Genesis P-Orridge in New York

Juergen Teller Matthew Barney Joan Brown Zane Lewis Sam Cady Raoul Hausmann John Heartfield Hannah Hoch

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Few have embodied that ethos as literally as legendary British artist, musician, and provocateur Genesis P-Orridge. His current retrospective at Invisible-Exports, 30 Years of Being Cut Up, features dozens of his collages and suggests that his reputation as hero to generation after generation of outsiders is well deserved.

P-Orridge, 59, is the avant-garde’s Madonna, continually reinventing himself, usually one step ahead of — and sometimes galaxies away from — his peers. There have been writings with William S. Burroughs, postal art exchanges with Ray Johnson, performances in staid European museums that were denounced by politicians and the press, and a run with industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle. Any one of these projects would have been enough to secure a decent legacy.

But his art and his life — it has become impossible to distinguish between the two — have only gotten more bizarre. More recently he has been transforming his body. First he underwent breast implants, face alterations, and all manner of plastic surgery with his partner Lady Jaye Breyer. They said they wanted to become one person. Then she died in 2007, and he decided to subsume her identity into his. He now refers to himself in the plural (but we've kept with "he," for clarity's sake). Even Matthew Barney’s very public explorations of intimacy with partner Björk begin to look tepid.

P-Orridge is equally experimental and disciplined in his photographic assemblages, which often mimic the work of the Berlin Dadaists. Like them, he seems obsessed with the tabloid imagery of contemporary life: Princess Di, the serial killers Brady and Hindley, and fashion models all make appearances in his works.

But that’s a superficial comparison: P-Orridge prefers unfiltered fantasy and personal neuroses to the political concerns of Höch, Hausmann, and Heartfield. Images of hardcore pornography and fetish objects accumulate, flowing into and on top of each other. In Education Sentimentale, a painted nurse monitors a photomontage of sex acts. It’s a proto-Richard Prince, though more adventurous than anything he has attempted. It was made in 1978.

Most of the compositions are tautly composed, often seamlessly filling the page, but the sheer brutality of his obscenity can become tiresome, bordering on caricature. Thankfully, though, these are the exceptions, and it would be unfortunate if overwrought moments obscured formal achievements. Thee Fractured Garden (1995), for example, features photographs of houses, flowers, and gardens delicately spliced together. One first reads it as a single photograph, as if it were an analog Gursky, and learns that P-Orridge wants to — and can — do more than shock.

Though there are no obvious evolutions in the three decades of work shown here, it all manages to look relevant. It would be strong in any environment, but it probably helps that collage is fashionable again. Dr. Lakra, Bjorn Copeland, and Dash Snow owe a clear debt to the work here, though P-Orridge’s pages are more intricately assembled — and more interested in art history — than those of his followers. P-Orridge riffs on Giuseppe Arcimboldo in English Breakfast (2002-09), using the hearty meal's components to construct a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. In Constructivism (1987) he uses the Russian movement’s vocabulary to more manic and mannered ends. Red, black, and white shapes swirl around masked portraits and scrawled drawings.

Six Polaroids showing P-Orridge and Breyer’s chests after their dual implant operations compose Two Into One We Go (2003). Cropped from the neck down, they conceal the identities of their subjects, borrowing a trick from Man Ray, who photographed a genderless chest in his Minotaur (1935).