Deviant Playground

We are now in the process of creating the 2nd Annual Deviant Playground. Last year was only a beginning - with fetish/sm icons now becoming a part of popular culture - Real Sex on HBO, runway models in latex, Gothic kids with arm restraints as jewelry, Madonnaís navel piercing, transvestites on talk shows, pleather slacks at JC Penneys - fetish/sm symbology has become pedestrian. This year we want to push the concept of sexual play even further - to challenge the artists to reinvent popular culture, playfully of course: to create new symbols, icons, rituals, new ways of having, being, thinking, looking at our sexuality and what we are doing to it, with it and possibly why. To build some really fun new toys.

4. FIREPLAY (SPIEGEL) The second show will include many of the same artists who made last year so dynamic, as well as new members of our creative deviant family. The Playground will be the night of May 25th at a location to be announced. For further information call the New York Body Archive at (212) 807-6441.

All photographs copyright Allan "Pogo" Spiegel for Sandbox Magazine (except #2).

1. One of the most popular props was David Brown's 'Weebles Wobble but They Don't Fall Down'. This was a massive concrete half-sphere with a few masts embedded in its flat side. Clinging to the masts, you could roll wildly on the thing and always rebound.

2. Amy Shapiro: "I was the Ephesian Artemis, a breast Goddess, a kind of warrior Goddess. (...) The breasts are not just sexual, they are nurturing, and they represent woman power."

3. Patricia Chang, Half + Half: In the corner, next to the bathroom, a topless woman is with her hands tied behind her back is sitting on a pile of bread dough about the size of an 8-year-old child. She kneads it with her feet and then, apparently bored by that, with her chin.

4. Fireplay: At the end of the night, we watched the mad hush of fire from his balls, juggling flaming batons with Stephanie Monseu, the two of them naked, dancing, breathing fire, swallowing fire.