COSEY COMPLEX The ICA, 27 March 2010 Thirty-four years have passed since the infamously controversial Pornography

exhibition was staged by the artists collective COUM Transmissions at the ICA and shut down after only four days under the pressure of a wave of public outrage. The 1976 exhibition featured cuts from the soft-porn and hardcore magazines that had published pictures of artist Cosey Fanni Tutti, a form of objectified evidence of the experiment she had started two years earlier: to become an integral part of the sex industry as an artistic statement. By delegating the visual representation of her activity to an external agent (the photographer first, then the publisher, then the unaware consumer of those images), Cosey managed to make art through a complete surrender of her body and of any control on the use of her image, only to then reclaim it as an artist in a sort of ready-made form. The physical presence of her printed image in an artistic context is in fact not to be confused with a sort of 'finished work' or planned outcome: I had no intention of going in there to get one job, get a magazine published and then show it in a gallery. [...] I was interested in in the experience of being one of the girls, because that was important to me. I wanted to know what it feels like to be used in that way to feel bad, really. (Cosey Fanni Tutti in conversation with Andrew Wheatley. Sex, Magick, Utopia, Finance, stanleypickergallery: Public Lectures ON ART, no. 1, London 2009, p.37) Even the choice of her name was not directly hers: Cosey is short for 'Cosmosis', a name gave to her by Genesis P. Orridge, fellow member of COUM Transmissions and later of Throbbing Gristle. The 'Fanni Tutti' bit (a genderless variation on Cos fan tutte or Thus Do They All, title of a Mozart's opera where 'they' refers to all women) was added by a friend in a Mail Art postcard to her. The name Cosey, then, comes to represent the artist's practice almost as a separate entity from her as a person: a label, a definition, a concept, a methodology. This was the starting point from which writer Maria Fusco, editor of the experimental magazine The Happy Hypocrite and director of the MFA in Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, formulated the eccentric event titled Cosey Complex, a truly cacophonous clash of ideas, papers, performances and other various contributions loosely arranged around the idea of Cosey as methodology. Held at the ICA on 27 March 2010, COSEY COMPLEX was in fact quite far in intent from being a study day on, a homage to or a discussion about Cosey as an artist or even about her practice - this was no CoseyCon 2010, to quote the satyrical definition given by Graham Duff in his stand-up comedy-like intervention. Cosey was physically present in the room, as much as she was behind this bizarre exercise in coral aesthetic production, but present more as vessel than as content. Or as Maria Fusco brilliantly put it in her introduction to the COSEY COMPLEX Reader, the theoretical premise was to think of what might happen when you shift Cosey from noun to verb: thereby profoundly shifting the possibility of Cosey. 'To Cosey', then. Coseying. To make something happen by relinquishing control to a number of agents. A verb declined in its various interpretations, each of them absolutely external to the woman and the artist. The concept of Cosey gets thus repeatedly (mis)interpreted, violated, regurgitated, in a number of different ways that were never meant to fit with one another in more than just a coincidental or perhaps anecdotal way. Cosey Complex included interventions as diverse as Anthony Elms' lecture about Cosey's chosen

moniker (in comparison with that of jazz musician and cosmic preacher Sun Ra), readings of fictional (and seemingly unrelated) texts by Martin Bax and Chris Kraus, Rob Stone's autobiographical recounting of loose memories of Pornography and listening to Throbbing Gristle, and a performance of Harold Pinter's Dialogue for Three staged by Gerard Byrne. Clunie Reid's typically flashy video Somebody to Love (Squirt as Method) alternated images of squirting with TV commercials and Spongebob Squarepants clips on a disturbingly catchy dance remix of Somebody to Love. The excellent Daniela Cascella, sound theorist and co-founder of curatorial initiative Sound Threshold, participated with a recording of her disembodied voice, discussing the significance and mechanisms of the voice as medium, touching on examples like Chiara Guidi and Carter Tutti (Cosey again, in collaboration with Chris Carter also of Throbbing Gristle). But most interestingly, the accompanying COSEY COMPLEX Reader was created, designed and collated on site by Zak Kyes and Bedford Press, and distributed on the day as one of the commissions for Cosey Complex. Polyphonic in itself, the COSEY COMPLEX Reader contains even more strands of research, interpretations, suggestions and variables. One above all is the transcript of Richard Birkitt's interview with cultural geographer Craig Martin, mostly discussing the text After Method: Mess in Social Science Research by John Law. A metatext about the COSEY COMPLEX initiative as a whole, which can open up the debate in an infinite number of directions, turning the symposium into a sort of vectorial research format, so to speak. If most of this text sounded like a puzzling list of loosely related names, that is probably one of the foreseen outcomes of Cosey Complex. It is virtually impossible to sum up the events of that day in a way that can convey a sense of what Cosey Complex really was. This is because, as a verb/agent rather than as noun/object, this incarnation of Cosey is quintessentially experiential. In spite of this, presenting such epistemological mess by constraining it within the format of a conference (as pseudo-as it might have been) must have come across for most attendants as a slightly frustrating exercise, almost a controlled failure. I'm suspecting that Maria Fusco stuck to her plan as it was because she knew that somehow, overall or just at some point during the day, it was not going to work. And it was interesting enough for me, as an attendant, to see how. Valentina Ravaglia