By Frankie Knuckles

Those whom archive, whether it be through word or image share a sense of commonality, they tell a story, but it is often one that masquerades through that of an object. Like the object this story is a simple substitute, acting as synecdoche for a wider and more intriguing discourse. That discourse is fetish.

Stoller once said that ‘ fetish is a story masquerading as an object’. However without such masquerade, the object largely remains insignificant. Whether the Louboutin shoe, the delicate French fancy or even the disgusting shit within a Freudian telling, all become only a preoccupation to avert attention from the true power fetish provides.

The word ‘fetish’ did not enter into the English language until the seventeenth century, used initially to describe amulets of the natives of the New Guinea Coast used to enchant travellers. However, its subversive overtones can still be traced much earlier when examining comparable words within other languages throughout time. As example, the subversive nature and potential power of ‘obre de feticos’ were ruled forbidden by King John I of Portugal (1385) for fear of summoning devils, or forging bonds against the State.

This demonization of ‘obre de feticos’ and the similar process of making deviant the fetish community is understandable when considering the object in relation to that of the state subject. This duality, the reliance and at the same time revering, of the necessary object, reflects that of our very own being human and this scares governance. It justifies why the other is disparaged from being further explored. But what of those who do explore, those whom live their weekends within the realms of otherness?

Torture Garden has been an icon in Fetish entertainment for over two decades and celebrates both domestic and international applaud. Operating in monthly cycles, it sees some 1500 people congregate within London each dressing in some of the most creative and outlandish outfits ever created. Within my own self-asking as to where else we see such number gathering monthly to take in performance art is where I first fond bond and a drawing to the club.

Given the financial and political motivations of many national bodies when funding art, and the environment where DIY is seen as the only other plausible avenue for independent artistic expression, an interesting option is yet to be fully explored within use of the fetish club.

I cannot take credit for realising this. Ron Athey in his interview with Dominic Johnson spoke at length about the way in which he used LA’s Club Fuck back in the 1990’s as a stage to test pieces that would eventually come to form Four Scenes in a Harsh Life. Within the interview Athey boldly comments;

‘This is what led me back into making performance work again, after a nine-year hiatus. Martyrs & Saints was created there, as a series of individual ten-minutes pieces. In and around our group, the ‘first family’ of Fuck, the early 1990s were really the heavy time of AIDS deaths, so the project was powered by frustration, grief, anger, despair. Sexually charged, exhibitionist behaviour rattled through this group like an affirmation of life, and I’m not being wordy with the sentiments.’

(Athey : JONES 2012:538)

Therefore the fetish club becomes a liberating space to re-affirm a sense of living and the freedom of self –expression. In these harsh times, where regulation is guised in economy, albeit being merely ideology in a mask, we find that artists have to force such spaces, to enter into the liminal, so that ‘extra-ordinary’ moments can be realised without being quashed by the rationalised fist of a society based only upon simulacra. Although we can see revolutionary artists like Suka Off now using porn within similar way within their Inside Flesh projects, it was the fetish club that first broke into such avenues within my view.

David Wood, one of the co-founders of Torture Garden, is a firm advocate of this notion. Within his book ‘Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex’ he says;

‘ Many have described their first experience of entering a T.G. event as like a stepping into another world, a sacred space, a new dimension of limitless possiblities’ (WOOD 1996: 5)

Hence Torture Garden becomes a monthly ritual, where one adorns the ‘obre de feticos’ either as performer or patron, to forge bonds of a ‘community (a notion within itself becoming ethos against that of the State and hence maybe John I Of Portugal’s concerns were justified). It represents people coming together to celebrate human expressivity in a ‘semi-public psychodrama of desire’ (Ibid 5) which cannot but help make for an interesting seeing/scene

References
JONES A, HEATHFIELD A (2012) Perform, Repeat and Perform: Live Art in History. Intellect.

WOOD D (1996) Torture Garden: From Bodyshocks to Cybersex, Creation Books.