JOHN DUNCAN
Blind Date

On May 14th, 1980, John Duncan performed ‘Blind Date’ at DTLA in Los Angeles. Duncan’s piece was part of a 2 month festival of performance art, called ‘Public Spirit’, which played at different locations throughout the city and was one of the largest and most comprehensive festivals ever held in the United States.  

Rumour was out surrounding the extreme nature of Duncans’ newest work, and in many ways what the audience saw and heard that night in the DTLA space lived up to expectation.  
Immediately the performance art community was not only divided but polarised over what Duncan had dared. The magazine ‘High Performance’ which ran a special issue catalog documenting the ‘Public Spirit’ festival refused to carry documentation of the piece. Instead the editor printed the following;

“John Duncan performed twice in this festival. His other piece is not included in this catalog because I find it highly, morally objectionable and do not wish to be responsible for publishing it. Rather than describe what occurred that May night, let us listen to John Duncan himself as he describes and performs for radio, ‘Blind Date’.”

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    ”Men are taught to respond to their own emotional pain with rage. A rage they often aim at themselves. Teaching men to react in this way is an obscene and sanctioned perversion. If you were a parent with a male child, you are partly to blame.

    I was very deeply in love. When I lost that love I saw myself as a complete, emotional failure. Unable to return any kind of positive affection. I wanted to punish myself as thoroughly as I could. I decided to have a vasectomy - but that wasn’t enough. I wanted my last potent seed to be spent in a dead body.

    I made arrangements to have sex with the cadaver.

    I was bodily thrown out of several sex shops before meeting a man who set me up with a morticians’ assistant in a Mexican border town. The man took $10 in exchange for a phone number. One hour with the corpse would be $80 paid to the morticians’ assistant. I was ordered not to take any pictures or film. I drove to the border town, rented the room and called the phone number. About an hour later the assistant came to my room. He drove to the mortuary at his insistence and shown me to a medium sized work room. He took the $80, shut the door and left me alone. The corpse was a woman who I guess to be in her mid-thirties with no disfigurements. All limbs and head attached, lying on a table covered with white paper.

    What you are about to hear is the sound of my having sex with it.”