Archive release
COUM Transmissions. Copyright Breeches
<div>London: COUM, 1973. 1st edition.</div> <div>One of 200 copies. 24mo. Stapled wrappers. Unpaginated (60pp. print- ed on rectos only). A ‘work in progress / in- terim report’, litho-offset in Cullompton by the Beau Geste Press. As Simon Ford explains in Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle, copyright became a major theme of COUM’s work in<br /> <br /> 1972. The book project started in April 1973 when Genesis P-Orridge sent David Mayor ‘a parcel containing three “copyrighted” photographs of [Cosey Fanni] Tutti. The book, [sic] consisted of purple tinted photographs of objects, places, and people, all marked by P-Orridge with the copyright symbol (like an artist’s signature, a symbol of ownership). His project was a further development of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the ready-made (where the artist merely needed to sign or select an object for it to become a work of art). In P-Orridge’s case the artist only had to copyright an object or situation for it to be transformed into a masterpiece, his masterpiece. The truly megalomanical [sic] scale with which P-Orridge carried out his appropriation and copy- righting parodied career artists who treated their art works as commodities, as things that could be bought and sold, just like other products.’</div> <div>Also amongst the photographs are copyright situations at FLUXshoe Nottingham, involving Paul Woodrow and the Midland Group Gallery, and images of P-Orridge in his ‘Copyright Breeches’, described by Ford as ‘a pair of flared trousers... made for him by Tutti and covered in a patchwork of stencilled copyright symbols’. Near Fine, with a little unobtrusive soiling to the upper wrapper. Also present are the stamps ‘FILE UNDER COUM’, ‘FLUXarse VOID’ (a take-off of Fluxus West and its stamp), and the date 29 JUNI 1974.<br /> <br /> </div>
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