Three Eight Four: Spider Garden

 It's Halloween tonight, and I'm thinking of the fetish artist Michael Manning. He's a San Francisco/Los Angeles artist who remains one of my favorite erotic artists. He is someone whose work I'll recommend, and someone whose work does come to mind here on a rainy Halloween night.

It's hard these days to find a lot of the work Manning did in the 1990s, but in those days he was something very new and different on the fetish scene. His work was eerie and had a very hothouse, fever-dream atmosphere. He fused cyberpunk sci-fi with a set of almost Heian-era Japanese images and a taste for exoticized s/m. I've always liked an s/m aesthetic, and Manning's art did mesh with my own desire for the self-consciously exotic. 

There was a press called Amerotica that published many of his collections in the 1990s, and I miss their catalogs. I miss the visions of hidden worlds that appeared in their books. The press is long gone, but keep their name in mind when you're searching for erotica in dark nooks out there over the aether. 

I discovered Manning's "Lumenagerie" art collection not long after it first appeared in 1996, and still find it enthralling. "Lumenagerie" and its sequel "Inamorata" (2005) are worth finding, as is his 1997 anthology of short stories and art, "Cathexis".  His sci-fi "Tranceptor" series isn't bad at all, either.

His "The Spider Garden" (1995) remains my favorite among his books, along with its companion works "Hydrophidian" (1997) and "In a Metal Web" (2003). I'm sad that they all seem to be out of print, and sadder still that we live in times that are increasingly hostile to fetish art and to the idea of exoticized and ritualized sex. 

Manning's world in the "Spider Garden" books was one where gender was deeply fluid, but not in any way that either the TRA or Gender-Critical sides of the current Trans Wars would accept. In Manning's world, there were no sexual identities, only masks that could be assumed or discarded at whim. There was nothing like a fixed identity, and no one, not even the mechanical spiders in his Heian-Goth palaces, was ever really anything. 

I believe Manning may still have a gallery website out there somewhere on the web. Find it if you can. 

Read some of his graphic tales, read the short stories in "Cathexis", and tell me what you think. Tell me your own thoughts on the idea of exotica and ritual sex.  And remember what a brilliant idea Heian-Goth is.