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"[Mark] Kramer, a New York-based arts writer, has been following
Christ's career for years. About three years ago, he wrote an article
on Christ for New York Press that included 'an oblique mention
of the penis thing.' 'And astonishingly', says Kramer, '[in 1995] he makes this movie with a guy with no penis.' His face is not shown, and the voice is altered. Kramer says one of Christ's ex-girlfriends and another independent source confirmed his suspicion that Christ is the memberless man. (The amputation was performed in an emergency room, Kramer says, after a cock ring was left on way too long.)"
From an item in Philadelphia City Paper Feb.,
1997
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In today's repressive cultural climate--when any patently offensive theatrical display of sexual organs can mean Federal prosecution or even jail time, Joe Christ's penile-amputation site is a living loophole in the United States Code's notorious Section 18. Not even the radical Christian rightists--whom Joe Christ has dedicated His life to baiting--or their elected shills in Washington, D.C., anticipated His explicitly objectionable display of no sexual organs.
Ratcheting up the pervo factor of this increasingly familiar roadside attraction is Joe Christ's adherance--onscreen and off--to the mutually self-reinforcing fictions that Sex Blood & Mutilation's phantom phallus was amputated "voluntarily", and that the ravaged remnants onscreen belong to someone other than Himself.
Reported Philadelphia City Paper, "Christ prankishly maintains that the penis missing from Sex Blood & Mutilation belongs to some other guy--purportedly a respected businessman leading a secret life as a post-penectomic personality."
Omitting any mention of the penile ligature, or the catastrophic priapism that engulfed His corpora cavernosa following an intragenital cocaine injection, Joe Christ's "mysterious" appearance in a seven-minute verbal-and-anatomical video installation morphs eerily into an endorsement for voluntary penectomy.
"About 10 years ago, I decided to have my penis cut off", dissembles His electronically disembodied voice.
"I'd already done everything which is done with one," He reports from the far frontiers of wishful thinking. "...I made a conscious decision to spend the second half of my life without a penis--just for the sake of doing something different...."
Itemizes His shamanistic skein of uro-genital delusion, "...My sexual partners don't seem to have any problem with it, either... They receive a lot more attention from me than from their other, more largely endowed, lovers... Most women, straight or gay, seem to like getting eaten out better than fucked any way, instead of interrupting the cunt-licking to shove a dick in. And now that I can cum from doing that, I'm a better lover than ever..."
"... Women seem to like it better this way, too.....", concludes Joe Christ's voice-over--a clear expression of the desire, if not the recommendation, that other men follow the His fraudulent example.
Simultaneously The Thing Denied and The Thing Displayed, the presence of this organ's absence--and the hideous recreational mishap that necessitated its amptuation--have been common knowledge among Texas and East Village subculturati for almost a decade. However, Joe Christ's penile injury remained a private matter--nearly worthless in its gossip value--until, in a relentless crusade of self-exploitation, He publicly, if pseudonymously, extolled the forbidden benefits of His irreversibly altered state.
 Sex, Blood & Mutilation video capture courtesy of dorky ravers who like goths. |
Sex Blood & Mutilation's pubic nubbin, and the strange case of Joe Christ, who actually was penectomized--but denies it--exists in poignant contradistinction to the short, brutal life of Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose simulated penectomy in 1966 inspired the ubiquitous, nearly ineradicable rumor that the doomed Austrian artist had cut off his own penis.
Indeed, Schwarzkoger's 1966 Third Aktion--a quasi-medical photographic series of bandaged genitals (composed, like Joe Christ's, below the neck)--plunged at least two famed art critics into a tragedy of errors that would become the dipstick by which suspended critical disbelief has henceforth been measured.
First came vaunted Time magazine critic Robert Hughes, writing in 1972, who described Schwarzkogler as "the Vincent van Gogh of body art [who]....proceeded, inch by inch, to amputate his own penis, while a photographer recorded the act as an art event."
Summarized Hughes, "....acts of self-amputation finally did Schwarzogler in...."--concluding that the troubled 29-year-old Viennese "died, a martyr to his art." This was only partly true: Schwarzkogler had careened to his death from a second-story Vienna window on June 20, 1969.
Nonetheless, in 1989, Schwarzkogler's "piece-by-piece amputations of his own penis" was referenced no less than three times in esteemed cultural commentator Henry Sayre's exhaustive, and, some might argue, exhausting study The Object of Performance.
The myth was not publicly discredited until 1990.
Joe Christ's phantom phallus is the involuted afterimage of Rudolf Schwarzkogler's mythic member--and both are illustrative of the wider assault of countercultures upon themselves.
As the as the very model of a post-modern missing genital--the truth about Joe Christ, like Freud's "slow return of the repressed" has metastasized into the World Wide Web's first body-modification scandale--a feeding frenzy of denial that has echoed into such ecumenically diverse outposts of expereience as the pornography, extreme-horror and recreational-drug industries and The Church of The SubGenius.
It's a Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ world--and a guy named Joe aims to keep it that way: Over a thousand USENET postings by Joe Christ and His spouse, "extreme horror" writer Nancy A. Collins, only hint at the depths they've plumbed in their attempt to bury this hauntingly real-life tale of dismemberment and deceptioon.
Coming soon: "CruciFixion or CruciFact?"
This penis is NOT attached to Joe Christ.