Cosey Fanni Tutti
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Cosey Fanni Tutti (born Christine Carole Newby on 4 November 1951, in Hull, England) is best known as a performance artist and for her time in Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey.
Before both of these she was a performer with COUM Transmissions in 1969. Her addition changed the nature of the group which, when she joined, was still mostly a musical venture. From that point on, COUM performances became events or, in sixties parlance, happenings, involving props, costumes, dance, improvisation and street theatre.
Cosey continues to release solo recordings, including a retrospective deluxe box set with many photos and text, called Time To Tell, and she continues to perform as a performance artist in the Dada tradition. She also had a long career as a stripper and in the fields of pornographic film and magazines, stemming from a desire to incorporate her own image into collages she produced in this period. This willingness to deliberately and consciously participate in the process of commercial image production has inspired a number of visual and performance artists, among them Joe Potts and John Duncan. Some of her performance art work has also drawn on her experience as an adult performer. She was regular performer at the Raymond Revuebar in London, England, during the early 1970s.
Her name came about in 1973 after having formally changed it from Cosmosis. According to John Ford, "Cosey Fanni Tutti" was suggested to her by mail artist Robin Klassnick, and it comes from the opera Così fan tutte, meaning literally "They [women] are all the same."
Music was used in some of Tutti's performance art. The use of music lead to Cosey's interest in the concept of 'acceptable' music and she went on to explore the use of sound as a means of physical pleasure or pain. In 1976 she co-founded the group Throbbing Gristle with Chris Carter, Peter Christopherson and Genesis P-Orridge. They disbanded in 1981.
In honor of the dawn of the 21st century, Chris & Cosey changed its name to Carter Tutti.
In 2004, after 23 years apart, Throbbing Gristle reunited, with all four original members, for recordings and events.
