Presenting my pictures of Desire Machine in my project group, the reactions of the group surprised me. Some were repulsed by references to violence–chains, for example–while others professed irritation at the lack of “readibility”. How were these pictures sexual? Where were the people getting it on? How was a roll of kitchen paper referring to fetish sex? What was the significance of a pair of socks or the colour red? Again, another group admitted to being unsure about the significance of much of the details, but they got the erotic context and associated feelings of alienation, detachment, even sadness and an overall sense of ambiguity with the pictures. A few–gay men–felt they could easily place each picture in a sexual connotation.

Working on the premise that gay fetish is a language of sorts, a code of symbols, signifiers, markers, and can serve as one example of a consumer language, i.e. an acquired set of signifiers used in the construction of identity, then the above phenomenon is its natural consequence. How am I like others? How am I different from others? A language such as fetish is sorts that out in no time.

I recently spent an evening at a birthday party; some championship football game was on and I found myself watching it in a group of fans. I hate football; as a German boy, I was expected to play it–in school, with my mates, with my dad, but it bored me to death. Watching it is like watching paint drying with added vuvuzelas. How beautiful was that pass, how nailbiting the end of the first half, how competent the goalie, and so on. Their excitement was lost on me. This in turn causes a football fan some frustration. I cannot get that part of him, that passion. I cannot validate their expertise, their shared identity as football fans. Of course, I love showing my indifference; it is a sort of late revenge for the countless hours of my childhood and youth wasted on football. So, my football fan’s frustration at my lack of interest in the game reflects my identity as someone who has always hated it. But I digress…

Belonging to one group of people and setting oneself apart from another is what consumer languages are about. A Porsche is lost on someone who has no interest in cars. Hermes scarves, Adidas trainers, a golfing holiday in Qatar, or that Eileen Gray chair–they all carry clouds of connotations about their owner’s taste, wealth, social aspirations, and association with others, but only to a person who can “read” these signifiers and understand their meaning. It is why people prefer associating in like groups; they read each other well and can thus validate each other’s lifestyle constructs.

For my pictures, that poses a problem. They are about a specific language–gay fetish sexuality–and are thus not accessible to everyone all of the time. I quite like viewers feeling “excluded” to some extent, but if they offer nothing to engage, then they stop communicating. If they are instantly readable, as in blokes in fetish gear getting it on, then they stop making the language as such visible; they then become instantly fixed in their meaning. But I concede that my take has been pretty dysphoric for ripping the language apart. Taking fetish signifiers out of their emotional erotic context exposes their function more than placing them in an erotically charged scene. After all, fetish refers to pleasure, sexual fulfilment and prowess; that is their aspiration. So, here’s another picture. A couple of guys playing on the bed–sex, finally!–another guy preferring his gayromeo account to the action before his eyes. The mirror reflecting a seemingly different scene to the one on the bed. A hand gesture remains ambiguous. Is he pushing the other man’s hand away, or withdrawing his own so the other can touch him? I am quite happy with this one as it maintains a certain openness, but offers enough to the viewer to “get” roughly what it is about. Or so, the feedback from the group.

Do the other pictures in combination with this one become more readable, maybe less irritating? Hard for me to say, but that would be my hope. I don’t want to lose too many viewers along the way. More of this, I think, and see if it works…