Cease to Exist No. 4
Our story begins with an attempt to erease security. If you decide to clutch at a straw you must expect COUM to try and tear it away. COUM are not trying to produce 'good art' as collectievely agreed by critics and dealers.
1). Genesis stands holding a bottle half milk half piss. He drinks it as fast as he can without breathing, if it runs through his clothes[it] does not matter. He tries hard to keep all his muscles so tense that they hurt.
2). Cosey begins naked. She has open wounds on her breasts. She also has a raw slash from her fanny to her navel. It is coagulating, about an hour old. She takes a needle & thread and sews up her breast cuts very neatly, just as if she is sewing a pair of trousers.
3). Small pools of blood collect on thee floor amongst thee yellow polenta. shadows of arrows. Cosey takes a syringe and pushes thee needle into her sewn breast, filling it with blood. She injects thee blood slowly into thee top of thee cut from her fanny to her navel. It runs through thee cut into her cunt and onto thee floor. She sticks a second jypodermic right into her cunt filling it with a muxture of blood and milk.
4). Genesis removes his blood and milk soaked cloathes. Under them he wears a saran-wrap jock strap over his testicle area. He takes a hypodermic syringe and stabs it into a testicle, fills it with blood, pics a black egg off thee floor, stabs thee syringe into it, empties thee syringe.
5). Cosey takes a rusty razor blade and cuts a rectangle into thee skin oh her forearm. Carefully slicing under one edge she lifts up thee flap of skin and places a passport photograph of Genesis under thee flap licking off excess blood.
6). Genesis takes another syringe of blood from his testicles and injects it back into his forearm. He does this repeatedly, also injecting a total of seven blackk eggs with his own blood. He is stood on a square of sharp black nails and ice.
7). Cosey opens thee lips of her cunt wide and pushes in her fingers, masturbating.
8). Genesis fills a spinal syringe with milk, another with blood. He takes each in turn and injects all their contents in turn up his anus. He pisses inta a large glas. And he squeezes out thee last drop he farts and blood mingled with milk shoots out of his arse.
9). Cosey slithers through all thee liguid towards him, lapping it up, rubbing it into her cunt.
10). Genesis vomits trying to swallow a 10 inch steel nail.
11). They meet in a pool of vomit and join together cunt to cock, legs entwined, on thee wet floor.
"
I used to do things like stick severed chicken's heads over my penis, and then try to masturbate them, whilst pouring maggots all over it... In Los Angeles, in 1976, at the Isntitute of Contemporary Arts (LAICA), Cosey and I did a performance where I was naked, I drank a bottle of whiskey and stood on a lot of tacks. And then i gave myself enemas with blood, milk and urine, and then broke wind so a jet of blood milk and urine combined shot across the floor in front of Chris Burden and assorted visual artists. I then licked it off the floor, which was a not-clean concrete floor. Then I got a 10-inch nail and tried to swallow it, which made me vomit. Then I licked the vomit off the floor and Cosey helped me lick the vomit off the floor. And she was naked and trying to sever her vagina to her navel with a razor blade-- well, she cut it from her vagina to her navel with a razor blade, and she injected blood into her vagina which then trickled out, and we sucked the blood from her vagina into a syringe and injected it into eggs painted black, which we then tried to eat. And we vomited again. | which we then used for enemas. Then I needed to urinate, so I urinated into a large glass bottle and drank it all while it was still warm. (This was all improvised.) And then we gradually crawled to each other, licking the floor clean.('cause we don't like to leave a mess, y'know; after all, it's not fair to insult an art gallery). Chris Burden, who's known for being outrageous, walked out with his girlfriend, saying, "This is not art, this is the most disgusting thing I've ever seen, and these people are sick." In Amsterdam we did a performance in the red-light district. The people in the theater asked, "What kind of lighting do you want?" and we said, "Oh, just put on all the red lights." Then we played tapes of Charles Manson's LP, Lie, cut-up with soundtracks of trains going through thunderstorms, and we went through all all different kinds of fetishes. Sleazy cut his throat and had to kind of do a tourniquet on his throat, and Cosey and i did this thing of spitting at each other and then licking all the spit off, and then licking each other's genitals, and then having sexual intercourse while her hair was set on fire with candles. There was an audience of around 2,000 people. |
| And each day it got heavier, so that on Easter Sunday I was crucufied on a wooden cross, whipped with 2 bullwhips, covered in human vomit and chicken wings and chicken legs, while I had to hold burning torches - people in the audience could hear the skin burning on my hands. And then i urinated down Cosey's legs while she stuck a lighted candle up her vagina, so there were flames coming out of her vagina. Just ordinary everyday ways of avoiding the commercials on the television.... " | |