Meeting through the mail art community, the trio collaborated during P-Orridge and Tutti’s 1976 US trip. Forming the Gary Gilmore Memorial Society they took turns in posing as the convicted killer for a series of mock execution photos. As P-Orridge states in Simon Ford’s Wreckers Of Civilization “at the time it was just for ourselves to get the whole feeling of what he would face”. The photos, and the act of taking them, examined both personal and cultural fascinations with the murderer (rather than his crime). Against all expectations, Gilmore demanded to be executed by the state, rejecting the lengthy process of appeals commonly undertaken by death row prisoners. Producing and sending-out postcards of these photos, the work played on the media fixation with the case. A picture of Cazazza was even reproduced in a Hong Kong newspaper as an image of the real execution. In some way this work can be understood as a central element in what became Industrial culture; an engagement with that which was deemed as abject that places the documenter/artist unflinchingly in the position of the other. This project maintained an ambiguity which frustrated some critics and commentators, but if punk rock’s response to the case was The Adverts’ catchy 7” and if the intelligentsia had Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, then the nascent industrial culture’s offering was, in retrospect, the most complex. This work shifts seamlessly from personal interest to fetishism to documentation to cultural artefact. The Gary Gilmore Memorial Society was engaged not simply in politics, but in an exploration of the media and its
presentation and interpretations of events. The case affected the artists involved because they understood the spectacular nature of media but they were also aware of their own complicity within the spectacle. There can be no ready resolution to the work because the creative process avoided didacticism in favour of an open ended personal exploration, viewers had to come to their own conclusions. In 1976 (and perhaps even still) these were largely uncharted aesthetic waters. What makes this work — and many subsequent pieces — perceived as ‘difficult’ is the lack of any attempt to explain away an interest. “If a piece works” Cazazza says, “you shouldn’t have to explain it.” With firm friendships established, Cazazza joined Throbbing Gristle in London where he constructed the wooden flash logo TG used in live performances and videotaped the recording of Heathen Earth. Working with the group, he recorded his first two records, the 1979 single To Mom On Mother’s Day and the 1980 EP Something For Nobody. “To me [music] was always about self expression