Either of those endings would have made a point. There might be noxious fumes that would eventually drive the audience out, or it would run out of gas. I originally thought this would kind of be a boring piece in which I would just go around and around. When it finally did, I lay down in the contraption and it started going round. The audience was sitting about a foot and a half away from the wheel as it came around, and when I started it up, the engine had a little trouble starting. I put steel rods down into concrete in the floor to anchor the thing. Then she jammed her fingers down my throat and I did the same.Īnother piece I did was called “Human Race.” I had had a vision of a piece involving a machine/vehicle of sorts that had a motor and a wheel and a little clutch that was a kind of hand throttle that would engage it to the side in such a way that it could go round and round inside a room. X got up (Allyson was a gifted bulimic for years) and she puked up the money onto a table. As the clock approached nuclear midnight, Mrs. They arrived at a dinner table in hell to feast on money.” We sat at the table, drinking “blood” and eating “money,” and there was an alarm bell going off in the heart of a skeleton in the piece and bomb blast sounds in the background. X were on their way to dinner when they were surprised by a nuclear blast. On each one of the seats there, we had written “Mr. My wife, Allyson, joined me in another performance piece I called “The Wasteland,” in which we represented the nuclear family. About ten feet away from me was my painting called “Nuclear Crucifixion.” Quite a few people wanted me to stamp their hands, and a few of them wanted me to stamp their foreheads. If they wanted me to, I would stamp their hand with the number of the beast – 666. He then goes on to describe some of his later, now famous works and how the psychedelic experience informed their creation.ĪLEX GREY: A few years back in New York, I was sitting in a pool of black, tar-like liquid in a performance called “The Beast.” As people entered the space they would see a hydrogen bomb blast projected on one wall that was to my side. In this talk, Alex recounts some of the artistic experiments from a “middle period” that bridged some of his earlier, truly transgressive work with social awareness and his nascent spiritual awakening. The Chapel moved to its permanent home in Wappinger Falls, New York in February 2009. A five-year installation of Grey’s best-loved artworks was exhibited at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, in New York City from 2004-9. In 2004, Alex and Allyson Grey founded the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York, a cultural center and refuge for contemplation that celebrates a new alliance between divinity and creativity. He is also the author of The Mission of Art and co-editor of a book about the conjunction of Buddhism and Psychedelics, Zig Zag Zen. Alex’s anatomical training prepared him for painting the Sacred Mirrors series of paintings and for working as a medical illustrator.Īlex’s paintings, which have appeared as album art for such leading musicians’ as the bands TOOL, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, have been exhibited throughout the world and are chronicled in a number of monographs: Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Transfigurations, and Net of Being. Joan Borysenko as a research technologist at Harvard’s Department of Mind/Body Medicine, conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. For five years, Alex worked in the Anatomy Department at Harvard Medical School preparing cadavers for dissection while he studied the body on his own. The Grey couple continued to take “sacramental journeys” on LSD. He has also courageously and unhesitatingly acknowledged his deep debt to vision-inducing substances in helping shape his artistic vision.Īlex bonded with his life-long partner, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey in Boston in 1976 when they had a life-changing, joint, simultaneous entheogenically induced mystical experience, which transformed Alex’s agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. An edited excerpt of a talk given by Alex Grey at the 2003 Bioneers ConferenceĪlex Grey is a NY-based artist who has achieved worldwide renown, especially for his extraordinary x-ray-like portraits of the human body’s physiological and energetic systems and for his search for a common mystical experience underlying all the world’s spiritual traditions.
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