Valerie Solanas is famous for two things: shooting Andy Warhol and composing the residue (Society for Cutting Up Male) Manifesto, possibly the most wilfully outrageous extreme feminist polemic. At first self-published and sold by her on the streets of New York in 1967, it hired “responsible, thrill-seeking women to topple the government … institute total automation and eliminate the male sex”.
The book got its initial prestige after Solanas’s attempted assassination of Warhol at his studio, the Factory, on 3 June 1968. Having actually handed herself in to the police hours after the shooting, she was charged with attempted murder, and later on sentenced to three years for “careless attack with intent to hurt” after being detected with paranoid schizophrenia. After her arrest, she reputedly informed a reporter: “Read my manifesto and it will tell you what I am.”
Exhibition A, 2020.
Ever since, Solanas, who passed away in 1988, has actually inhabited a singular and complex location in the cultural landscape, her manifesto hailed by some feminist scholars as a visionary text and her story motivating numerous plays and an acclaimed art movie, I Shot Andy Warhol. Now comes a brand-new book from 52-year-old American professional photographer Justine Kurland, best understood for her 2020 series, Woman Pictures, representing girls in the American wilds. Her intriguingly entitled SCUMB Manifesto pays homage to the wildly transgressive spirit of Solanas, whom she describes in the book as “a revolutionary, a panhandler, woman of the street and vagabond, crazy, brilliant and very funny”.
New York in Color, 2021.
SCUMB represents Society for Cutting Up Guys’s Books, which is exactly what Kurland has done, dismembering and reconfiguring images from around 150 photobooks by white, male professional photographers. All of the books were from Kurland’s own racks. They consist of Stephen Coast’s American Surface areas, William Eggleston’s Los Alamos, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, Martin Parr’s Consider England, Alec Soth’s Sleeping By the Mississippi, Brassaï’s Paris By Night and, most famous of all, Robert Frank’s The Americans.Each collage is called
after the book that offered the raw product for it, but does not describe the professional photographer in concern. Prior to displaying 65 of the SCUMB collages in a Brooklyn gallery last year, Kurland used each of them to the individual photographers whose work she had actually cut up and reassembled.” I sent out emails saying, ‘I have actually been making collages out of photobooks and here’s yours ‘,”she says, chuckling over the phone from her studio in New york city. Most of them did not respond. Of those who did, she informs me, Tod Papageorge stated he was flattered, Stephen Shore used to do a trade for a print and Jim Goldberg sent her a copy of his book Raised By Wolves, to use as raw material, however, she states, “some others had less of a sense of humour and were offended by the work “. This is barely unexpected given that her collages not just challenge the patriarchy
however also raise concerns around authorship and respect. “I’m not targeting anyone,”she states. “It has to do with a system and structures of power, not people, though I have to say, a few of these people have been using up too much room for too long. “She ended up selling the early collages for$ 900(₤ 690 )each, primarily to her trainees,
though the Museum of Modern Art in New york city likewise snapped up a number of. A choice, created from Lee Friedlander’s series Nudes are presently on display screen at the Herald Gallery in London as part of a group show, Say Less.Think of England, 2021. If SCUMB Manifesto is a gleefully intriguing attack on photography’s patriarchal history, it is likewise an act of incredibly complex creativity: the collages possess a brilliant, typically viscerally effective life of their own.
Kurland’s design varies from the playfully surreal– Parr’s signature English character studies reconfigured as an assortment of artfully arranged limbs, vegetables, flowers and deals with, to the coolly minimal– Friedlander’s America By Automobile rendered as a Ballardian swirl of steering wheels.I started believing it would be a punk act of destruction, but … it is a reparative act rather than a destructive one Frequently, the initial pictures have actually been so transformed that you may struggle, as I did, to recognize the photographer whose images she has actually revamped. She overthrows Robert Adams’s rigorously formal detachment and renders Brassaï’s nocturnal Paris unrecognisable by cutting up and reorganizing information of his pictures
— a cobbled street, a coffee shop tabletop, fabrics– as threatening monochrome geometric shapes.Elsewhere, her subversion is more pointedly political. The female body, as fetishised by professional photographers such as Helmut Newton and Person Bourdin, is rendered by turns sculptural, dreamlike and troubling in works that drift without the voyeuristic male gaze while drawing attention to its voraciousness. The addition of prominent photographers such as Brassaï and Frank will no doubt be considered an act of cultural vandalism by some however that, too, belongs to Kurland’s provocation.Justine Kurland, photographed in 2018. Photograph: Naima Green The angriest element of the book is the front cover, in which Kurland draws on Solanas’s ferociously combative and accusatory prose style to stick it to the patriarchy. Over a blood red collage of squirming female nudes, she specifies:” I, Justine Kurland, am SCUMB. I grow in the stagnant waste of your boring photography. I bubble up, a raw vital force, increasing from
the useless excrement of your misogynistic books.”Her screed ends with the mock-threatening line:”I’m coming for you with my blade.”In its confrontational tone, it does guarantee more than it delivers considered that, throughout, her scalpel is more a tool of elaborate reconfiguration than violent dismemberment.Los Alamos Revisited (Vol. 3), 2021.”I started out thinking it would be a simply punk act of destruction, but really it’s the most fragile, picky medium,”states Kurland, “I invested hours and hours making these meticulous, lacy cuts and after that carefully putting them together. It’s about the glue along with the scissors. For me, it is a reparative act instead of a devastating one. “Kurland has been making photos since she was 15. She studied at Yale in the late 1990s under Gregory Crewdson, a professional photographer known for his elaborately staged cinematic tableaux, among which she revamps in her book. The collages area dramatic shift in tone and approach from
her previous work, which explored, and subverted, a certain sort of American frontier romanticism. Her book Highway Kind (2016)was made on a series of epic road trips she took across the country in a beat-up camper van, often with her young kids in tow. Girl Pictures( 2020 )made up images she made in between 1997 and 2002, in which her young, rebellious female subjects appear to live in an almost utopian world of liberty in nature.Kurland’s shift from photography to collage was precipitated by a combination of occasions, personal and cultural: the death of her dad, the seismic political and social upheavals of the previous few years and a type of moral reckoning with her own way of working. “In a manner, my trip bought into a long-lasting concept in American photography, which is that you go out into the world and bring the news back home,” she says.”It felt like a holdover from the colonial impulse and I began to feel a little uncomfortable with that. I believe that was when I started to feel really ambivalent about the method I was working. “While not as transgressive as other acts of imaginative defacement– the Chapman bros drawing clown heads on an uncommon edition of Goya etchings springs immediately to mind– SCUMB Manifesto is certainly a well-aimed missive at what Kurland calls “the male photography canon and its monopoly on significance and worth “. Photography is still, to a degree, a male-dominated medium, particularly as relates to the frequently unpopular compulsive world of photobook gathering however, creatively, that monopoly is being challenged on many fronts, not least by an abundance of modern female photographers, managers and artist-activists. There is no doubt it has actually held sway for too long, however, with groundbreaking professional photographers such as Berenice Abbott, Gerda Taro and Germaine Krull, to name just 3 groundbreaking ladies, still not as celebrated as their male counterparts.Earthly Bodies, 2021.”The history of photography is filled with ladies,” as Kurland puts it, “so there is no reason or validation for their exclusion.” In the meantime, she informs me, collage is a method to “check out the uncertainty “she feels about the medium in which she established her reputation. Will she return to photography?”You never understand, “she states.”It’s a huge hot mess in my head and I haven’t really formulated it yet. I like photography, and photobooks have actually been a course towards what I do in my work, but when I understood that 99 %of the ones in my collection were by straight, white males, it interrupted me. SCUMB Manifesto is not me saying,’Fuck all those professional photographers, they suck and they shouldn’t exist’. It’s more ambivalent than that. It’s mad and severe, but it’s likewise funny.”Not everyone, I believe, is laughing. SCUMB Manifesto by Justine Kurland is published by Mack(₤ 60)