Books: Cock, Paper, Scissors

This recent exhibit mounted by ONE Archives in Los Angeles showed the clever recrafting of male porn images for a more transcendent message. And now you can get the delightful catalog.

"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.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition "Cock, Paper, Scissors" from ONE Archives is now available for $35 on the new ONE Archives Foundation online store here. The hardbound, full color, 158 page publication includes numerous images and multiple texts on a range of queer collage practices.