Cosey Fanni Tutti
“Selflessness”
No. 2, 2002
Live Art Action
Beachy Head
Sussex, U.K.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

By Kate Green and Steve Peralta

“Industrialists” of the ‘70s produced experimental music, film, art and prose pushing the limits of the physical and the conceptual by stressing the seemingly infinite and at times anarchic ways in which their work could be produced. In the process, they helped to invent a social movement which affirmed creativity and expression based on active voice and experimentation.

Artist John Duncan in his 1976 piece titled “Bus Ride” used fish extract and the ventilation system of a hot Los Angeles bus to expose repressed sexual impulses and the oppressive social order they create.

Monte Cazazza is said to have walked the streets of San Francisco dressed as an old woman with a “loaded revolver in holster around his waist.” In his suitcase he carried a dead cat and a bottle of gasoline. When he visited friends, he would methodically take out the dead cat, pour gas on it, and fire it up while everyone looked on – aghast.

The apology wasn’t part of the industrialist’s lexicon.

“The basic inspiration or philosophy is that we’re primitive, but primitive in an urban way,” said Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder.

“We’re bullshit fighters,” added fellow bandmate, Richard Kirk.

One of those at the forefront of the ‘70s industrial movement was Cosey Fanni Tutti. It’s a matter of well-publicized debate about the significance of any one particular individual’s contributions to the movement, but Tutti’s own work as a contemporary artist and her work as one of the founding members of the seminal ‘70s industrial music group Throbbing Gristle can’t and shouldn’t be understated regardless of where the criticism begins. More…