Extended exhibition hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1-5pm and 6-8pm; Closed Monday-Wednesday
Opening reception: Saturday, April 2, 6-9pm
“Reuses of the Erotic: A Symposium On and Beyond Queer Collage” at UC Irvine: Friday, April 8, 11am-6pm
“Anita of New York Meets Tom of Finland”: A Conversation with Richard Meyer and Rachel Middleman: Monday, May 23, 7pm
“Cruising the Mapplethorpe Archive” at LACMA: Thursday, June 16, 7:3opm
Cock Paper, Scissors Book Launch and Collage Workshop: Sunday, June 19, 4-8pm
Purchase the catalogue for Cock, Paper, Scissors here.
Cock, Paper, Scissors brings together works by an intergenerational group of fifteen queer artists who explore the collaged page or the scrapbook with diverse, erotically inclined tactics. The exhibition draws from both archival collections and contemporary practices, focusing on how these artists reuse the pieces of print culture for worldmaking projects ranging from the era of gay liberation to the present.
Cock, Paper, Scissors places special focus on the work of four rarely exhibited artists that produced collages for personal pleasure drawn from the collections at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. From ONE, this includes the anonymous “Graphic Albums Collection,” which combines gay male pornography with pages from interior design and visual arts magazines, and the collages by erotic artist Olaf Odegaard. From the Leslie-Lohman Museum, this includes the anonymous “West End Avenue Collection,” a vast archive of Xeroxed collages of BDSM imagery, many including Nazi fetishism, and collages by psychic Ingo Swann, who developed a process known as “remote viewing” for the CIA during the 1970s. In addition, the exhibition includes collages by Steve Blevins as reproduced in gay porn magazines from the 1980s, often as illustrations for erotic fiction. Theses eclectic producers all utilize gay male pornography to innovative and wildly explicit ends.
While Cock, Paper, Scissors is undoubtedly a celebration of the numerous uses of gay male pornography, the inclusion of historical and contemporary feminist collage practices seeks to address gay male phallocentrism with feminist critique and lesbian power. The exhibition includes a site-specific installation by feminist pioneer Mary Beth Edelson, part of an ongoing series of collage projects initiated years after her renowned collage posters of the 1970s; a series of preparatory collages by Marlene McCarty produced for her large-scale drawings of young women who committed patricide; and a series of mixed-media collages by veteran feminist artist Anita Steckel that places the artist within drawings by Tom of Finland, exploring the possibility of alternate forms of cross-gender desire and visual pleasure.
Many of the artists in Cock, Paper, Scissors utilize collage for deconstruction or intervention within the circulation of images. Enrique Castrejonmeticulously cuts-up and measures the figures from the gay porn magazine Black Inches. Jonathan Molina-Garcia combines images of his own body with those of older HIV+ men as part of a larger series on gay male intergenerational knowledge. Suzanne Wright merges the female body with monumental and utopian architecture. Glenn Ligon plays with the vernacular form of the photo-album, combining fetishistic photographs of Black men with family photographs. Jade Yumang screen-prints pages from vintage porn magazines onto fancifully decorative bundles of soft sculpture phalluses. In a newly commissioned work responding to the archive of West End, Kate Huh utilizes fragments from the collection to produce collages that are embroidered by LJ Roberts.
Cock, Paper, Scissors is accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by the exhibition’s curators, three original interviews with artists, and reprints of historical texts. The catalogue, published by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries with the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, is designed by Kimberly Varella of Content Object and will be released in June 2016.
Cock, Paper, Scissors is organized by David Evans Frantz, Curator at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries; Lucas Hilderbrand, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of Visual Studies at UC Irvine; and Kayleigh Perkov, Ph.D. Candidate in Visual Studies at UC Irvine.
Support is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support is provided by the City of West Hollywood through its Arts and Cultural Affairs Commission and the ONE Archives Foundation. Generous support for the catalogue to accompany this exhibition is provided by the Pasadena Art Alliance, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the USC Libraries. Support for “Reuses of the Erotic: A Symposium on Queer Collage” held at the University of California, Irvine on April 8, 2016, is provided by a University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) President’s Public Partnership in the Humanities grant.
This exhibition is presented as part of the City of West Hollywood’s One City One Pride LGBTQ Arts Festival, which this year celebrates the theme ‘Into the Streets,’ based on a rallying cry of early LGBTQ rights groups. Events take place from Harvey Milk Day (May 22nd) through the end of June Pride month. For more info and to see a full roster of events please visit weho.org/pride or follow on social media @WeHoArts.
