lane, Fiesta, Whitehouse, the British soft-porn periodicals of the mid-1970s), framed and lit and captioned as gallery objects; used Tampax tubes preserved in glass display cases; rusty knives and syringes; documentation photographs from COUM performances in Milan and Paris going back to 1971; assemblages of magazine clippings, hair and personal effects; and a small information-table at the entrance handing out a flyer the size of a folded A4 sheet, with a Cosey photograph on the front (the magazine image now stripped of its commercial context and presented as art-object) and an editorial statement on the back. The Bureau holds that the editorial statement is the document this entry is filed under, with the understanding that the document is incomplete without the eight-day occupation it accompanied.
The opening was on the evening of Monday 18 October 1976. The performance was Throbbing Gristle's first public appearance under that name and their third gig overall (the prior two had been small, private, semi-rehearsal events). LSD, a London punk band who would in the following months rename themselves Chelsea, played as a supporting act. Shelley, a striptease artist hired for the night, performed. The audience was a mix of art-world regulars, fashion-set hangers-on, established journalists, recent punk arrivals, sex workers from Soho (a short walk north of the ICA's premises on The Mall), Cosey's modelling colleagues, Hells Angels and the Conservative MP for Kinross and West Perthshire, Sir Nicholas Fairbairn, who had been invited and was conspicuous in the room. Fairbairn left early. Within twenty-four hours he was on television and in the press denouncing the exhibition as a sickening outrage, the participants as wreckers of civilisation, and the use of Arts Council funds for the show as a public scandal.
The phrase, in the conventional reading, had been intended by Fairbairn as a dismissal. In the reading the catalogue has retained, it had been intended by Fairbairn as a press kit. The Daily Mail headline of 19 October 1976 read WRECKERS OF CIVILISATION, in 144-point Roman caps, above the byline of a journalist named Roger Daniels. The Telegraph's leader the same morning declared that every social evil is celebrated; the Express ran State aid for Cosey's travelling sex troupe; the Sun, characteristically, settled on Mr Orridge is prostituting Britain and sending us the bill and ran a follow-up story for four consecutive days. The Mirror went with Bust-up at Gallery of Porn. By Wednesday morning the show had become news in the formal sense: a story the rest of the press needed to cover whether they had seen the exhibition or not. By Friday morning four Conservative MPs had tabled written questions in the House of Commons regarding the Arts Council's funding criteria and its responsibility to the public exchequer.
What happened next is the part the Bureau wishes to put on record because it is the part that turned the exhibition from a closed object into the manifesto this entry files it as. COUM responded to the press by treating the press itself as additional gallery material. Each morning, starting on the Wednesday, the day's newspaper clippings were cut out, framed and hung on the walls beside the rest of the work. By the end of the week the walls of the exhibition were covered with framed cuttings of denunciations of the exhibition; the exhibition was, by its closing day, partly an exhibition of itself in the press; and the cuttings were themselves being reported on in fresh cuttings, which were then framed and hung the following morning. The Bureau holds this strategy to be the most efficient piece of détournement the British art-world has produced in its tabloid era. The strategy ran the press's outrage back into the exhibition's argument at the speed the press was capable of generating outrage, which by Thursday was roughly twice a day.
Marina Vaizey, writing in the Sunday Times of 24 October, was less hostile and more useful. Her review took the position that the show was neither civilisation-wrecking nor especially shocking by the standards the British art-world had set for itself since the 1960s and that the press had over-reacted to material that was, in straightforward technical-art-criticism terms, of variable quality, restrained in its install and clearly the closure of a body of work rather than its breakthrough. Vaizey's headline, drier than the rest, was Much Ado about Nothing at the ICA. The Bureau considers Vaizey's review the most accurate review of the exhibition the contemporary press produced and the least-quoted, by a wide margin, in the later literature.
The show closed on Tuesday 26 October. The ICA's membership numbers had risen sharply over the week. The Arts Council's chair sent a letter expressing displeasure. The Conservative MPs' written questions received bureaucratic replies and were quietly archived. Genesis P-Orridge announced, at the closing, that COUM Transmissions was over and that performance art was over with it. Within six weeks the four people who had played the opening-night performance, calling themselves Throbbing Gristle, had constituted themselves as a band with a label and an address and had begun typing up the prospectus the Bureau files at M·03. The slogan on the spine of the prospectus, coined by Monte Cazazza at a dinner that autumn and put into circulation by Christopherson's photocopier, was a closing argument the exhibition had implied without making. The first record on the label, The Second Annual Report, was released a year later. The phrase industrial music for industrial people was on the spine. The phrase wreckers of civilisation was on the spine in a different way: as the title of Simon Ford's 1999 history, which remains the standard reference.
The Bureau notes, in closing, that the exhibition did not say what it said in the conventional manifesto manner. It did not declare. It did not propose. It did not list. It hung used Tampax in glass, put framed pornography on the walls, played a confrontational forty-minute live set on the opening night and let the British press do the rest. The most efficient manifesto is sometimes the one that does not write itself down. The Bureau respects this strategy, files it as a category and recommends the catalogue clipping the show generated, in aggregate, as the longest manifesto the genre has ever produced; eight days of it, written by people who would have been horrified to learn they were producing it.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Late Anthropocene · last revised c. the Regency era