Art Sexe Musique

“The hippie kingdom had its conventions, even if they didn’t always make much sense. We rebelled against the system by playing the fringe, but we didn’t mind collecting social security or state benefits. Poverty, hunger and a sense of responsibility to Tremble, Moonshine and Gen made up my mind. If I took a job, Gen would be free to devote herself to art and we’d have enough to pay for groceries, rent and raw materials.”

This is the story of Christine Newby, known as Carol, Cosmosis, Cosey, Cosey Fanni Tutti… It’s her story, and it’s essential that we hear it from her: Art Sexe Musique offers a uniquely intimate insight into the British underground, pornography and art world. A multi-disciplinary artist and a key figure in the history of industrial music (with Throbbing Gristle) and synth wave (with Chris & Cosey), Cosey Fanni Tutti is also known for her years with the variable-geometry collective COUM Transmissions, as well as for her work as a performer and visual artist, highlighting the porosity between the art market and the sex industry, the need to perform rituals, and so much more. Drawing on excerpts from her diaries, she tells us about domestic work and striptease, squatting, drugs and forms, sex and love, subversion and caring for others. While Cosey Fanni Tutti has never ceased to experiment, her life was soon based on a principle of identity taken to the extreme: my life = my work. Her story is that of a woman constantly fighting for her autonomy, in her multiple family, artistic, sexual and sentimental relationships. In an abundance of collaborations, improbable successes and the joys and disappointments of reunions, we see the emergence of relationships of manipulation and domination, as well as unfathomable friendships. In Art Sexe Musique, everything is in everything, but in the first person: the book is both a situated and transversal view of the English underground from the 1960s to the present day, and an electrifying testimony to what art does to a life.

Cosey Fanni Tutti was born Christine Carole Newby on November 4, 1951 in Kingston-upon-Hull, England. A multidisciplinary artist, performer, visual artist, singer, composer and musician, in the 1970s she took part in the activities of the performance art group COUM Transmissions with Genesis P-Orridge, before co-founding the band Throbbing Gristle, known for its music early described as “industrial music”, and then the duo Chris & Cosey. She has regularly performed as a stripper, pornographic actress and model for erotic magazines.