“The title for the show comes from a remark that Gysin made to Genesis, and Genesis to me: that magical training can only be passed on by the touching of hands.” — ST
An evening of solo and collaborative projects by Scott Treleaven and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, focusing on the shared influence... Read more
“The title for the show comes from a remark that Gysin made to Genesis, and Genesis to me: that magical training can only be passed on by the touching of hands.” — ST
An evening of solo and collaborative projects by Scott Treleaven and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, focusing on the shared influence of artist and mystic Brion Gysin. Gysin’s close friendship with Breyer P-Orridge, and in turn her friendship with Treleaven, has over time given rise to a number of aesthetic and philosophical affinities found in the work of all three, communicated from one to the other by direct contact.
Each has explored, in his or her own way, the nature of extreme mental states, ideas of eros and thanatos, and modern applications of occult thought. Permutations of the cut-up technique, invented by Gysin in the 1950s, can be found in the reordering of visual information by both Breyer P-Orridge and Treleaven. A preoccupation with the legend of the Cult of the Assassins led to Gysin collaborator William Burroughs’s novel The Wild Boys, Breyer P-Orridge’s collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and, later, Treleaven’s The Salivation Army, his VHS classic about a mid-90s movement centered around a Wild Boys/Psychick Youth-inspired zine. All demonstrate what Treleaven calls a “pre-Web concept” of “total intimacy and privacy, unmediated by uncontainable social networks.”
