Neil Andrew Megson discovered Max Ernst when he was 15 years old, and it set a course for his life. The book was called “The Hundred Headless Woman,” surrealistic collages of human and animal forms. It presented the body as fluid and mutable, and the self as open to negotiation. It was the mid-1960s, and to a British schoolboy who felt he didn’t fit in — into his school, his gender, his body — this was freedom.

In the half-century since, Megson — better known as the musician and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge — has steadily probed at the boundaries of the body, both literally and figuratively, evolving from art provocateur to founder of the influential British bands Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV to semi-established fine artist with archives at the Tate Britain. As P-Orridge now considers retiring from live music, Throbbing Gristle’s albums from the 1970s and early 1980s are newly available in deluxe reissues on Mute.

At 68, P-Orridge lives on the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan in a body racked by chronic myelomonocytic leukemia.

[Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has died at 70. Read the NYT obituary here.]

“I’m stable right now, my blood counts are close to normal,” P-Orridge said on a recent afternoon at home, flanked by a snoring Pekingese named Musty Dagger. “But at some point it will finally flare up and become terminal, and there’s no way to know when that might be. Optimistically, two years. Less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death.”