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."
