February 09, 2006

Sex Machines in Toronto's Eye Weekly

If you build it, they will come
February 9, 2006
by Brian Joseph Davis

The world does love America for one thing: its impressive per-square-mile concentration of oddball eccentrics. We just like them tinkering in the garage, not in the White House. But is the world ready for a subculture of erotic Edisons building and selling homemade sex machines? Timothy Archibald, the photographer behind Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews (Process Books, $28.50, 112 pages), thinks we are. While on an assignment about inventors, Archibald happened upon a world he had never heard of before -- everyday citizens who dwelt in the darkest corners of eBay hawking dildo/kitchen appliance hybrids for up to $6,000. Archibald writes in his introduction that he didn't know what to think. Was it a folk art? An example of the changing sexuality of middle America? To put a human face on what otherwise could be a merely obnoxious email forward, he travelled the country to interview and photograph the inventors, their kinetic contraptions and their customers.

"Here I am, this divorced Christian guy, not promiscuous at all, and here I am with a sex machine," says Jon Traven of Idaho City. He plans to use his machine to help Christian marriages in trouble. He assures us that to buy his marital aid you will have to send in proof of marriage. The other inventors range from professionals to goth teenagers and the machines themselves vary from having the quaint charm of shaker furniture to looking like a failed foundation-year art project.

As an anthropologist, Archibald assumes tactics closer to Errol Morris than Diane Arbus. His photographs accentuate similarities, not differences, between his subjects and (I'll go out on a limb of faith here) the vast majority of people who don't attach phalluses to their Makita combo kit. As critic A.D. Coleman points out in his afterword, Archibald's compositions are "observational rather than voyeuristic ... as objective and detached a manner as the subjective medium of photography will allow." Nothing in his frame is given more prominence than anything else. Subsequently, the "Eros IV" resting on a floral-print couch appears as natural as a remote control. Sex Machines is more than good anthropology; it's also good art because by the end you stop asking "Why?" and start asking far more important questions. I just hope you don't find yourself asking, "How much?"

All dreamers have to be tinged with the tragic. It's the nature of wanting to leave your mark on the world, whether by inventing the phonograph or, in the words of Ken Cruise, making the "Hide-A-Cock" affordable for "every home." These dreamers are tragic, one and all, but their Yankee pluck and hard-earned wisdom is charming, especially when the inventor of the "Ultimate Ride" tells of bringing his prototype into a bank to try to secure a loan.

Thanks to Archibald's unerring eye, like those bank tellers, you'll never look at your Salad Shooter the same way again.

Read this and other reviews at Eye Weekly.

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