Press release:

If this remains something of an artistic mystery, then drop in to an ex-bar off Oxford Street called X where for one month from X, TONY is to exhibit color blow ups and full page reproductions from a new publication which brings together the best works from his unique collection of extremist advertising.

TONY DEVLIN'S X DIRECTORY is a salute to sexual sub-culture running riot on the streets in the form of 600 illegal sexual service cards stripped from BT phone boxes during the past decade.

It's a canny advertising industry, where one liners and line drawings offer a gateway to the gratification of bizarre desires, and fantasies can be considered, selected, set up and booked from a booth that's completely public but utterly anonymous.

If you think that by reading such cards - either in TONY'S beautifully produced X DIRECTORY book or at the X DIRECTORY EXHIBITION - you're party to something perverse, foul, fetid and depraved, stop here ... and buy a mobile phone.

But if instead you feel that to look at such strange emanations of our society is to exercise that most essential of human faculties - a healthy curiosity - then read on.

Using text purely designed to provoke testosterone production and extraordinary and explicit Enid Blyton meets Readers' Wives line-drawn images, the cards featured in the X DIRECTORY open up a sexual academy where students can take up virtually any erotic option on a 24 hour timetable run by international tutors.

Spanking, caning, domination, submission, breast relief, bust worship, bondage, watersports, smothering, cross-dressing, oral exams, Greek and French are all available, and punters can be squeezed between knees, packed in cages, electrocuted, and offered the opportunity to worship women's feet. It all seems to add up to a pretty normal week of political sex scandals.

There are Asian, Italian, Brazilian, Japanese, Jamaican, Swedish and Thai teachers on tap, and a copious range of maids, slaves, love queens, mistresses, severe headmistresses, nurses, JPs, policewomen and very naive undisciplined St. Trinians sixth formers whose parents apparently shop at Anne Summers.

This London-wide academy and its tutors are superbly equipped with silks, stockings, suspenders, satin, lace, thigh high boots, gymslips, rubber, leather, whips, chains, and hot knickers.

And of course, everyone's raunchy, ready, waiting, beautiful, bubbly, blonde, strict, hot, ripe, sexy, naughty, curvaceous, dominant, masterful, dusky, and busty.

This is a weird and wonderful collection. It's not published as a practical guide to such services, but as a record of a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Is it art? Is it documentary proof that the UK has a national potty training problem? Or should it simply be celebrated as an expression of an essential sexual diversity?

Whatever the X DIRECTORY is, for supporters of this curious urban art form, the real pleasure will be that once the exhibition has closed at X, it'll carry on .... all over London.

Click Here to read the account of the Launch night

Read the Preface

Look inside the Irdialani Gallery

Read the Press Release

Read an Account of Book Launch

View on line Gallery of vice cards

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