Art Metropole

#11077

Save Me From What I Want

Date

2003

Publisher

Sexymachinery

Format

Artists' Books

Size

10.9 × 16 × 1 cm

Length

146 

If you had asked a Medieval man-on-the street ‘What is it you want to be saved from the most?’ he might well have answered, ‘The unforgiving flames of hell…eternal damnation…that kind of thing.’ Ask the same question today and the replies would no doubt encompass a wilder enumeration. Avoidance of a vengeful afterlife would feature alongside saving oneself from over-eating; over-spending; the J-Lo/Ben saga; Arnie and Dubya; sickly manufactured pop or terrorists with unruly facial hair. When the world rallied around Shakira’s emotive call for ‘Wherever, Whenever’, they didn’t predict the flipside to such ultimate, instantaneous mobility. The failure of secular liberation, as J. P. Sartre pointed out, is that you are banished to your own freedom. What a downer. Sexymachinery Nine is a celebration of the limits of desire and one’s desire for limits. Here, impulses, speculations and theories (that form unconscious codes to our lives) are made public. Our contributors want to be saved and in turn want you to be saved: from social worker palm trees, from over-sensational fake-lesbian kisses, from a lack of hope. As Traci Lords said of her teenage induction into the hard-core world of porn ‘Wild as I was, a little girl playing grown up, underneath I wanted to be saved.

CONTENTS

Cover: FRONT, Palm tee-shirt Photographed by Frans Hallqvist ; BACK cover and SPINE, Tokyo’s nest model by Stéphane Orsolini and Hiroshi Yamasaki ; SPINE, It has to Be Perfect by Lisa Torell; TOP EDGE, Liar, Liar by Lena Artaker; BOTTOM EDGE, The Great Fire of London 2003 by sexymachinery ; RIGHT EDGE, Hiding Places by Ben Chatfield ; CHAPTER 1: SAVE: It’s so new left vogue compiled by Shumon Basar; A message of HOPE for an uncertain future by Neville Mars; The Ruthless and The Innocent by Christopher Wortley; A Pig Saved My Life by Elio Caccavalle; I Had A Dream, Deer Friends, Kofie Annan by Smac Reynolds; From Leslie to Horst by Peter Rhmkorf contributed by Siko; CHAPTER 2: ME: Ideal Monsters by Anna Aleksandrovna Neimark; Tectonic signage by Jean Jaminet; Centrefold by James Irland; Mama Monster doth preach by S.B.; Switzerland by åbäke; Kjole by Marie Lund and Nina Beier; CHAPTER 3: FROM: End of Project by Sandra Parvu; The Rise and Fall of the Palm Project, Frans Hallqvist & Teo Carlsson by Martin Funnerdahl; Tokyo’s Nest by Stéphane Orsolini and Hiroshi Yamasaki; Saved from What I Wanted by Cynthia Davidson; A rudimentary Celebration of Divorce by Payam Sharif and Kasja Korczak; The Most Beautiful House in the World by Dominik Kremerskothen; CHAPTER 3: WHAT: Installation in South Kensington pedestrian underpass by Ben Chatfield; MacGuffin by Julia Spicer; Domino Book by EricandMarie ; Once Upon a Time There Was a Wolf by Natalia Ibanez; CHAPTER 5: I: The Penalty for Perfidy by Maria Fusco; Moving House to Get Home by Anna Kubelik; Lifestyle by Sir Eric Beyond; Man X by Nick West; A Shopping Alcoholic by Lisa Panting; Reason vs. Emotion by Matthias Edlinger; Truisms, Then