Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Alex Grey" in English language version.
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When Grey came back from the north he got a job in a morgue, job he worked periodically from 1975 through 1979, utilizing the morgue's "resources" for several of his pieces. [...] Perhaps the climax of his death pieces came in March 1976 in a piece called Necrophilia. A painting shows Grey making love with a dead woman's body. [...] How did you feel during Necrophilia? "My state of mind was fear," Grey replied. Questioning Allyson, Grey's wife and photographer or active participant in his work: Did you have jealousy about the Necrophilia piece? "No," Allyson replied, "because I knew it wasn't about sex, but about exploration." Necrophilia, 1976, oil on linen. [...] But why did you choose a corpse that was so mutilated? This one seems to have had a lobotomy. "Because it horrified me, and that was what I wanted to experience. [...] He began to feel terrible, he admits, about the way he was relating to bodies in the morgue, [...] ["]It was probably the worst thing I've ever done.["] [...]Alt URL
My Shadow: My own works that I consider most disturbing and morally questionable center around the use, or misuse, of bodies at a medical school morgue where I worked more than twenty years ago. I did a variety of "performances" using cadavers. [...] Around the same time, I made a painting of myself lying on top of a dead woman, entitled Necrophilia. [...] Around this time, in 1976, while sitting in my studio one night, a vision of an ominously menacing courtroom appeared. Before a judge I could not see and an angry jury, I faced a woman who accused me of trespassing her body in my morgue work. I tried to explain that I was making art, but there was absolutely no forgiveness. The judge told me that from now on I must do more positive work, putting me on lifetime probation. These visions were a turning point for me that helped me realize that I could spend a lifetime in negativity and darkness or begin to uplift my focus. I came to see those performances as a misuse of innocent people. Even if they were dead, they did not agree to such actions. [...] [...] At the time I felt I was courageously exploring the realm of the ultimate polarity, that of life and death, but it seems that I was also uncovering my own lack of values and understanding of good and evil. [...] My attitude regarding this early "shadow" work is ambivalent, if I had not performed those dark works, I would not have been inwardly pushed toward a more numinous light. [...]Alt URL
When Grey came back from the north he got a job in a morgue, job he worked periodically from 1975 through 1979, utilizing the morgue's "resources" for several of his pieces. [...] Perhaps the climax of his death pieces came in March 1976 in a piece called Necrophilia. A painting shows Grey making love with a dead woman's body. [...] How did you feel during Necrophilia? "My state of mind was fear," Grey replied. Questioning Allyson, Grey's wife and photographer or active participant in his work: Did you have jealousy about the Necrophilia piece? "No," Allyson replied, "because I knew it wasn't about sex, but about exploration." Necrophilia, 1976, oil on linen. [...] But why did you choose a corpse that was so mutilated? This one seems to have had a lobotomy. "Because it horrified me, and that was what I wanted to experience. [...] He began to feel terrible, he admits, about the way he was relating to bodies in the morgue, [...] ["]It was probably the worst thing I've ever done.["] [...]Alt URL
Alex Grey is a young performance artist from Columbus, Ohio who now lives in Boston. [...] In 1975, Grey says, he found a job in a morgue doing embalming and other preparation of bodies. [...] On March 16, 1976, Grey and his wife Allyson, herself a performance artist, a photographer, and what Grey calls "an active participant in my craziness" snuck into the morgue. While his wife took photographs, Grey picked out a female corpse, one missing its brains and the top half of its skull. Why one that had been so mutilated? "I guess because it horrified me. I guess that's what I wanted to experience." Then he and the dead woman made love. [...] "Did you come in the corpse?" I asked Alex. There was a pause at the other end of the line. "I'd rather not talk about that. [...] As he spoke I stared down at the photo his wife had taken while he was on top of the body. "You appear to be grinning," I ventured. "I wasn't really smiling," Grey insisted. "It was just a wierd camera angle." [...] I was so sorry, disgraced and disgusted with myself for having used her body for my own work that I cried and begged forgiveness. [...]
[...] 90. In response to an article about Blind Date in the Los Angeles publication Wet, artist Alex Grey wrote a letter to the editor describing his performance Necrophilia (1976), in which, photographed by his wife, he had sex with a mutilated corpse. He wrote, [...] ["]A day has not gone by that I haven't thought of the necrophilia piece" (Alex Grey, "More Sex with the Dead," Wet, July–August 1981, n.р.). [...] For more on Alex Grey, see Lewis MacAdams, "It Started Out with Death," High Performance 5, no. 3 (Spring–Summer 1982): 43-49.
My Shadow: My own works that I consider most disturbing and morally questionable center around the use, or misuse, of bodies at a medical school morgue where I worked more than twenty years ago. I did a variety of "performances" using cadavers. [...] Around the same time, I made a painting of myself lying on top of a dead woman, entitled Necrophilia. [...] Around this time, in 1976, while sitting in my studio one night, a vision of an ominously menacing courtroom appeared. Before a judge I could not see and an angry jury, I faced a woman who accused me of trespassing her body in my morgue work. I tried to explain that I was making art, but there was absolutely no forgiveness. The judge told me that from now on I must do more positive work, putting me on lifetime probation. These visions were a turning point for me that helped me realize that I could spend a lifetime in negativity and darkness or begin to uplift my focus. I came to see those performances as a misuse of innocent people. Even if they were dead, they did not agree to such actions. [...] [...] At the time I felt I was courageously exploring the realm of the ultimate polarity, that of life and death, but it seems that I was also uncovering my own lack of values and understanding of good and evil. [...] My attitude regarding this early "shadow" work is ambivalent, if I had not performed those dark works, I would not have been inwardly pushed toward a more numinous light. [...]Alt URL
His name was John Duncan and his piece was called "Blind Date." He had pulled off weird and violent stunts before-such as showing up at Paul McCarthy's door with a mask and a gun. He confessed his sinful act during a performance festival and he had an audiotape to prove he wasn't making things up. He said he was kicked out of a bunch of porn shops for asking how to find a corpse for sex before someone sold him a phone number in Mexico, et voilá, he got his wish. His audience of fellow artists was horrified—the women, I was told, felt particularly violated but no one liked the feeling that they were somehow complicit as witnesses. The decision to suppress the performance appears to have been unanimous. Duncan managed to score airtime to defend himself on a local public radio show, but he was now a pariah. He soon left the United States for good.
In only one case am I guilty of "censorship." It was a piece I found morally objectionable: the artist played to a festival audience an audiotape of sounds he said were a recording of his sexual intercourse with a woman's corpse in Mexico. [...] In fact, I did later publish a story about the work of Alex Gray, another artist who performed the same act, but the documentation of his Necrophilia was dominated by what transpired in his psyche afterward—what HAPPENS to a man who fucks a corpse and calls it art. For this artist, it was a psychic event in which he felt he was put on trial for the violation of a human spirit and was sentenced to make positive art for the rest of his life.
In the central action of John Duncan's controversial performance Blind Date (1980), the artist had sex with a female corpse. [...] The artist's horrific and deeply despairing action tested the limits of his psychological and physical endurance. [...] Duncan audio-recorded his sexual encounter, and he photographed a later action in the performance, a vasectomy procedure. [...] Confronted with this confusion of aggression and vulnerability, perpetration and victimhood, Duncan's friends in the Los Angeles feminist community condemned him as a rapist, attempted legal prosecution, and effectively put an end to his career in the United States.7
Dear WET, I read with sadness and some surprise your "Sex with the Dead" article in March/April 1981 WET. In 1976, I had access to a morgue and did a piece called Necrophilia. [...] The necrophilia piece came to me after having a dream that I was fucking a seductive and beautiful living woman who rapidly aged and died as we were making love. She clamped her arms around me and the sides of the bed became a coffin enclosure. [...] After doing the morgue pieces I felt less afraid of death, but more afraid of the moral and karmic consequences of my actions. [...] In 1979 [...] I met the soul of the woman that I had sex with [while on LSD]. She was extremely angry and screaming at me saying — didn't I know I was violating her and that she was a person just as I was. [...] I guess, during the past couple of years, I have come to regard the body as a sacred thing as well as a piece of meat. Alex Grey. Boston.
How was BLIND DATE received by the world of art? With hostility, to a degree I was completely unprepared for. Several of my closest friends tried to arrange for me to be extradited to Mexico and arrested on necrophilia charges. When that effort proved to be legally formidable, they decided to threaten anyone publishing or showing my work with boycotts, which effectively banned my work in the US for several years. With other friends, it created a sense of separation, a wall that in some cases still remains. I felt, and was, abandoned by every one of the people I felt closest to. Some claimed that the cadaver had been raped, [...]
Most unnerving was an account in the March–April 1981 issue, describing a performance-art piece by one John Duncan, who had bribed a Tijuana mortician to let him have sex with a female corpse, recording the act on audiotape. Afterward, he had gotten a vasectomy "so that the last potent seed I had," he recounted, "was spent in a cadaver." Blind Date immediately became a personal touchstone in sorting out what was possible in the name of Art. Ten years later, when I wound up at UCLA grad school, I asked around about Duncan and his work and was shocked at the mostly blank stares with occasional frosty silences that constituted the response. Blind Date had proved to be one of the most violently polarizing works in L.A. art history, eventually sending Duncan into a self-imposed exile to Japan, Amsterdam and, finally, Italy, where he resides to this day. His critics had seemingly succeeded in erasing him from the equation, while elevating Chris Burden's also-difficult oeuvre to canonical status.
In only one case am I guilty of "censorship." It was a piece I found morally objectionable: the artist played to a festival audience an audiotape of sounds he said were a recording of his sexual intercourse with a woman's corpse in Mexico. [...] In fact, I did later publish a story about the work of Alex Gray, another artist who performed the same act, but the documentation of his Necrophilia was dominated by what transpired in his psyche afterward—what HAPPENS to a man who fucks a corpse and calls it art. For this artist, it was a psychic event in which he felt he was put on trial for the violation of a human spirit and was sentenced to make positive art for the rest of his life.
Blind Date [(1980)] transformed [John Duncan] into a Los Angeles pariah. The Los Angeles art community saw to it his work was informally banned here—even his closest friends turned against him—and Duncan exiled himself to Japan for the years following.
In the central action of John Duncan's controversial performance Blind Date (1980), the artist had sex with a female corpse. [...] The artist's horrific and deeply despairing action tested the limits of his psychological and physical endurance. [...] Duncan audio-recorded his sexual encounter, and he photographed a later action in the performance, a vasectomy procedure. [...] Confronted with this confusion of aggression and vulnerability, perpetration and victimhood, Duncan's friends in the Los Angeles feminist community condemned him as a rapist, attempted legal prosecution, and effectively put an end to his career in the United States.7
When Grey came back from the north he got a job in a morgue, job he worked periodically from 1975 through 1979, utilizing the morgue's "resources" for several of his pieces. [...] Perhaps the climax of his death pieces came in March 1976 in a piece called Necrophilia. A painting shows Grey making love with a dead woman's body. [...] How did you feel during Necrophilia? "My state of mind was fear," Grey replied. Questioning Allyson, Grey's wife and photographer or active participant in his work: Did you have jealousy about the Necrophilia piece? "No," Allyson replied, "because I knew it wasn't about sex, but about exploration." Necrophilia, 1976, oil on linen. [...] But why did you choose a corpse that was so mutilated? This one seems to have had a lobotomy. "Because it horrified me, and that was what I wanted to experience. [...] He began to feel terrible, he admits, about the way he was relating to bodies in the morgue, [...] ["]It was probably the worst thing I've ever done.["] [...]Alt URL
Dear WET, I read with sadness and some surprise your "Sex with the Dead" article in March/April 1981 WET. In 1976, I had access to a morgue and did a piece called Necrophilia. [...] The necrophilia piece came to me after having a dream that I was fucking a seductive and beautiful living woman who rapidly aged and died as we were making love. She clamped her arms around me and the sides of the bed became a coffin enclosure. [...] After doing the morgue pieces I felt less afraid of death, but more afraid of the moral and karmic consequences of my actions. [...] In 1979 [...] I met the soul of the woman that I had sex with [while on LSD]. She was extremely angry and screaming at me saying — didn't I know I was violating her and that she was a person just as I was. [...] I guess, during the past couple of years, I have come to regard the body as a sacred thing as well as a piece of meat. Alex Grey. Boston.
In the central action of John Duncan's controversial performance Blind Date (1980), the artist had sex with a female corpse. [...] The artist's horrific and deeply despairing action tested the limits of his psychological and physical endurance. [...] Duncan audio-recorded his sexual encounter, and he photographed a later action in the performance, a vasectomy procedure. [...] Confronted with this confusion of aggression and vulnerability, perpetration and victimhood, Duncan's friends in the Los Angeles feminist community condemned him as a rapist, attempted legal prosecution, and effectively put an end to his career in the United States.7
