Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything

For nearly half a century Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (British, 1950–2020) questioned the meaning and substance of identity through artistic endeavors, willful reincarnation, and physical shapeshifting. Embracing the body as not simply the vessel but the site of the avant-garde impulse, Breyer P-Orridge reinvented and reintroduced h/erself again and again—as Fluxus pioneer, groundbreaking performance artist, inventor of industrial music, “wrecker of civilization,” essayist and theoretician, and with her late wife Lady Jaye as pandrogyne. Breyer P-Orridge’s work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, including S/he is Her/e at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh (2013), and Life Is A Cheap Suitcase at Summerhall, Edinburgh (2014).

Beth Citron was previously the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Rubin Museum of Art. Her exhibitions for the Rubin Museum included Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Try to Altar Everything (2016), Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India (2014), Witness at a Crossroads: Photographer Marc Riboud in Asia (2014), and the three-part exhibition series Modernist Art from India (2011-13). She completed a PhD in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught in the Art History Department at New York University, from which she also earned a BA in Fine Arts.