There is something inherent twisted and disturbing about Sex Shop that always seems to be glossed over — it is sadistic and depraved. I believe it was Georges Bataille who said something along the lines of "If you clean up Sade, you have removed Sade." It was indispensable that the writings of the Marquis be kept dirty and fucked up. I once heard it said, though I forget where, that to appropriate the Marquis into any moral agenda will fail and anyone who tries can go fuck themselves. It is necessary to keep things dirty and filthy. For Bataille, this was a form of sacredness. And in a way, the taboo, sexual, degenerated, is usually separated, kept a part, and that is in part a definition of the sacred.
Consider this in the kink community. While they are open about their kinks and fetishes, it is still kept separate from public. They do not publicize their fetishes on network television, nor do swingers parties and orgies occur during the Super Bowl Halftime Show. These things and so much more is kept separate from the general public, thus maintaining to some degree a merit of sacredness. Bataille certainly felt that the more pornography and transgression is made public, the less sacred it becomes. Hence why de Sade must remain dirty.
I think this is in many ways exemplified in a precedent of Sex Shop: C. N. Ledoux's Oikema or "House of Pleasures," or more plainly, a whore house. The plan is pretty much a set of cock and balls, while the elevations appear more like a temple. Not only is the Oikema part of the ideal city according to Ledoux, but it is its own temple, a sacred edifice set apart from everything else for the purpose of fucking and sucking.
Thus, let us be perfectly clear, I think it time to start discussing the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, William S. Burroughs... and ultimately Sex Shop in the same way they present themselves: depraved, transgressive, explicit, degenerate. All commentary and writings on Sex Shop are so... sooooo... tame. They're academic and proper. It exemplifies par excellence that transgression and taboo is okay to talk about, but don't you ever do it. Or as Foucault puts it: we liberate sexuality from the bedrooms, from behind closed doors, and enslave them into discourse (History of Sexuality, Vol. 1). Sexuality is still not free. Even with the end of obscenity laws in the US, we can freely read Burrough's disgusting and filthy work of Naked Lunch or Nin's Delta of Venus, but don't ever do any of that.
Again, obscenities are fine, just not in our language. The writings of the Marquis were found in French in England, Germany, Spain, and even America, but nowhere to be found in France. Yet German translations were found in France but not in Germany, and English translations were found in France but not England or America. This exemplifies that obscenities are okay, just not in our language. Another example, in The Testament of Solomon, the demon Pterodrakon says that he "coitum habens per nates," or literally "I have anal sex with her" or "I fuck her in the ass." In the Conybeare translation of the Testament (Jewish Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, Oct. 1898) this passage is translated from Greek into Latin, while the rest of the Greek is translated into English. This further illustrates that obscenities and filth are okay to publish, just not in our language.
Thus, one will note that I will not be dancing around terms here. I think in discussing sex shop we ought to be explicit. We need to say fuck and tits and cunt and cock... We cannot be like Roland Barthes discussing de Sade's writings in proper and polite philosophical language. One need only look at Schneider and Barbara Ambach's paper "Douglas Darden's Sex Shop: Digital Reconstructions of the Situation of Architecture's Dreams." I have studied under both these individuals at CU Denver, and I must say, it is a very tame and polite paper for such a depraved building design. I kind of expect Peter to dive more into the depravity, but Barbara I am a bit surprised she was involved in this at all.
While I wish to discuss Sex Shop in less academic terms and be more on par with the depravity of it, I also believe that Sex Shop is not as depraved as Darden wanted it to be or he thinks it is. It is known that he Darden had not done any work on Sex Shop when he published Condemned Building, except for a brief narrative of how the drawings were confiscated and a Dis/continuous Genealogy. In nearly the last year of his life, he set to do three drawings for Sex Shop, which as I have previously discussed is exceedingly abstract than all previous works.
Peter Schneider is more certain than I that Darden had worked out Sex Shop in his head between the publication of Condemned Building and 1995, thus the total lack of anything found in the project file except a photocopy of a fann(e)y coupler and the three yellow trace paper sketches and a model are, for Peter, an indication that he completed it in his mind and executed it suddenly one day. That was all. Whereas all his other projects had copious photocopies of images, articles, notes, sketches, letters, postcards, name it. I am not as convinced as Peter.
I personally think Darden just wanted to get it over with. I think by July and August of 1995, just one month before his CML blast crisis began, he must have felt terrible and knew he did not have long. I think he had long departed from his approach and drawing theory he developed for the projects of Condemned Building that he decided to implement his new ideas he was already exploring in Laughing Girls, hence why both projects are exceedingly abstract. He did not have time to build up a proper project, or do proper drawings, or even try to become the person he was five years prior while drawing Oxygen House. I think he just was getting his house in order and decided to finish Sex Shop. That is of course my opinion. I digress.
The language Darden uses on his Sex Shop drawings are probably more childish than degenerate. For instance, the Dis/continuous Genealogy is of a fann(e)y coupler for a train, a male and female glass blow-ers, a sex-tant, and a sketch of the Ins-tit-ute of Debauchery or "Theater of Lubricity" by the Marquis de Sade (as found in Anthony Vidler's The Writing of the Walls, which is the only source I have for this image). He emphasizes dirty words like tit and sex and fanny; he dates the drawings as the "Twenty-Sex of June." These and more are probably childish things he giggled at as he executed them, but really are not depraved.
Ultimately Sex Shop itself is not depraved and taboo; it is merely a stage for depravity to occur upon.
Yet there is actual porn in the drawings of Sex Shop. He reuses a lot of images in the collage that makes up the Sex Shop sketches, in particular the female glass blow-er and nudes of Adam and Eve. Yet on the third sheet, the building section has an actual nude woman on all fours, looking back at us with desirous eyes, and getting fucked by a sex-tant-like machine. This image in particular is rather graphic, though it does not actually show any devices going into her cunt, but the curved device that rotates on a sex-tant implies movement, which is indeed aimed right at her cunt. Further, in this same building section there is a "Viewing Couch" on the stage, under a pair of spread disembodied legs, with a man reclining and appears to be jerking off. Further, on the first sheet in the sketch of the Theater of Lubricity, there are disembodied legs that are cut from what is presumed photos or porno mag images of an actual nude woman. Thus, Darden works actual pornography into his sketches and collages for Sex Shop.
In a way, Darden's process for designing Sex Shop is still kind of fucked up. The model, being little more than abstract grid of blue and red, is partly constructed with legs cut off a Barbie doll. Even the drawings-collages incorporate cut ups of nude human images. Darden includes notes like in the building section of "De Sade (pulled apart)." Vivisection, dissection, cutting up... disembodied legs and limbs, cut-up people... these are all violent and sadistic things to be doing to another person, though they are really an artistic process here.
Let us not forget that Darden is following much of the violent principles he laid out for Condemned Building in the design and execution of Sex Shop. Darden is decapitating, overturning, cutting up, imprisoning (e.g. the "Inescapable Garden (Trapped)," &c. The very first image seen in Condemned Building is a self-portrait of Darden flashing a very hefty set of tits. He is still being obscene. He is obscene.
And let's not forget that many sources of inspiration for the projects in Condemned Building are controversial, even obscene individuals. Clinic For Sleep Disorders is inspired by Arthur Rimbaud's "Drunken Little Boat," and Darden makes sure everyone knows that he and Rimbaud share a birthday. Augustine of Hippo's Confessions is inspirational to Confessional, and Confessions can be explicit and illicit. Oxygen House embraces dying and living to "stay dead for a very long time" (As I Lay Dying). Saloon For Jesse James focuses on an American outlaw, a thief, murderer, and all around not a great guy. Temple Forgetful focuses on an artifact of fratricide (Romulus and Remus) as well as the destruction of all architecture. Melvilla focuses around Moby-Dick, a novel about an obsessed man, hellbent on destroying an animal at all cost, even his ship and crew. These are the sources of inspiration to Darden. These are not positive role models, yet Darden embraces them completely.
Apart from LeQueu and Ledoux, there are very few architects that have explored sexuality and perversion in architecture. There is also Alberto Perez-Gomez in his work Polyphilo, or, The Dark Forest Revisited: An Erotic Ephiphany of Architecture (1992) and probably Anthony Vidler in some of his early writings. But then again, as stated before, architecture nor architectural theory can be fully depraved; construction and creating is not an immoral act; rather it is the stage for depravity.
Consider Vidler's discussions on de Sade in Writing of the Walls, a work that was influential. In his analysis of Justine, about as architectural as anything gets is comparing the movement through the hall in which Justine witnesses an erotic initiation into a secret society to the movements through the subterranean temple in Abbe Terrason's Life of Sethos. This latter novel would be the source of inspiration for LeQueu's Gothic House as well as Mozart's Magic Flute. Thus, as we can gather from Vidler that, while transgression, fucking, sucking, butt fucking, incest, murder, &c occur within architecture, architecture is not itself obscene; it can only be a house encasing obscenity, a stage for depravity.
Thus, while Darden aims for vice and sin and debauchery, it is exceedingly difficult for him to truly execute transgression in the design of a building. Depravity becomes an inside joke for the architect, a symbolic system of illicit significations in the development of constructed signs: a stage for debauchery. Yet, I must admit, in examining any sort of sexual architecture, Darden might be the one who pulled it off the most. I don't think he succeeded, because architecture is too limiting of a medium to execute depravity, yet, I think Darden's Sex Shop is the best execution of depraved architecture.
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