Welcome back to i-Dentity, where we celebrate global subcultures, past and present. This week, we caught up with a true countercultural icon, who for decades has shocked the world with her radically autobiographical work: Cosey Fanni Tutti. 

Cosey’s multidisciplinary career has spanned the course of five decades, often with identity at its core, and she’s been a member of art collectives Throbbing Gristle, COUM Transmissions and Chris & Cosey.  “My life is my art, my art is my life,” she has famously said, refusing to define her practice by any one discipline. “I don’t want to limit myself in any way. If I’ve got something to do, I will look at how to express myself,” she told us. 

Her work has spanned music, performance, costume, photography, collage, mail art, forging connections between different creative realms — and often it has placed herself at its centre, provoking in the process. “I don’t want to limit myself in any way — if I’ve got something to do, I will look at how to express myself,” she says. 

Born Christine Carol Newby in 1951, the daughter of a fireman and a wages clerk from Hull’s Bilton Grange council estate, Cosey Fanni Tutti as she is now known, took her name from Mozart’s famous opera, which translates as “That’s What All Women Do”. In 1969, she co-founded the music and performance art collective COUM Transmissions, which drew inspiration from surrealism and underground music, challenging aspects of conventional society. 

In 1973, Cosey and COUM moved to London, where she continued to develop her solo performance practice. Sex has been a part of Cosey’s work since the beginning, most notably in 1976, when she and COUM staged a now-infamous exhibition at the ICA in London titled ‘Prostitution, the poster for which featured magazine spreads from Cosey’s two-year foray into the porn industry as part of her art practice, along with a 5ft dildo and a Perspex box containing her used tampons, which were crawling with maggots. Her engagement with sex work was an investigation of self and sexuality in the context of the sex industry — and at the time, the exhibition was debated in Parliament, where a conservative MP claimed that she and COUM was "the wreckers of civilization". As a result of the coverage, her mother never spoke to her again.

“I don’t call it bravery, it’s more determination,” she says. “Not to just carry on, but to not allow people to hold you back and hold you down, and silence you.” To this day, her work is both radical and, at times, conceived to make the viewer uncomfortable. “I’m not interested in decorative art,” she has previously said, adding that she considers counterculture one of her biggest driving forces. “It was freedom of expression completely,” she explains. “To be yourself, that was what was important.” 

Though she worked as part of countercultural, anti-consumerist art collectives for the first two decades of her career, it wasn’t until the 1990s that her work was celebrated by the mainstream, acquired by institutions and displayed along the likes of Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, and Gilbert and George. Right now, some of her works are on display as part of Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt exhibition. The first of its kind, this exhibition is a wide-ranging exploration of feminist art by over 100 women artists working in the UK. Her autobiography, Art Sex Music, was published in 2017. 

In this episode, we sat down to discuss an illustrious life spent in the counterculture, and the radical ideas that still sit at the beating heart of her work.