Cosey Fanni Tutti – Magazine Action 1975 – 1980

Hand Numbered 5/65. One of three uniform volumes which reproduce in facsimile the covers and contents of many adult magazines that featured photosets of Cosey as part of her Magazine Action project. Includes material from Piccadilly, Rustler, Whitehouse, Ladybirds etc. In one of the photo sets Cosey poses with Genesis.

*** Condition *** Book is in pristine condition (no markings / stains / missing pages / etc) and included original red PVC bag. Book has a slight warp on right side due to being shelf stored in said PVC bag.

This book contains pornographic images and should only be purchased by adults. 

In the 1960s and ’70s, magazines and newspapers became platforms for making art, with people like Robert Smithson, Dan
Graham, Lynda Benglis and Adrian Piper creating mass-media-inspired conceptual artworks.
Cosey Fanni Tutti took the project a step further: She worked as a pornographic model, then sought out the magazines in which
nude photographs of her appeared and signed the magazine spreads as artworks. “Magazine Actions,” first exhibited in 1976 in an
incendiary exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, titled “Prostitution,” are currently on view at Maxwell Graham.
What makes this art and not just porn? The lineage of Tutti’s gesture can be traced back at least to Marcel Duchamp signing a
urinal in 1917 and calling it sculpture. Tutti’s work also dovetails nicely with 1970s feminism, as seen in essays by Laura Mulvey
studiously analyzing the “male gaze” to identity-bending photographs by Cindy Sherman, Ana Mendieta and David Lamelas. At
the Maxwell Graham show, Tutti appears as “Geraldine” or “Nanette,” and the anonymous texts read like a Greatest Hits of early
gender studies.

Tutti is best known, though, as a member of the industrial band Throbbing Gristle. In 1979 they released “20 Jazz Funk Greats,” an
album whose famously devious cover image shows the band standing in a bucolic landscape. Only, the site happens to be a famous
suicide spot in England.

Photography, in that case, was used as a means of tricking the consumer. Similarly, with “Magazine Actions,” Tutti wrote in her
smart, funny autobiography “Art Sex Music” (2017): “I was no ‘victim’ of exploitation. I was exploiting the sex industry for my
own purposes.” She added that she “was transgressing rules — feminist ones included.”

– NY Times Martha Schwendener