Cosey’s perspective on being an artist reflects her sentiments about growing up in Hull’s working class community. Free from both humility and pretention, her approach to art and music has consistently championed direct experience, the limitless possibilities of individual expression and the efficacy of transgression with immeasurable, complex meanings.
I don’t have an attitude of entitlement about me whereas a lot of people I work with do. That’s where their confidence comes from, the class structure. The whole thing about the entitlement attitude is they feel they can do what they want and it’s right. You can’t argue with someone like that.
I come from a very working class background and I know how strong you have to be to withstand all the pressures within that community. It builds a kind of ruthless determination because you have to fight so hard for your place in society.
As a child I was always fighting physically with everybody. When I was nine I remember thinking it was great [being] able to physically suppress every boy in my class – except my boyfriend, I left him alone. I think my dominatrix days started very early!
I wasn’t a bully, it’s just if someone started pushing me around physically then I would answer in the same way. I wouldn’t do what they do now, try and talk it down. I mean, I would now because I’m more mature but when you're young your instincts kick in.
It’s very rare to get a working class person that won’t defer to someone a class above them. There is a small percentage of people that are strong enough to work their way right through – that have the determination to break down the class structure, [which is] a manufactured thing. We’re all human beings capable of doing everything we set our minds to, it’s just whether we’ve been put in a position and a mindset that we think we can.
Cosey and Genesis first moved to Beck Road in London’s East End in 1973. At the time, the borough of Hackney’s dilapidated houses and warehouses had yet to be converted into desirable flats and studios. The two started as squatters before legitimising their residency, establishing a blueprint for other artists and hangers-on in the decades to come.
The [middle classes] don’t need to be squatting so why are they? It’s a lifestyle choice [for them]. These great ideas get swallowed up by middle class people who have the money to do it. You think, oh for God’s sake, you need people to tell you how to live your life?
We really didn’t have any money. We came across some squatters who were moving out and offered us the house. The whole road was scheduled for demolition and the council was rehousing its tenants and leaving the houses empty.
When we squatted we approached the [artist-led] Acme Housing Association to legalise our occupation with the council on a temporary, minimal rent basis and agreement to vacate when demolition was due. We were the first artists to live down Beck Road; we were paying about two quid a week rent.
As council tenants moved out we occupied the houses and turned them over to Acme and that’s how the street became so full of artists. The demolition order was cancelled and they built it up as an artists’ community. It’s our fault!
People own their own houses now [in Hackney] I presume? It’s like pretending at life isn’t it? I don’t know if I want to see that. [I walked] Martello Street, across London Fields to the shops down Broadway Market and then home to Beck Road every day. In my mind there’s still the butcher’s with sawdust on the floor and the chopping block; the old shop with all the shelves – you had to go up and ask for what you wanted. There was a little old lady there, she was fantastic. Complete with cat.
COUM performances often included displays of bodily fluid-letting, self-mutilation and graphic sexual acts. In 1976 the group’s notorious exhibition, Prostitution, at the ICA featured, amongst other things, photos from pornographic magazines featuring Cosey.
She had been working in the sex industry and continued to do so for the next few years in films, magazines and strip tease. Cosey used her body to directly investigate the relationship between private and public, production and consumption, civilisation and primitivism, while also taking advantage of her natural ability to cause a sensation by the simple act of being female.
I didn’t do it because no one had ever done it before—I didn’t realise it at the time—I did it because it was an area I wanted to explore. That came through using pornographic images in mail art. I thought it’d be nice to see what’s going on, you know, what they have to do to set everything up and how they feel. That was more important to me, how they feel when having these photographs taken, what it’s like to create these images. That’s how and why I got into it. You can’t ignore [the sex industry]. Ignoring it is as deadly as just doing nothing. It’s the same as doing nothing.
It’s such a long subject. Some days you feel fine, other days you feel like crap, you feel used and dirty and you want to go home. You don’t want to do it. I’ve always thought, if I feel like this and I’ve got a reason for doing it, I’ve got something to work with other than this, I don’t know what the others are going to feel like, you know? It was the same with strip tease.
It’s an experience and an exploration of what it’s like to be manipulated or what it’s like to have sex with no emotion and make sure the angles are right so the photographs can be taken. And to know that at the end of it someone is going to pick up the magazine or watch the film and masturbate or really get off or just have a good laugh… that whole subject is a minefield of possibilities.
I’ve been put in feminist shows which retrospectively I don’t mind because Feminism now has a different definition for me. In the 70s Feminism was basically all about knocking men and I had nothing against men, I adored men – I still do.
What I have a thing against are people who try to compartmentalise and separate us all the time. I have a problem with misogyny, sexism – I come across it all the time and that annoys the life out of me the same way the class system does. It’s just another division of people, one-upmanship based on nothing at all.
I don’t recognise any of it, I genuinely don’t see male and female in humanity, I just see humanity and everyone is equal. It confuses me that people can actually think one human being is more worthy than another; I can’t figure that out.
From a personal aspect, my artistic criticism and analysis of [working in the sex industry] could go on for years. I’m engaging with it now in a totally different way because when you're in there you don’t see it the same way as you do when you’re outside.
Shortly after Prostitution, COUM underwent a transformation when members Tutti, P-Orridge, Carter and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson took up the Throbbing Gristle mission full time, unaware that their experiments in sound would resonate with countless devotees over the years to come.
None of us were really trained but the transition was quite natural; we were all heavily into music before TG. Chris had built his own synth and had his own band. Sleazy had done djing and me and Gen had done experimental music within COUM.
We put the skills we had together and did something that was anti-music, really, as it was perceived at the time. It was ’74 - ’75 when we really began working together and it was all Saturday Night Fever.
The sequencing and everything [to Donna Summers’ I Feel Love] was fantastic. That kind of thing inspired Chris. I was stripping at the time so a lot of that music was going on when I was working. I would pick up on 12” singles that were out.
I still play the cornet – I really love the cornet. I always enjoy playing my guitar but with TG I can really thrash it about so it’s quite a different mindset then with the Carter Tutti stuff, which is more subtle.
When I do my laptop work I’ve gotten into Ableton. I did that on the TG tour. It’s very bizarre how people see [me]; even though I'm sat at the laptop and there’s stuff coming out of the speakers they assume I’m not doing it, that it’s the boys. It’s not the kind of sound people expect a woman to make. People don’t expect me to be that loud or aggressive.
