At the beginning of Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Incognito a vitrine holds a delicate black lace bolero. It’s laid out with her first modelling shots, taken in Hull in 1972, a year before she moved to London and a few years after she joined COUM. In the photos, Cosey is pictured wearing nothing but unbuttoned bolero. She leans forward a little, looking directly at the camera, her expression perfectly unreadable. It’s one of a handful of shots from her very first nude shoot at 21, with a local family portrait photographer. She hoped to get some decent photos in preparation for her Magazine Actions, but both she and the photographer were amateurs at glamour shoots, and so she didn’t get what she needed.
There are a handful of these photos laid out, of her in the bolero, and in a leotard that was later used as a costume for a COUM show, but while it is remarkable so much early material survives, it is the bolero that stands out. This fragile bit of clothing, bought in a jumble sale, worn for this first shoot and later for one of her first stripteases, has survived moves from Hull to London, then presumably to Norfolk where she and Chris now live, and back to Hull. To be here in this vitrine now, it must have been thought of as important, then. You don’t keep things if you don’t think you’re going to have a future in which they will be needed. It speaks of Cosey knowing something of the value of her art from the very beginning. It is for me, a sort of mascot for the show, a bit of flimsy black lace bought at a jumble sale, that both covers and reveals, and which finds itself back in Hull, celebrated in the city where it debuted.
There is lots of clothing included in the show – tiny black hotpants that zip all the way through, a bra and thong augmented with hand-sewn silver sequins and matching lace gloves, shoes scuffed from use – each of which suggests its own lineage of Cosey’s art. These garments were mutable, worn across different strands of her output, creating unlikely links. That first photo shoot, for example, led to the Magazine Actions, which formed part of the infamous ICA Prostitution show just four years later in 1976, so the unassuming little bolero is closely linked to the show that gifted Throbbing Gristle their “wreckers of civilisation” epithet. A see-through bolero: a wrecker of civilisation.
The photos and the ephemera give a body and material to what was often live performance, and the overlapping strands of her work are hung together on the walls and in the vitrines. One sequence stacks three rows of photos, one of her modelling, one of her dancing, and another of her actions as performance art. In the description for the first, the text reads: “the photographer gives me many personalities, none of which are my own”.
One byproduct of the breadth of documentation – be it photos, letters, objects or clothes – often place the work in a historical moment, whether subtly in the tone of business letters typed up on headed paper, or a sea of grimy faced fellas watching a striptease in a pub. Across one wall is roughly half of her collection of 7”s used for her stripping, all scratched and roughly labelled as the property of ‘Scarlet’, the pseudonym she used, along with an exhaustive list of the pubs she worked in (many now closed).
This approach to archiving though, has a stark origin story. In Art Sex Money she recounts being thrown out by her dad, and not being given enough time to retrieve all her own belongings, meaning she had to break back into the house to retrieve the rest. Losing so much prompted what she described to Luke Turner as a “fastidious” approach to archiving. It is this fastidiousness – present in items like the scuffed shoes worn for dancing, and letters to ‘Mrs Orridge’, and a date book showing a busy week in October 1976 – that really make the show sing.
The showstopper is the series of photos taken by her TG bandmate Sleazy, from which the show takes its title, and which are hung alongside the white leotard she wears in the shoot (one of those worn for stripteases). Instead of taking it off, Sleazy shot her putting it on in front of a perfect fig-leaf green backdrop. Seven photos show her altering and then dressing in the leotard, from crouched and naked with scissors, to pulling up the legs and drawing it over her shoulders, to dressed and posed. In the context of the show it contains the clearest message of these multiple strands of activity; the overlaps of Scarlet and Cosey, and are a visual manifesto of her mantra. In these photos she is the artist, her body and her art captured in both process and exhibit, and her expression remains unreadable.
Incognito speaks of how the boundaries between the modelling, the dancing and the performance art are porous. You can get caught up in the sex and the nakedness; the fantasy poses or the bloody goo of a performance, but the body and the person are in them all. Attempts to untangle one strand fail – the leotards, shoes, and boleros will resist. These outfits allowed Cosey to create in disguise, and she used them across the porn and art, the action and the striptease. They are costume and disguise that cover and they reveal. Incognito traces an origin story and emergence of the self that is the engine and the heart of all of Cosey’s art, but it is a self that resists attempts to pin it down. And if you can’t pin down Cosey’s black lace bolero, you don’t stand a chance in pinning down Cosey.
Incognito by Cosey Fanni Tutte is at Humber Street Gallery, Hull, until 25 January. On Sunday 25 January, Cosey Fanni Tutti will be in conversation with Caroline Catz at the gallery from 6pm. For more details please visit.
