Cosey Fanni Tutti - Art Sexe Musique

The hippie community had its conventions, even if they did not always make much sense. We rebelled against the system by acting like outsiders, but we did not hesitate to claim social security or state benefits. Poverty, hunger and a sense of responsibility towards Tremble, Moonshine and Gen made up my mind. If I took a job, Gen would be free to devote himself to art and we would 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... She is the one who tells us the story, and it is essential that we hear it from her: Art Sex Music offers a unique insight, rooted in intimacy, into the British underground, the world of pornography and the art scene. A multidisciplinary artist and 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, which highlights 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 talks to us about domestic work and striptease, squatting, drugs and forms, sex and love, subversion and caring for others. Although Cosey Fanni Tutti never stopped experimenting, her life quickly became based on an extreme principle of identity: my life = my work. Her story is that of a woman constantly fighting for her independence in her many family, artistic, sexual and romantic relationships. In a profusion of collaborations, through improbable successes, and to the rhythm of the joys and disappointments of reunions, we see the emergence of relationships of manipulation and domination, but also the formation of unfathomable friendships. In Art Sexe Musique, everything is in everything, but in the first person: the book is both a specific and a cross-cutting perspective on 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 4 November 1951 in Kingston-upon-Hull, England. A multidisciplinary artist, performer, visual artist, singer, composer and musician, she participated in the 1970s in the activities of the performance art group COUM Transmissions with Genesis P-Orridge, before co-founding the group Throbbing Gristle, known for its music prematurely labelled "industrial music", and then the duo Chris & Cosey. She regularly performed as a stripper, pornographic actress and model for erotic magazines..