Monte Cazazza

Monte Cazazza (born before 1971) is an American performance artist and musician from Oakland in the 1970s and 1980s . He became known for his radical and extremely brutal style with death, sex and violence as leitmotifs. Little is known about his biography. Monte Cazazza now lives in seclusion in California .

art

Cazazza first appeared as an artist in 1971 when, on his first day as a student at the "College of Arts and Crafts" in Oakland, he poured concrete over the stairs so that it was no longer possible to enter the school. This performance led to his dismissal. In the same year, long before the fanzine culture of the late 1970s, he published the fanzine Nitrous Oxide and participated in an exhibition in San Francisco with collages in which the pistils of orchid flowers were replaced by penises .

In 1972 he realized his most spectacular performance: invited to an art conference in a pleasant atmosphere in the forests of California, he arrived with an armed bodyguard, poisoned the food with arsenic , and threw bricks marked “DADA” on the hungry at lunch Foot, and burned the half-decayed, maggot-strewn cadaver of a cat at the dining table at dinner while his bodyguard blocked the exit. Images of this performance have been published worldwide.

In December 1975 he carried out the performance Futurist Sintesi in a gallery in San Francisco, during which a large Jesus statue was ritually “raped into oblivion” and finally destroyed with chainsaws .

Monte Cazazza first came into contact with Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanny Tutti from the British performance group COUM Transmissions in 1974 , who were fascinated by a photo by Cazazza on the cover of the January issue of Vile , an American mail-art magazine. The photo showed him grinning with a naked, blood-smeared upper body and (apparently) torn out heart in his hand. So Cazazza got into the environment of the beginning industrial around the later band Throbbing Gristle .

Their first collaboration was the production of a "Gary Gilmore Memorial Postcard" and related to the American robbery murderer Gary Gilmore , who demanded the highest possible punishment for himself and was accordingly executed in 1977. The picture posed on the postcard was sold over 6,000 times as a t-shirt and was considered real and printed by the Hong Kong Daily News . The proceeds from the t-shirts were used to finance the trip from Cazazza to London to Throbbing Gristle. Together they produced another film in which Cazazza and a 14-year-old boy reenact an execution on the electric chair. This should be his last major artistic action for the time being before he concentrated on music for the years to come.

music

From 1977 onwards, Cazazza made his first musical recordings. In 1979/1980 they released two singles and a live cassette on Throbbing Gristle's Industrial Records label, for which he coined the slogan "Industrial music for industrial people."

In 1982 he released further recordings, often together with Tana Emmolo-Smith before , but that almost ended his musical activity, after brief interludes with the band Factrix and in the early days with Psychic TV , he was rarely heard from .

In September 2010 his 7-track first full-length album "The Cynic" was released on the [Mute Records] sub-label Blast First.

Discography

• 1979: To Mom On Mothers Day , single
• 1980: Something for Nobody , single
• 1980: Monte Cazazza - Live , cassette
• 1982: California Babylon , LP
• 1982: Stairway To Hell , single
• 1992: The Worst Of Monte Cazazza , CD
• 1996: Power Versus Wisdom, Live , CD
• 1996: Kill Yur Self , maxi single
• 2010: The Cynic , CD / LP

Web links

• Monte Cazazza at brainwashed.com (English)
• [1] (Review of the current Monte Cazazza album with some interesting information about his career)