PHONEBOX PHANTASIES

talking telephone booth blues with g bataille

As the original, primary purpose of the public payphone is supplanted by the ubiquity of the mobile telephone, the phone box retains a tenuous position in urban life as other functions assign themselves to it. While the surreal banality of capitalism ensures the viability of phone boxes through the marketing of their surface area as advertising space, the purpose of their interior has often been subverted into a gallery of sexual archetypes, fluctuating in response to market forces in the invisible economy of the sex trade, forces driven by the even murkier economy of repressed desire in search of fulfilment.
To enter a phone box, to step inside the advertisement for fried chicken, is to stand before a battery of blankly imploring gazes. Postures affecting both the need for and the promise of sexual satisfaction, calculated to generate a libidinal vacuum, to divert currents of desire towards where they can be harnessed and converted into other forms of currency.

TELEPHONE EXXXCHANGE

How have phone boxes become hubs for the arrangement of this form of exchange? It is an echo of the telephone exchange. Erotic desire is a drive toward connection, toward fusion and away from individual isolation. The grid of lurid postcards has become a kind of switchboard, through which the desiring man is connected to the object of his desire. This connection heralds the immanence of the sexual act that will see his consciousness temporarily abandoned, his identity dissolved, in the course of erotic experience. Through this abandonment of consciousness, a profound sense of connection with another human being is made possible as the distinction between self and world is destroyed.

For some reason, it is common to find phone boxes installed in pairs. While photographing them for this project, the image of these pairs gave birth to a diversion. A bespoke pair of postcards was required for these situations- a phone box soliciting phone calls from the adjacent phone box {"CALL ME/ USE ME"}. The poetic algebra of the pimp, whore and trick. Responding to the postcard, the trick is left listening to the lonely, unanswered ring of the neighbouring phone, in dissonant harmony with the dry, clipped ringtone coming from the handset. Or else the call is answered, creating an awkward, furtive connection between two curious punters. An erotic stalemate.

THE EROTIC OBJECT

Of course, phone boxes are anonymous. The coffin like space is also a haven from prying eyes and giant databases. The destruction of the individual self associated with erotic experience and it's kinship with violence and death means that it is an area of life that is conducted in privacy and treated with the sanctity of the taboo. In fact, it is partly the gravity of this taboo that makes erotic experience so powerful.
In modern post- Christian cultures, all but the merest traces of violence and destruction have been purged from the realm of the sacred or spiritual. The erotic object is sanitised, neutralised and ultimately debased, then proliferated as if to prove that sexuality is base and profane. The series of prints that led to this project were intended as erotic objects of a higher order. Images that evoke the horror and complexity of eroticism, and offered a glimpse of it's place in the sacred, and a sense of it's power to dissolve our identity, to open up a sense of continuity with the world beyond ourselves. By relocating these images among the strange colonies of the phone box the intention was to re- present the sacred aspects of eroticism in a situation where it seems to be lost or disappearing, to restore the disturbing sense of taboo, and make possible the powerful liberation that comes with it's transgression.
M.O.