In the following interview, Brad Phillips speaks to author, Erica Garza about their mutual experience with sex and porn addiction. Challenging the stereotype that sexual addiction is within a man’s nature, and for a woman, the result of sexual trauma, in Getting Off: One Woman's Journey Through Sex and Porn Addiction, Garza recounts a life of “revolting” fantasies both imagined and realized. She lays out a lifetime of orgasmic pressure begging to be released, and she courageously traces her road to recovery. Throughout the conversation, Phillips and Garza share their experiences of responding to fans who look to them for guidance, the benefits of being triggered, and the sexual taboos that continue to plague our sense of moral authority. Click here to read more.
"Unique in Their Genders" Group Show @ Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris
Galerie Christophe Gaillard hosts “Unique in Their Genders” (“Uniques en leur genres”). This group show is a kind of “other world” in which self-eroticism, personality games and domestic space are theatre for the most intimate and unconfessed fantasies. In these (art) rooms, all variations are not only conceivable: they exist. Roles, then, aren’t as set as they are on the outside and in the shadowy light of a gallery that resembles to a domestic space, reality can reflect many surprises. On view until December 17 at Galerie Christophe Gaillard in Paris. photographs by Mazzy-Mae Green
Cameron Platter "U-SAVED-ME" @ Depart Foundation In Los Angeles
U-SAVED-ME is Cameron Platter’s first solo exhibition in the United States, featuring work made over a two-year period. Comprising video, sound, sculpture, tapestry, and drawings, the works in the exhibition cohere to form an immersive installation that captures the artist’s eclectic and multi-disciplinary approach to research and art making. Blurring the distinction between high and low, Platter’s work appropriates, references, and filters, in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way, the enormous amounts of information available to us today. U-SAVED-ME draws on sources as disparate as R. Kelly, fast food, Constantin Brâncuși, historical South African artists and Arts and Crafts movements, LSD, landscape, Deepak Chopra, poetry, interracial pornography, cheese curls, advertising, therapy, psycho-collage, and consumerism. Cameron Platter "U-SAVED-ME" will be on view until September 24, 2016 at Depart Foundation, 9105 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles
Read Audra Wist's Essay On the Demystification Of Sexual Urges And Why Men Need To Be Touched More →
“I love to be caressed,” he said to me, my hand on his chest. Color me impressed. As I get older, I continually notice the need for men to be touched. I’ve been a long time proponent of strip clubs, sex work, and so forth – physical sites designed for and marketed to men for sexual pleasure – even before I could really justify it legally or intellectually. I always had a hunch that something was going on there that was good for women and for sex, and that the usual bad mouthing on the grounds that men were sniveling tit-obsessed cretons was ill considered and lacked any constructive thought about the potential of these venues for sexual progress. Click here to read the full essay.
Read Our Interview with Artist and Filmmaker Bruce LaBruce →
In anticipation of Bruce LaBruce's film retrospective at MoMA in New York later this month, we pulled out our interview with the artist and filmmaker, which was featured in Autre Issue 2 (2012). Click here to read.
American Ecstasy
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"It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1982 when I started working on porn movies, we shot real 35mm film on big movie cameras. Home video cassette players had barely been invented. There were no DVD’s, no home computers, no Internet. People went out to downtown movie theaters and watched sex movies on the silver screen." American Ecstasy is the photographic memoir of Barbara Nitke who over 12 years shot publicity stills during the golden age of porn. "My images reveal the contradictions inherent in the business – great beauty, tinged with sadness, punctuated by surreal silliness." Nitke is currently raising funds to publish a book of "....seventy color plates, a selection of my written stories of life on the movie sets, and short excerpts from tape recorded interviews [she] conducted with the porn stars at the time." There are currently 11 days left to complete funding for the publishing of American Ecstasy.