From the Archives ... Lovely Louise (On the Nakedness of the Prostitute)

 

My fascination with the cards left in the now nearly vanished red phone boxes by London's prositutes advertising their services and physical charms, already had a long history before I decided to produce an adapted range of my own cards in the early 2000s, containing fragments of text taken from my Illicit Lover's Discourse project [click here].  

 

I suppose - using a term coined by the cultural critic Mark Dery - this might be described as a form of subvertising. Having said that, whilst my cards mimicked the look and feel of the original works, I wasn't attempting to undermine the sex trade, nor mock those involved in such.  

 

Rather, I was just playfully trying to introduce a little philosophical speculation into the world of vice and perhaps deconstruct some of the stereotypes and clichés that endlessly circulate within the pornographic imagination. 

 

Perhaps what I was doing might better be thought of as an apolitical détournement - i.e., something done just for the fun of it, with no real objective and free of all judgement.   

The cards - extremely limited in number - were placed in phone boxes in Soho and Paddington. Fuck knows if anyone ever saw them before teams from Westminster City Council removed them, but it pleases me to imagine that an illicit lover went round collecting them in the same way I went round collecting the real cards. 

 

Sadly, the only example I seem to have kept in the archives is a card featuring Lovely Louise (New - 19 Yrs Old), who specialised in solo exhibitions and strip tease. My addition to the card is a text in which I muse on the nakedness of the prostitute:

 

"Were we ever to succeed in peeling away that series of coverings given her by the pornographic imagination in order to ensure the erotic appeal of her flesh (and advertise its availability), the Prostitute would not merely be desexualised, she would in fact cease to exist. 

 

Knowing this, the Prostitute is very reluctant to remove her clothes (to have her strip always costs extra). And knowing this, the Illicit Lover is often a fetishist who realises that desire is aroused and sustained by signs and symbols of the surface; like the Greeks, he becomes superficial out of profundity."

 

 

We Are All Fashion Clowns

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (dir. Todd Phillips)

Warner Bros. Pictures, 2019

I don't know if it's a post-Joker phenomenon, but the fashion world is still loving a full-on clown look at the moment, with zany outfits, exaggerated makeup, and ludicrous footwear; exactly the sort of thing I was wearing 35 years ago in my Jimmy Jazz period (and I'm still of the view that you can't beat clashing prints and colours, kipper ties, baggy trousers, and clumpy shoes).        

Clownishness would, on the (painted) face of it, seem to be the very opposite of elegant and sophisticated cool; a kind of anti-style that transgresses all notions of restraint and good taste. As Batsheva Hay rightly says, it's the epitome of what most people in their muted blues and browns regard as loud and would normally reject in terms of appearance. 

And yet, it has a queer kind of sexiness and, of course, a slightly sinister edge; the evil clown being a well-established figure within the popular imagination, combining horror elements with the more traditional comic traits. Mark Dery, who theorised this figure with reference to Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, regards the psycho-killer clown as a veritable postmodern icon. 

Which returns us to Joaquin Phoenix and his astonishing performance as Arthur Fleck (Joker) dressed in his burgandy red two-piece suit, gold waistcoat, and green collared shirt ...

It's a very carefully thought-through look created by two-time Academy Award winning costume designer Mark Bridges (in close collaboration with director Todd Phillips); one that is suggestive both of the period in which the movie is set (late-70s/early-80s) and true to the character and his means. Thus, Arthur looks good, but not catwalk fabulous; as if he found his clothes in a thrift store, rather than an expensive designer outlet.     

Again, I can certainly relate to that and maintain that a punk DIY ethos provides the crucial (shabby-subversive) element if you are going to assemble your own clown-inspired outfit ...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Punk Clown 

by Gaelle Sherwood (c. 1984)

See: Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, (Grove Press, 1999), chapter 2: 'Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns'.

Play: Joker - final trailer - uploaded to Youtube by Warner Bros. Pictures (28 Aug 2019): click here. 

Note: some readers might be interested in an earlier post to this one called Send in the Clowns: click here.