“By far the most significant event relating to the crystal ball was the action and installation of the same name held at the 9th Paris Biennale, at the Musée d’art moderne in October 1975. Every evening for a three day period COUM performed in its exhibition space. The list of materials used, according to P-Orridge’s account in ‘TransMediators’ (1992), ran as follows: walking sticks (one with used tampax attached), wire, knives, fruit, bandages, mirrors, corn powder, blood, scissors, cling film, chains, feathers and fur.

The centrepiece of the COUM installation was a transparent perspex box filled with maggots and tampax. Fixed around the walls of the space were small boxes containing mice and Christopherson’s bondage photographs of young men. On the back wall was another photograph of a boy bound and gagged which mirrored the situation of the incarcerated mice trapped in the boxes. Towards the centre of the space COUM placed an upright workman’s frame around a mirror, which was laid on the floor with its reflecting side upwards. The rest of the space they littered with trails of powder, rolls of paper, and white arrows.

A sequence of photographs survives of these performances and they reveal a white walled space, with a heavy iron chain attached to an old iron hanging from the rear wall and what looks like rolls of paper untidily piled up against another wall. In the first frames Tutti is sitting on the floor-at this stage fully clothed. In the background P-Orridge, with his long dark hair covering his face, carries two sticks; one, a walking stick, points forward like a blind man’s white cane. P-Orridge’s outfit is remarkably close in style to the ‘bondage’ clothing then being designed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. He wears a scruffy pin- stripe suit covered in chains. From one of these chains hangs a metal bar. On a shelf behind him is a bottle, two-thirds full of a dark liquid. P-Orridge’s nails are long and sharp and his dark mascara’d eyes are staring intensely as he points with the stick. Blood is seeping from his mouth.

In another set of photographs Tutti is shown kneeling, fully clothed in a patterned dress with black belt, black stockings, and white high heel shoes. P-Orridge waves one of the walking sticks, then uses it to touch the frame around the mirror. Tutti sits down between the trails of gravel leading from the frame to the perspex box. She then pulls down the stocking covering her left leg, writes something on one of the large rolls of paper, and moves nearer to the now seated P-Orridge. She then moves away and returns to the roll of paper. P-Orridge, at the back of the room once again, waves the walking stick with the tampax attached. Tutti smears some kind of soft fruit on to the calf of her left leg, and covers it with cling film. She removes her belt and cuts open her dress with scissors. P-Orridge drinks from the bottle with the dark liquid.

The photographs then stop and when they resume Tutti has completely dispensed with her dress and shoes and is naked except for a black body-stocking. She bandages her left leg and the juice from the fruit seeps through, suggesting a bleeding wound. Tutti then stands at the open end of the frame, between the gravel lines, with one hand on each post. As she stands there, P-Orridge, with two walking sticks and the tampax stick, staggers around her. Then in tandem they proceed to the front of the space, up to the double line of white and grey powder that marks off the space of the installation and action from the audience. P-Orridge falls down on to his knees, his head lowered to the ground. Tutti joins him and during what looks like a struggle, wraps the top of his head, including his eyes, with cling film. Tutti abandons the blinded P-Orridge who is left to stumble out of the installation and into the audience.” — Source : ‘Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions & Throbbing Gristle’, edited by Simon Ford, pp.5.19, 5.20 & 5.21, Black Dog Publishing Limited, 1999.