Torture Garden

Rating:
Summary: Happy Halloween in Hell!
Review: "Long live the new flesh!" This quote from David Cronenberg's cinematic playground of perversion, Videodrome, announces the theme of Torture Garden, the inimitable London nightclub established in 1990. We are not allowed to categorize it as simply a fetish club, because it is "multi-dimensional, ever evolving and mutating." One way to get a handle is to peruse the strict dress code on its website. Your look better be: burlesque, fantasy, theatrical, period costume, glamour, drag, alien, cyborg, cabaret, mutation, cybersex, fetish, SM, body art, rubber, leather, PVC, or uniforms. Sounds like the East Village on a Saturday night.

You take the Angel Tube to get to the current site of Torture Garden's monthly parties. You really do. These partygoers don't engage in much actual BDSM play, although there is some walkabout bondage. It's mainly a Stand and Model venue, a nightclub/dance scene. There's no room to swing a cane anyway. There's a floor show by some of the top out-there acts in the world. There are performance photos here of (among others) Miranda Sex Garden, the Genitorturers, Ron Athey, Medieval Magick, and Angel Grinders & Chainsaws, who use industrial equipment to send fountains of sparks gushing from the groins of troupe members.

The production package of Torture Garden, the book, is superb. Chaplin's candids capture the feverish ecstasy of a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted. They are brilliantly grouped and sequenced. Sivroni's mostly larger format portraits bring you face to face with folk in costumes far beyond fabulous, exuding the potency of their homemade personas. The Videodrome quote above is one of many at the bottom of every page. These provide a quick, painless introduction to the TG philosophy. A few favorites:

"...sadomasochism enjoys all the forms of religious piety - kneeling, praying, worshipping, sacrificing, invoking and punishing." -- Terence Sellers, The Correct Sadist

"The first duty of man is to become artificial." -- Oscar Wilde

"The body is both a pleasure palace and a torture chamber." -- Charles Levin, Body Invaders

"It's your body, play with it." -- Fakir Musafar, Modern Primitives

"Your body is a battleground." -- Barbara Kruger

At Torture Garden, the concept of costume is raised to extremes of creative imagination, transcendent otherness and disgusting repulsion. By the time you get through this volume, your own definitions of these categories will have been severely mangled. On one night a performer named Franko paraded through the crowd on crutches, accompanied by a nurse. He was nude except for syringes, catheters, rubber tubes and various medical receptacles containing various bodily fluids. On the same night, completely independently, a female partygoer appeared wearing a brassiere consisting of two plasma bags filling with her own blood.

One man's features are covered by a remarkably lifelike effect of the flesh of his face pulled back and nailed to his skull. Hellraiser-style pinheads abound. Crazed male ballerinas, harem girls, rubber boys, sirens, harpies, transvestites, androgynes, hermaphrodites, naughty nurses, naughty nuns, naughty Nazis, welder's goggles, gas masks, catcher's masks, nine-inch nails, helmets, horns, spikes, wounds, rings through everything and to top it off, a spitting-image Laurel and Hardy. Happy Halloween in Hell!

Rating:
Summary: Happy Halloween in Hell!
Review: "Long live the new flesh!" This quote from David Cronenberg's cinematic playground of perversion, Videodrome, announces the theme of Torture Garden, the inimitable London nightclub established in 1990. We are not allowed to categorize it as simply a fetish club, because it is "multi-dimensional, ever evolving and mutating." One way to get a handle is to peruse the strict dress code on its website. Your look better be: burlesque, fantasy, theatrical, period costume, glamour, drag, alien, cyborg, cabaret, mutation, cybersex, fetish, SM, body art, rubber, leather, PVC, or uniforms. Sounds like the East Village on a Saturday night.

You take the Angel Tube to get to the current site of Torture Garden's monthly parties. You really do. These partygoers don't engage in much actual BDSM play, although there is some walkabout bondage. It's mainly a Stand and Model venue, a nightclub/dance scene. There's no room to swing a cane anyway. There's a floor show by some of the top out-there acts in the world. There are performance photos here of (among others) Miranda Sex Garden, the Genitorturers, Ron Athey, Medieval Magick, and Angel Grinders & Chainsaws, who use industrial equipment to send fountains of sparks gushing from the groins of troupe members.

The production package of Torture Garden, the book, is superb. Chaplin's candids capture the feverish ecstasy of a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted. They are brilliantly grouped and sequenced. Sivroni's mostly larger format portraits bring you face to face with folk in costumes far beyond fabulous, exuding the potency of their homemade personas. The Videodrome quote above is one of many at the bottom of every page. These provide a quick, painless introduction to the TG philosophy. A few favorites:

"...sadomasochism enjoys all the forms of religious piety - kneeling, praying, worshipping, sacrificing, invoking and punishing." -- Terence Sellers, The Correct Sadist

"The first duty of man is to become artificial." -- Oscar Wilde

"The body is both a pleasure palace and a torture chamber." -- Charles Levin, Body Invaders

"It's your body, play with it." -- Fakir Musafar, Modern Primitives

"Your body is a battleground." -- Barbara Kruger

At Torture Garden, the concept of costume is raised to extremes of creative imagination, transcendent otherness and disgusting repulsion. By the time you get through this volume, your own definitions of these categories will have been severely mangled. On one night a performer named Franko paraded through the crowd on crutches, accompanied by a nurse. He was nude except for syringes, catheters, rubber tubes and various medical receptacles containing various bodily fluids. On the same night, completely independently, a female partygoer appeared wearing a brassiere consisting of two plasma bags filling with her own blood.

One man's features are covered by a remarkably lifelike effect of the flesh of his face pulled back and nailed to his skull. Hellraiser-style pinheads abound. Crazed male ballerinas, harem girls, rubber boys, sirens, harpies, transvestites, androgynes, hermaphrodites, naughty nurses, naughty nuns, naughty Nazis, welder's goggles, gas masks, catcher's masks, nine-inch nails, helmets, horns, spikes, wounds, rings through everything and to top it off, a spitting-image Laurel and Hardy. Happy Halloween in Hell!

Rating:
Summary: Bitter Fruit indeed
Review: From virginal Eden to lascivious lavatory, this frightening photo-document exposes the moral corruption in its most vivid form. Consider yourselves warned!