WARNING:
This true information about Alex Grey is genuinely NSFL (Not Safe For Life - disturbing and disgusting). Viewer discretion is advised, but we also advise people who consider Alex Grey to be a spiritual leader or influential voice to proceed.
ALEX GREY FUCKED A CORPSE, AND THERE'S MORE:
The transgressions and deceptions of Alex and Allyson Grey
PART I
Key Allegations & Incidents
Alex Grey Fucked a Corpse
to be clear
Alex Grey inserted his penis into the genitals of a dead woman who had donated her body as an anatomical gift for science and education without the knowledge or consent of the deceased or her family.
How do we know this to be the case?
Blind Date pamphlet by Lewis MacAdams, 1981:
This pamphlet describes two instances of necrophilic acts by performance artists, one of whom was Alex Grey. MacAdams writes,
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.
"Were you afraid?" "No," [Allyson] insisted, "I was only afraid of Alex getting caught."
WET Magazine letter by Alex Grey, 1981:
Alex Grey wrote in to WET Magazine in reference to the other performance artist who engaged in necrophilia (whose "piece" was previously covered in WET Magazine) saying that he "had done the piece several years before." He goes on to describe being confronted by "the soul of the woman that [he] had sex with" during an LSD trip years later.
High Performance Magazine article "It Started With Death" by Lewis MacAdams, 1982:
This article, by the same writer as "Blind Date", covers more of Alex Grey's work and somewhat censors the descriptions and language in comparison to the previously published pamphlet. Alex Grey was asked how he felt during the performance ("fear," he said, and "it felt very decadent and sick to do the piece"). Allyson Grey, who was present and photographed the performance, was asked if she felt any jealousy. She replied that she wasn't jealous "because [she] knew it wasn't about sex, but about exploration."
The article includes an image for "Necrophilia" described as being "oil on linen" and dated 1976. The image depicts Alex Grey on top of a dead woman (her head is cut in half) with her legs on either side of his body, missionary position. When asked about his facial expression in the image, Alex Grey said that it was a "wierd [sic] camera angle" or strained expression. This explanation indicates that the image was at least based on a photo Allyson Grey took of the performance.
"High Performance, Performance Art, and Me" by Linda Frye Burnham, 1986:
Linda Frye Burnham, the founder of High Performance Magazine, wrote a piece reflecting on the magazine. She had refused to cover the other performance artist who engaged in necrophilic acts, but did allow the story about Alex Grey. She writes, "I did later publish a story about the work of Alex Grey, 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."
Notes:
There are more nasty details in some of these sources, particularly the Blind Date pamphlet, which you may read in full.
* The morgue refers to the Harvard Medical School Anatomy Department morgue where Alex Grey worked at the time. This morgue gave him access to bodies, specifically the bodies of people who made the decision in life to donate their bodies as anatomical gifts for science and education.
** We have elected to never describe this necrophilic act as "having sex with" or "making love" because those are acts of mutual participation. Alex Grey fucked the body of a woman who had specific intentions for her body to be used for science and education. Any wording describing it otherwise is taken verbatim from original sources.
Alex Grey does not regret engaging in Necrophilia or any of his other "performances" that utilized people who had donated their bodies for science and education because the experiences benefited him.
Alex Grey thinks that these offenses he committed were bad, karmic crimes, but also that they were a necessary part of his artistic or "shamanic" journey. He writes of the "morgue pieces"* in The Mission of Art (1998) in a section called "My Shadow:"
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.
Alex Grey's book Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (1990) includes an essay called "Through Darkness to Light: The Art Path of Alex Grey" by Carlo McCormick which condones the "morgue pieces" as necessary and "shamanic" even more emphatically.
The art that came before the Sacred Mirrors represents a bizarre and necessary journey for the artist. [...]
His investigations raise exceedingly ugly and taboo issues in our moral, ethical, and aesthetic philosophical value systems. However, these are the threads that led to the creation of the Sacred Mirrors. To come to terms with the morbid elements haunting this work, I would offer the following vantage point: Alex Grey must be considered as a shaman [...]
Grey's intensely morbid tendency [...] would become even more pronounced in the latter half of the seventies when he was employed as an embalmer and preparator at a morgue. It is important to stress that in his quasi-scientific work there, at times involving the dissection and dismembering of corpses, and in the extremely controversial art he made in that time, Grey's entry into socially taboo and frightening regions of activity was always fundamentally in the interest of his own private vision: the polar geometry of life and death in the matrix of personal, physical, social, and transcendental metamorphoses contained within the divine logic of mortality. [...]
Violating the sacred distance from the bodies later brought the artist to a crisis of conscience that altered his work forever and led him to create the Sacred Mirrors.
While Alex Grey has described many times (with many changing details**) a "Trial of Souls" during which a woman's soul (specifically the woman whose body he fucked in the earliest tellings) is incredibly angry with him, and he is ultimately told that he must do "positive" work for the rest of his life. He says how he was sorry and begged for forgiveness, but he always stops short of saying that he should not have done it. Suffering the guilt and karmic consequences of his offenses is just another part of his artistic or "shamanic" journey.
To put it another way, engaging in Necrophilia and the other "morgue pieces" was ultimately enriching to Alex Grey's personal development and art, and therefore, according to him, they were necessary.
Examples of Morgue Pieces:
Notes:
* Alex Grey used bodies and body parts from the morgue in several pieces, with Necrophilia only being the most extreme instance (or "the climax of his death pieces" [MacAdams, 1982]). You can read about more of them in the Sources.
** See part three for more information on how Alex Grey has changed his account of what happened and what his motivations were over the years.
Alex Grey killed a rat just so people could watch it die.
While this may be insignificant in comparison to the morgue pieces and especially Necrophilia for many, for others the pieces with already dead bodies may be considered more neutral while actually killing is a clearer infraction.
Transfigurations by Alex Grey, 2001:
This book describes a performance in 1978 called "Life Energy." As part of the performance, Alex Grey killed a rat so that the audience could witness "the passing of life energy."
PART II
The Path to the Morgue:
Alex Grey was always obsessed with death and dead things and always showed a lack of normal ethics.
As an advocate for safe use of psychedelics, I am aware that some people should not do psychedelics and that it is possible for psychedelics to be done in inappropriate and harmful ways. It was plausible to me that inappropriate use of psychedelics and/or use of psychedelics with pre-existing tendencies toward certain mental health disorders could have resulted in psychosis or something similar, which could potentially explain some of the actions described above (even if they don't explain why the actions were later justified and have now been obfuscated from Alex Grey's audience). However, after reading a great deal of interviews and autobiographical writings and presentations by Alex Grey, a different story emerges in this case. His interest in interacting with dead stuff had already been an intense and animating force in his life well before he first tried psychedelics.
Alex Grey was always obsessed with death and dead things. His earliest known artwork was of a skeleton at age 5, and the rest of his childhood art features skeletons, grim reapers, and other themes of death. He would pick up dead animals and insects and bring them home where he ultimately buried them. When asked if he dissected them, Alex Grey replied, "I didn't really do much dissection. I wasn't so interested in that. It was more or less just being aware of a dead animal, and seeing them close up. I wasn't that fascinated with what made them tick so much" (Brown, 1993). He collected dead animals until what he thought was a dead bird turned out to be a rabid bat and he had to get a series of very painful rabies shots.
With his obsession with interacting with dead stuff temporarily put on hold, he graduated from highschool and got a four-year full ride scholarship to Columbus College of Art and Design (CCAD) in 1971. There, he learned from magazines that people were doing a different kind of art than he could learn in that art school - performance art, where people got to interact with dead things or even kill animals for Art. He decided that he wanted to do that instead of finishing his degree. He just really likes dead stuff, he always has, are you seeing this?
Here are some ways that he has described this time and the performance artists who inspired him:
I attended CCAD for two years but in the mid-70's the art world had it that "painting is dead." So, I became interested in dead things and took up performance art. [...] Performance artists that intrigued me at that time were the Viennese Actionists who created pageants that included animal sacrifice and inter-special sex, Chris Burden who shot himself and had himself crucified to the top of a Volkswagen Beetle, and other transgressive types that I found more interesting than the Minimalists or the Color Field painters popular at that time.
[While at CCAD] I started reading art magazines, and there were artists like Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, and a number of the so-called "body artists." There were also a number of Vienesse actionists, who worked over in Austria. I got to meet one of those guys, a fellow named Otto Muehl. In the Sixties they did a series of performances that were very violently sexual. They would use swans to violate women with, and then cut off their heads in orgiastic displays of passion, throwing the blood around. Herman Niche, one of the Vienesse actionists, continues to do these kinds of performances were [sic] they slaughter lambs, and let the entrails fall all over nude figures strapped up underneath a sort of crucified lamb. [...] This fellow Muehl started a place called Actions Analysis Organization. It was very much based on LSD, and Wilhielm Reich's kind of bodywork stuff. He was sort of like a cross between Charlie Manson and a Neo-Reichien kind of bodyworker. He was a very charismatic character, and was really my introduction to performance work.
Reading avant-garde art magazines like Avalanche and the early Art Forum became my art school education and I decided to leave school, to the great dismay of my parents
It's worth noting that at the time of the David Jay Brown interview in 1993, Otto Muehl (whom Alex talks about "getting to meet" and being his "introduction to performance work") was in prison for sexually abusing minors. While I have not seen any suggestion that Alex Grey sexually abused any living person, his positive view of Otto Muehl adds to the evidence that Alex Grey thinks that Art is above morality.
This all brings us to Alex Grey's first adult foray into ethically dubious use of dead things for Art: Secret Dog (1973). The earliest description of Secret Dog that I was able to find comes from the Blind Date pamphlet in 1981.
He began to investigate death in his artwork in 1973 when he accidentally hit a dog with his car on a freeway and killed it instantly. He stopped and loaded the dog into a plastic garbage bag and hid it by a river. Five weeks later he went back and got the dog and took its picture. Then he kicked the dog into the river.
Secret Dog is one of the elements of Alex Grey's history for which the facts have changed drastically over time. In 1998 (in The Mission of Art), he started sometimes saying that he took the dog home to call the owner and receive permission to use its body for his art before taking it to a river. However, given how Alex Grey's stories tend to move in the direction of becoming more flattering to himself in ways that contradict prior versions (including sometimes saying that he found the dog already dead instead of accidentally killing it), I suspect that the earliest descriptions were accurate in saying that he hid the dog instead of contacting the owner. The title of the piece also reinforces this interpretation. Furthermore, all the times where he says that he found the dog already dead, he does not say that he contacted the owner.
Assuming that these first descriptions of Secret Dog are accurate, he accidentally killed someone's dog, and thought something like "this is mine now, because Art." He didn't leave the owner with any hope of finding out what happened to their pet. He says that he looked at it rotting and thought about Vietnam, and I'm sure he did, but he didn't do it for Vietnam. The catalyst for doing it was reading about performance artists who sacrificed animals for Art, and his dormant life-long interest in being around dead things becoming reinvigorated.
Following this first foray into performance art, he did at least one other piece that utilized a dead dog, though possibly more. In Transfigurations (2001), he describes Rendered Dog (1974), in which he found out how animal carcasses from roadkill are processed, ground up, and the fat separated from the rest. He took photos of the processing facility and obtained a bag each of the fat and the ground up meat and bone.
Alex Grey has said over and over in more modern talks, interviews, etc. that he is interested in the body or anatomy because he's interested in consciousness, and the body is the box that consciousness comes in, but this is one of many post hoc justifications for things that Alex Grey has made. If his descriptions of his childhood interest in dead things doesn't show it well enough, he's quoted explicitly in Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey (1990) contradicting the idea:
"Doing the dog pieces," Grey has stated, "made me wonder about the nature of consciousness."
The interest in consciousness came later. Initially, he was simply interested in dead things. He just likes them. He simply likes looking at and being around dead things, he always has, or at least that's what his life story implies.
In 1974, Alex Grey moved from Ohio to Massachusetts because Jay Jaroslav, a performance artist who had been arrested for identity theft of dead babies, taught at School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and Alex Grey admired him (BL!SSS, 2008). He studied under Jay Jaroslav at the Museum School for one year before once again dropping out of an art school. During this year, his next notable foray into using dead things for art took place, but this time with human remains.
Brain Sack (1975) was a performance that included Alex Grey shaving off the long side of his hair, placing a human brain onto the shaved hair, vomiting onto the brain, and putting it in a garbage bag (Transfigurations, 2001). Where exactly Alex Grey sourced this human brain seems to be clarified in the talk Alex and Allyson Grey gave at Burning Man in 2012.
Allyson: After walking away from a full scholarship at art school after two years, [...] how did you walk into Harvard and get a job? Harvard Medical School, anatomy department - how did you do that?
Alex: Okay, I was obsessed with anatomy and bothered the person who was there in the anatomy department and was just hanging out there a lot until he invited me to work with him.
Allyson: Well, you wanted to see a brain. You wanted to hold a brain in your hand and guts in the other hand. It was a performance Alex wanted to do. It's called "Brains and Guts." [...] You had to go find somebody in order to do that piece, you had to find somebody who could access those things and allow you to access them. And here you were, with your hair half shaved, one side all the way down and one side bald, [...] somebody you wouldn't trust walking in your door. But you got this guy to trust you enough to hire you.
Given that Alex Grey shaved off the long half of his hair during the Brain Sack performance, which was performed at the Museum School, he must have already been "hanging out" around the Harvard Morgue seeking access to pieces of dead humans before he left the Museum School. It is unclear when "Brains and Guts" actually took place and whether it was before or after "Brain Sack."
"Brain Sack" took place in February, 1975, Alex Grey tried LSD for the first time in late May, 1975. The overall trajectory here leads me to believe that Alex Grey was going to continue to ramp up the intensity of his Art with dead things regardless. He may well have already been working in the Harvard morgue during his last semester at the Museum School, and he was certainly already successfully seeking access to bodies at the morgue.
Using his access to dead bodies at Harvard, Alex Grey continued his performance art, including Necrophilia. Eventually, something inside him seemed to notice that he was doing things that were wrong.
He began to feel terrible, he admits, about the way he was relating to the bodies in the morgue, so he started using what he had learned from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. When the corpses were brought in. He'd look up the bodies' names on their death certificates and when nobody was around, he'd get down next to their ear, call the name and say, "There's nothing to fear, everything's all right, leave the body behind and go for the light," several times loudly.
It is unclear whether he continued to do art pieces with the bodies after performing this ritual.
Four years after I did the necrophilia piece I was on a heavy LSD trip, and I hallucinated a trial of the souls involved with the piece. I met the soul of the women I had sex with. She was extremely angry and screamed at me, saying 'Didn't I know I was violating her and that she was a person just as I was even though she'd been dead two weeks?' I was so sorry, disgraced and disgusted with myself for having used her body for my own work that I cried and begged forgiveness. But she did not forgive me, and I was put on a kind of probation by the judges for the rest of my life. They said I was only to do positive, not harmful or negative works.
This is the Trial of Souls that Alex Grey has described in many books, interviews, etc. in many different ways (see part three). The timeline of this taking place four years after Necrophilia puts it at around the time that he stopped working in the morgue.
Alex Grey has been very clear about how his work shifted from performance art to becoming a famous and influential painter. Even when his performance art became less harrowing, he didn't shift his artistic focus back to painting until after a performance art piece called "Life Energy." The performance was described in full in Transfigurations (2001). It comprised some different demonstrations of life energy in the first half. There was an intermission activity where people could stand in front of charts of literal and spiritual anatomy. The second half was a presentation about different schools of thought on life energy, and then Alex Grey killed a rat so that people could watch it die. It didn't go over well.
Part of that performance was really transgressive. I thought that at the end we should witness the passing of life energy, too, and to do that I sacrificed a rat. I decapitated it with a medical device. We warned people, and some left, but afterwards we thought we had lost all of our friends. Nobody wanted to talk, everybody was like, "Oh, geez." We left there thinking, "What have we done? Oh my god."
Heading home, feeling terrible about the rat, Allyson turned to me and said, "You know, people really loved the charts. It would be great if you'd make life sized oil paintings of the physical and esoteric systems of the body." That was in 1978, and I began painting again.
On our way home from this performance, Allyson and I were talking and we both agreed that the most successful element in this performance happened to be these charts. Allyson had the idea, "Why not create a large series of fully detailed paintings examining both the physical and metaphysical aspects of our anatomy?" Later on, after I had been working on the series for about a year, she also came up with the title Sacred Mirrors.
And that's how Alex Grey was forced to realize that he couldn't make it as a transgressive performance artist, and he had to become Famous Visionary Artist Alex Grey instead.
PART III
How Alex Grey Changes His Story
There are many puzzling ways that Alex Grey's story has changed over time. Memories can be faulty, and I'm not at all concerned with errors in dates and timelines and the like. There are many times Alex Grey has changed the facts of a situation, and many times that he has changed his reasoning for doing something. This analysis will focus on three events that are described relatively frequently (Secret Dog, Necrophilia/the morgue pieces, and Life Energy).
For the full chronological breakdown of how these stories have been presented over time, please view the full analyses. For brevity, we have provided short synopses of the inconsistencies.
Secret Dog
Over time Alex Grey inconsistently changes the story with no specific progression in a single direction. Sometimes he says that he found the dead dog instead of accidentally killing it. Sometimes he says that he went back to observe the decomposition every day instead of just going back weeks later. Sometimes he says that he contacted the owner of the dog and the owner didn't want the body, but never at the same time that he says he found the dog instead of accidentally killing it. Oddly, on two occasions he mentions bringing one or more dead dogs to class, which is hard to reconcile with the timeline and the story that he just observed the dog and then disposed of it in the river.
Analysis of Shift:
He began to investigate death in his artwork in 1973 when he accidentally hit a dog with his car on a freeway and killed it instantly. He stopped and loaded the dog into a plastic garbage bag and hid it by a river. Five weeks later he went back and got the dog and took its picture. Then he kicked the dog into the river.
This is our baseline version of Secret Dog.
Accidentally running over a dog on the freeway, he picked up the corpse and hid it in a garbage bag by a river. "Five weeks later," he writes, "I went back, pulled out the dog and took a photograph. Then I kicked the dog into the river."
No change (unsurprising given that this was presented by the same writer, Lewis MacAdams)
I brought a dead dog in a bag into the classroom and showed it .... The administration and I never saw eye to eye so I left school and painted billboards for about a year. Then I came to Boston and studied with a conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav.
This one is very much out of left field. As you can see, he generally says that he only watched/documented the dog's decay and disposed of it in the river. The timeline of when he attended CCAD doesn't match up for Rendered Dog. Was this an additional dog that he doesn't mention often? This particular interview has some other very unusual discrepancies with other stories, so it could be that it's simply incorrect that he ever brought a dog to class.
In Secret Dog, Grey picked up an animal that had been recently run over, and put it in a bag near a river. Every few days, Grey photographed the remains to document its gradual decay.
This version brings in two new elements - implying that Alex Grey was not the person who hit the dog, and saying that he went back multiple times to document the dog's decay instead of going back after 5 weeks. He may well have gone back multiple times and simply didn't think it was relevant to mention previously.
I was painting billboards for a living and accidentally struck a dog on the freeway. Saddened, I took the dog's body home in my car trunk. After calling the owners and finding they did not want the dog's body returned to them, I had to decide what to do with it. I found a remote place by a riverbank, placed the dead dog in a plastic bag, and left it there. I decided to come back every day to document photographically the decay of the dog. It was a warm summer, and the smell from the rotting carcass became very strong. This was my first "performance.'' I titled the action Secret Dog. After the dog had bloated and putrified and was no longer recognizable, I placed it in the nearby river.
This represents a dramatic shift in how the story is told, particularly in saying that he contacted the owners of the dog, but also in the tone of him talking about being saddened and having to figure out what to do with this deceased pet he had ended up with. I suspect he was saddened when he accidentally killed a dog, but in previous tellings he didn't find that element relevant. He is clearly aware at this point that people might find this piece controversial and that he should take care in how he presents it.
When I was a student, minimalism was the rage, so content or imagery of any kind was verboten. My answer was to bring rotting dogs to class, set my underarm hair on fire, and vomit on human brains. Stuff like that.
Another case where he says that he brought dogs to class. This one is less specific that he was talking about CCAD, so it may have been the Museum School. Or perhaps he meant this non-literally and was just gesturing at the kinds of performance work he started doing.
While driving on the freeway, I hit a dog with my car. I picked up the dog, put it in a garbage bag, and left it by a river. Over a period of six weeks I went back numerous times, pulled out the dog, and documented its decay.
As we will see in future stories, it is not uncommon for Alex Grey to revert back to a previous version of a story, and it seems that he feels more at liberty to be candid in some situations than others. Transfigurations is an interesting case in which he was much more open about his past than in many places both before and after its publication. Interestingly, he seems to be much more careful about removing copies of Transfigurations from the internet than his other books, and I had to actually purchase a physical copy.
This piece was called "Secret Dog." It was about an unfortunate situation where I accidentally hit a dog on the freeway. I pulled over and put it in the trunk. I called the owner, and they did not want it. And so I put it in a bag down by a river and I went back everyday and took photographs of it.
This is the first example we have of Alex Grey presenting the story in front of a live audience, and as we can see, he uses essentially the Mission of Art version, potentially to avoid any backlash.
For my first performance, "Secret Dog," I stopped and picked up a dead dog in the road, took it down to a river and documented its decay. Decades later I learned of the Tibetan Buddhist practice of "Charnal Grounds Meditation" where seekers contemplate the decay of corpses in order to experience the impermanence of the flesh. "Secret Dog," done in 1973 in Columbus, Ohio. I related the smelly decay and goo with the ribs sticking out to be a projection of my own human illness, and in a more worldly sense to be related to the Vietnam War and the pathologies of our government.
This telling uses the "I found the dog already dead" version of events, but also puts a lot more emphasis on the meaning of the piece, which he did not do as much previously. This seems to be an example of Alex Grey presenting himself and his art as more meaningful and enlightened over time.
Focusing on an examination of polarities such as life and death, I observed and documented a dead dog rotting. Later that year, observing the intuitive and the rational hemispheres of the brain, I shaved off half of my hair. Six months later, I shaved off the other half in a ritual performance. Placing the shaved hair on a human brain, I ate spaghetti, took the universal antidote, syrup of ipecac, and vomited onto the brain and hair. I wrapped the entire mess in a bag and called the performance "Brain Sack". These acts tapped into a deeply disturbed but somewhat shamanic search for meaning.
Something in this will come up again later, but he very much presents his performance work as both having defined purposes and being explicitly shamanic in nature.
I was unable to find anything more recent than 2008 where Alex Grey describes Secret Dog.
Necrophilia
Aside from early 80s texts about the situation (and partially within them), he describes Necrophilia as a painting. Sometimes the Trial of Souls is told in connection with Necrophilia, and sometimes in connection with the morgue pieces in general. Most of the time, the Trial of Souls is described without the context of it being in an LSD trip. Sometimes he says that the consequences of the piece were in scaring away a potential audience. Sometimes he describes the morgue pieces as bad things that he did and other times as very controversial art.
Analysis of Shift:
Necrophilia as a point of discussion has three general components: the dream that inspired it, the piece itself, and the trial of souls afterwards. The dream that inspired it doesn't tend to change much, but the way that it's used in the context of an interview does change. That said, I will only include it if it seems especially relevant for a given source.
One night in 1975, Grey had a dream: "I was fucking a seductive and beautiful living woman who rapidly aged and died as we were making love. Suddenly, she clamped her arms around me and the sides of our bed became the enclosures of our coffin. The dream was terrifying," he reported, but it forced him to take his death pieces to their conclusion. 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. [additional gross details omitted, you can read them in the Sources section]
"Four years after I did the necrophilia piece I was on a heavy LSD trip, and I hallucinated a trial of the souls involved with the piece. I met the soul of the women I had sex with. She was extremely angry and screamed at me, saying 'Didn't I know I was violating her and that she was a person just as I was even though she'd been dead two weeks?' I was so sorry, disgraced and disgusted with myself for having used her body for my own work that I cried and begged forgiveness. But she did not forgive me, and I was put on a kind of probation by the judges for the rest of my life. They said I was only to do positive, not harmful or negative works.
This is our baseline version of Necrophilia.
In 1976, I had access to a morgue and did a piece called Necrophilia. [...] In 1979 I hallucinated a trial of souls who were involved. I met the soul of the woman that I had sex with. She was extremely angry and screamed at me saying - didn't I know I was violating her and that she was a person just as I was. I was so sorry, disgraced and disgusted with myself, I cried and begged her forgiveness. She did not forgive me, but I was put on a kind of probation by the judge and told to do good works, not harmful and negative works. A day has not gone by that I haven't thought of the necrophilia piece. 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.
Roughly the same, but a bit more cagey with the realities of what he did.
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. [...]
During the period of the dream, Grey was reading Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on learning to love life by confronting the fear of death. "If you could love death," he figured, "you could love life more fully." Resolving the fear of death by doing Necrophilia "became like a metaphysical yearning." [...]
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. At the time, I didn't know about Shiva and Kali, and I guess I wanted some sort of ultimate acknowledgement of the negative forces I was feeling. It felt very decadent and sick to do the piece, but I felt that there were a lot of decadent and sick things happening. I'm not sure if I'm making this up, but I think I remember him saying that he felt that way about the body of the woman he was fucking. It was a very strange and intense experience for him." [...]
[...] But Grey's researches were interrupted by what he says was a vision. He suddenly found himself in a courtroom of souls, and he was on trial for the necrophilia piece. "There was the soul of the dead woman there; and, like, a jury of other souls. [...] They were sort of indicting me," Grey continued, "saying 'why have you done this?' And I really couldn't offer an excuse, I was so sorry and disgusted at myself for using her body. I cried and begged the woman to forgive me, that I didn't plan on doing that kind of action again and that I was extremely sorry I had offended her."
The woman refused to forgive him. She screamed at Grey. Didn't he know he had violated her? Didn't he know she was a person?
"So," Grey concluded, "the judge put me on probation for the rest of my life and told me to do good works. That's where it ended - 'You're not forgiven. Do good works.'"
This version includes a lot more about the meaning/significance of the piece in comparison to Blind Date, possibly in part due to the editor of High Performance's concern about addressing the topic of necrophilia. This article is fairly clear that he did actually perform "Necrophilia," but they stop short of saying what exactly he did and refer to a painting (which will become the norm insofar as Necrophilia is mentioned at all in later sources). The Trial of Souls is only described here as a vision, no mention that he was tripping on LSD at the time, and he won't really be candid about LSD's role in confronting him with his sins again to my knowledge. Please note that he says here that he defended himself to the victim's soul by saying that he wasn't "planning" to do it again and that he apologized for "offending her."
Grey's mortuary phase trespassed in many ways into a region we've come, for lack of a better word, to call "evil." Grey's secret research and self-expression within this forbidden zone was to abruptly cease when a series of dramatic, ego-shattering visions forced him to reevaluate his position as an artist and as a human being. Grey described them to me as follows.
[...] A few days later, I had another nightmarish episode in which I found myself inside an ominously menacing courtroom, before a judge I could not see and an angry jury, as 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, and put me on life probation never again to create such negative art.
This is an early example of his necrophilic act not being described at all, not even as a painting, but merely gestured at, though still including the Trial of Souls.
Well, I had a dramatic series of vision states that occurred after doing certain performances. They were performances that were done in the morgue where I worked, using the dead bodies. Using people's bodies in my artwork had questionable ethical ramifications. It was trespassing and there were consequences. I experienced a vision where I was in a courtroom being judged. I couldn't see the face of the judge, but I knew the accuser was a woman's body who I had utilized in the morgue work. She was accusing me of this sin. I said "It was for art's sake." This excuse didn't hold up under scrutiny for the judge. I was put on lifetime probation and not forgiven. The content of my work and my orientation would be watched from that point on. It made me consider the ethical intentions of my art.
In this interview he is clear that he did bad things, but does not mention what he did, and includes the Trial of Souls.
Mission of Art book 1998 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. 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. [...] 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. My actions had serious consequences, scaring off a number of people who might otherwise have been interested in my work, and cursing my work to somehow being precariously near or over "the edge."
There is an odd timeline discrepancy here - saying that the Trial of Souls happened in the same year as Necrophilia instead of four years later or 1979. But, Alex sometimes just gets confused about dates. Necrophilia is described as a painting here. This version does include more awareness of the wrongness of his actions than others, but it's interesting that he discusses the consequences of it as scaring off a potential audience and giving him a negative reputation.
I made a painting, entitled Necrophilia, of myself lying on top of a dead woman. Not long after that an unusual and for me life-altering vision occurred: While sitting in my studio one night, an ominous courtroom appeared. Before a judge I could not see and an angry jury, I faced a woman who accused me of trespassing upon 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.
As before, Transfigurations is more open about his past works than some other tellings. However, it is still described as a painting, and it also implies that the Trial of Souls occured much sooner after the Necrophilia piece than he said originally. If he was under the impression that Necrophilia had already affected his reputation at the time, this fairly intense change of timeline may have been used to present the idea that he very quickly felt remorse and changed his ways rather than the change occurring years later.
Life Energy
Often the killing of the rat is omitted. When it is described, sometimes it is described as being poorly received, and once it is said that Allyson (and possibly Alex) felt bad for the rat. Sometimes some amount of description is given of the performance as a whole, and other times it is implied that it was mostly or entirely the charts. Allyson is typically credited for the idea of making Sacred Mirrors following the performance.
Analysis of Shift:
Because of its significance as the inspiration for Sacred Mirrors and Alex Grey's return to painting, Life Energy is described more often than many others.
October 20, 1978
Helen Shlein Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts
A group of about twenty-five people joined me in an evening of events intended to stimulate awareness of our united energy fields. In the first half of the presentation we held hands in a circle and responded to taped instruction:
Focus your eyes on each member of the group for one minute.
Release a tremendous one-minute outburst.
Experience your group aura by internal visualization.
At intermission, people viewed the life energy charts that I had drawn for the presentation. The charts showed ancient Eastern and more recent Western concepts of the anatomy that allows us to live and think. Viewers were advised to stand facing the charts as if looking into a mirror and to sense the systems in their own bodies.
During the second half of the evening, I presented some of the myriad scientific and religious theories of life energy. To end the presentation, I invited people to stay if they wished to witness the passing of life energy as I decapitated a rat. Some left and some stayed to observe the sacrifice.
This more formal description of the event is from Transfigurations and is taken out of chronological order, but this seems to be the fullest description of the event, so it will serve as the baseline. Note that the charts are barely part of the performance as an intermission activity.
The direct inspiration for the Sacred Mirrors came from the performance, Life Energy, in which audience members participated with the artist in various experiments to get in touch with their own life energy. Simple life-sized charts of the nervous system and subtle energy systems (acupuncture, chakras, auras) were displayed to allow the audience to stand before them and mirror their own systems.
The rat is omitted entirely and the charts are described as being a larger portion of the performance than they actually were. Allyson's role in suggesting the Sacred Mirrors piece after the performance is also omitted in this version, though he will become much more consistent about crediting her.
"During the 1970's and 80's I did numerous performances and installations based on my visions. One of these performances was called Life Energy and in it, among other things, were black and white drawings, life-sized charts of the nervous system and the Eastern life energy systems. I used these charts to make a point about the relation of Eastern and Western concepts of consciousness and life energy. I had demarcated a space in front of them for where the viewer could stand and "mirror" the system with their own body.
My wife Allyson noticed the popularity of the charts and she suggested that I develop this idea further by doing paintings of the physical and metaphysical anatomy."
Omitted rat, the performance aside from the charts neglected, Allyson credited.
We had done a performance together in 1978 which was called Life Energy. We had the audience focus on different aspects of individual and group energy, and we went through a slide of history of the various cultural and individual understandings of the nature of life energy. There were also a couple of charts that I had made for the performance. One detailed an anatomical view of the nervous system, suggesting the Western notion that consciousness of a by-product of biology and the nervous system. That contrasted with the other chart, the Eastern view, that was comprised of various life energy systems and psychic energy systems, the acupuncture meridians and points, the chakra system, and the auras surrounding the body. These charts had a small area marked in front of them where the viewer would stand and mirror these life-size images.
On our way home from this performance, Allyson and I were talking and we both agreed that the most successful element in this performance happened to be these charts. Allyson had the idea, "Why not create a large series of fully detailed paintings examining both the physical and metaphysical aspects of our anatomy??" Later on, after I had been working on the series for about a year, she also came up with the title Sacred Mirrors.
This one describes the actual performance more than the previous interview. Allyson credited.
I did a performance called "Life Energy", back in around 1978, and I had made these charts-- of the Eastern model of Life Energy, and of the Western nervous system, as just an anatomical model, where consciousness is seen as a by-product of the nervous system. And contrasting those two charts I even had a little area set off in front of the image, so that a person could stand in that. They were life-size charts, and you would stand in that zone and then try to mirror the system within your own body. I did many variations of this during Life Energy performance. But as we were walking away afterwards, Alyson said, "You know it would really be great if you did fully detailed oil paintings of these different systems that people could stand in front of." Because that was really the most successful thing about that performance. So at that moment I felt doomed to doing the "Sacred Mirrors", because that was really the inspiration behind it. So she's inspired me to do numerous paintings, I think, some of my best work. She's a great designer in her own work.
This one describes the charts as the primary part of the performance, with the rest of it being described as "variations of" the audience interactions with the charts. Allyson credited.
The Sacred Mirrors series, which is now my most well known body of work, began out of a performance called "Life Energy" we did in 1978. I had this idea that I needed to look at life energy in various ways. We did a series of performances exploring that concept, and as part of this process we created two charts of human figures – one was of the nervous system and the other was of auras, chakras and meridian points. We demarcated a little zone in front and suggested that people stand in front of the charts and see if they could identify with the figure and use it as a mirror to start to imagine the systems in their own bodies.
At the end of the performance, I executed a rat to show the passing of life energy. We really felt like we had lost all of our friends because of that. It didn't go over too well at all. But as Allyson and I were walking home and a little despondent, she said: "You know, Alex, people really liked the charts. You should do a whole series based on them." That was the birth of the Sacred Mirrors.
This is the earliest interview I've found where killing the rat is mentioned. Allyson credited.
At a performance we called "Life Energy," participants were invited to stand before life-sized charts, one of the nervous system and one of the esoteric systems of the body -- the chakras, acupuncture meridians and points, the auras, etc., and meditate or reflect on their own personal bodily systems. We led the group to experience their "life energy" in a variety of exercises. To end the performance, for the purpose of experiencing the passing of life energy, I sacrificed a rat for art in the manner that rats are sacrificed daily in science labs, using a special guillotine made for that purpose.
Heading home, feeling terrible about the rat, Allyson turned to me and said, "You know, people really loved the charts. It would be great if you'd make life sized oil paintings of the physical and esoteric systems of the body." That was in 1978, and I began painting again.
This one is the first interview I've found that says that they felt bad about the rat rather than feeling bad about people not enjoying it. Allyson credited.
The same motivation went into creating this series called Sacred Mirrors. The Sacred Mirrors started with a performance called Life Energy. Allyson and I met with a group of people and were doing exercises to get in touch with our life energy. I made two charts for this performance, one was a nervous system and the other was a kind of subtle energy map. Allyson noticed how many people were really enjoying this experience there in the gallery, so she suggested that I do an entire series based on this idea. That was the birth of the Sacred Mirrors. She also named the Sacred Mirrors.
This one describes that there was more to the performance than the charts, but omits the rat. Allyson credited.
Back in 1978, we did a performance together called "Life Energy," and I made life-sized charts of the body to place on the gallery wall -- one of the Eastern model of Life Energy with chakras, auras and acupuncture meridians and points, and the other was the Western anatomical model of the nervous system. I demarcated an area in front of the image, so that a person could stand in that zone and try to mirror the system on the chart within their own body. Afterwards, Allyson suggested, "It would be great if you did fully detailed oil paintings of these different systems, body, mind & spirit, people could stand in front of them and get in touch with their deepest self." Allyson was really the inspiration of the painting series and she even came up with the name, "Sacred Mirrors."
This one presents the charts as if they were the entire performance without any implication that more occurred. Allyson credited.
[Allyson speaking] In 1978 we collaborated on a performance called "Life Energy" for which I assisted Alex in creating a slide talk on the history of an invisible force that permeates all consciousness and animates our being.
For the performance, Alex created two life-sized figures — detailed ink drawings on paper depicting the Western and Eastern understandings of Life Energy — one with the anatomical nervous system and the other depicting the Eastern concepts of Life Energy including the acupuncture meridians and points, chakras and auras. An instructional sign invited guests to stand in the anatomical position facing the ink drawing and "mirror" their personal life energy systems. Guests lined up for this intermission activity.
On the way home, I suggested that the "charts" were the most beloved part of the performance, and that Alex could paint in fine detail all the anatomical and esoteric systems as a series of paintings. Alex felt called to this work and began right away.
The charts are described as an intermission activity here, rat omitted. Allyson credited.
[Allyson speaking] In 1978 we collaborated on a performance called "Life Energy" for which I assisted Alex in creating a slide talk on the history of an invisible force that permeates all consciousness and animates our being.
In 1978 Allyson and I did this performance called Life Energy. I put some charts of anatomical systems up on the wall and invited people to stand in front of them and see if they could sense the systems in their body. It was a kind of a performative painting to stimulate awareness of our vital forces. Part of that performance was really transgressive. I thought that at the end we should witness the passing of life energy, too, and to do that I sacrificed a rat. I decapitated it with a medical device. We warned people, and some left, but afterwards we thought we had lost all of our friends. Nobody wanted to talk, everybody was like, "Oh, geez." We left there thinking, "What have we done? Oh my god." Then Allyson says, "You know, Alex, people really loved the charts. What you ought to do is maybe a whole series based on that -- body, mind, and spirit." And that was the birth of "The Sacred Mirrors." She also named the series.
This is the most detail we ever get on the rat killing, to my knowledge, though the rest of the performance isn't really described. The feelings after killing the rat seem to be more about people being horrified rather than horror at what they had done. Allyson credited.
This flow over time of Alex and Allyson Grey changing their story, and especially the way that they sometimes revert to previous versions, shows that the changes were not a case of their memory drifting over time, but instead a deliberate decision to censor the reality of what they have done.
PART IV
Is Alex Grey still interested in dead things?
Why, yes! As much as he seems to have developed qualms about actually doing "morgue pieces," he has shown a continued interest in seeing and being around and interacting with dead things and body parts.
In the 1993 interview with David Jay Brown, Alex was asked if he's gotten to hold a brain and replied, "Oh yeah, plenty of times. And to me that's like the most amazing thing, just to hold the brain. I teach anatomy now for artists at NYU, and we go to a medical school anatomy lab. They always have the brains with the spinal cord there."
Transfigurations includes an image of Alex Grey in his art studio, and there are, of course, skeletons there, at least one of which appears to be real.
I wish I could find more information about the context for it, but here's an image from Transfigurations of Alex Grey holding a brain, and he appears to be older than he was when he worked at the morgue.
He has certainly continued to draw corpses well after leaving the morgue.
While it isn't directly dead things, his art showing all the internal bits of people that you would normally only be able to see in dissection also pays homage to his love of bodies. In discussing some of the sexual artwork that he has made, Alex said to Juxtapoz in 2003, "I don't know how hot it is, in terms of whether it would be a turn-on to people - I think that seeing all the bones and guts and things like that is a bit of a turn-off for some people and, for some others, a turn-on. For me it's sexy". Interesting.
Rest assured, his love of dead stuff seems to be intact.
PART V
Why This Matters
For those who have stumbled across this page without much knowledge of Alex Grey, let me be clear - his role in his community is not simply as an artist. He is a leader of a religious organization, he is invited to speak at events and conferences, and he has been on Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine's 100 most spiritually influential living people for who knows how long. I have no problem with death of the author when it comes to appreciating artistic works, but Alex Grey's product is not just his art but himself as a guru-type figure.
His interest in death is not an issue in itself, and I do think that people can learn and grow and become better people. However, Alex Grey does not present himself to his current audience and followers as someone who did bad things that he should not have done in his youth when he was mentally ill, and he does not talk to them about how they should avoid giving in to unethical juvenile impulses even if they feel like they can justify them in the moment. Instead, as far as we know, he still thinks his transgressions were justified for his shamanic path, and he hides the truth from his current audience.
If Alex Grey was honest with his audience and members of his religious congregation about his past, people could make their own informed decision about how much they want him to spiritually influence them. He could openly make his case that his incredibly unethical performance art was a shamanic journey and let people decide whether they agree. But he has not given that honesty to the people who listen to him.
The psychedelic community as a whole has a problem with people being excused for harmful behavior because they are part of the community. In my mind, this is a perversion of what psychedelics should be. Psychedelics are powerful mind-altering substances with an incredible power to help people and do good, but with the potential to encourage delusion and allow harm. If we care about psychedelics, we should hold the psychedelic community to the highest possible standards of integrity. The idea that psychedelics make people good and moral is a dangerous delusion.
I call on all corners of the psychedelic space to be vigilant for liars, manipulators, and people who use their reputation in psychedelia to gain undeserved power over others. We must demand integrity in our communities, our science, and especially our leaders.
Never demand perfection, but always demand honesty.
In the case of Alex Grey, I mostly want the truth to be known. As Lewis MacAdams wrote in Blind Date (1981) speaking of Alex Grey and the other featured artist,
Both men know that they have violated something very strong and very profound. Both men know that they will always be known as men who fucked the corpse.