The politics of outrage inform the work of 42-year-old Lydia Koch (aka Lydia Lunch), an upstate New Yorker (Rochester; birth place of Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and The Plasmatics' Wendy O. Williams) who drifted towards NYC's no-wave scene in the mid-late 1970s/early 1980s through a succession of art/noise punk bands, but notably via a stint with the uncompromising Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. Eventually, following a series of musical collaborations with bands such as Eight-Eyed Spy, Australia's The Birthday Party and Denmark's Sort Sol, Lunch founded Widowspeak Productions, an outlet to document her burgeoning spoken-word work, in 1984. Lunch released The Uncensored Lydia Lunch tape, which included the harrowing Daddy Dearest, an account of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Around the same time, she gave birth to a baby girl whilst grasping in her hands a book she referred to as her bible - Patti Smith's Babel.
Lunch then went on to work with Henry Rollins, Nick Cave, Jim Thirwell and Rowland S. Howard - all names that frightened the commercial music industry establishment.
Through her association with these art/rock thorns, she gradually altered her on-stage art form. Instead of pleasure, Lunch mused, she would sell her audience pain. "A public platform for psychotherapy," she wrote in her 1997 novel Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary. "Make them pay to be tortured. Assaulted. Abused. The audience as whipping boy, whose sex could and would be used against them. Obliterate the safety net that separates the spectator from the exhibitionist. The doctor from the patient. Play wet-nurse to nightsickness. An unholy vortex of verbal abuse. A hideous din." Throughout her performances, Lunch would test and explore the boundaries of social acceptance, her kindred spirits performance/literature artists such as Kathy Acker and Hubert Selby Jr.
In 1998, an international retrospective of her photography culminated in Paris at the Museum of Erotic Art, where four of her pieces are now on permanent display. Now living in New Orleans, Lunch's busy workload has necessitated a reversal of socialising. She considers her main pleasures peace and quiet, waking up at 5am, reading in hermit-like solitude.
Despite her self-imposed serenity, she is still a much loved figure of cultish desire. Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary was widely acclaimed and translated into German and Czech, while in France she was hailed as the next generation Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Marquis de Sade (three of her obvious major influences). She cares little if the messages within her work are not universally heard. "It only matters that those who need the so-called kind of public psychotherapy I deliver can seek it out," she has said. "If they look hard enough, they can find. It's out there."
More information: www.lydialunch.org