She had good reason to hate men, but at the same time there's a distinct ambiguity to her anti-male rage, it seems odd to hear her taunt male sexuality by declaring it "incapable of zestfully, lustfully tearing off a piece", and at times she tries to rationalize complete disinterest in sex "Sex is not part of a relationship on the contrary, it is a solitary experience, non-creative, a gross waste of time". For those who accuse Solanas of being nothing more than a man-hater, consider that she was molested by her father, beaten by her grandfather, and panhandled and worked as a prostitute to support herself. The brief bio of her in the back of this edition is sufficient to help understand her motivations.
But once I read not merely the Manifesto itself, but learned a little about Valerie Solanis herself, a different picture emerged. It's easy to see why many people would find it offensive or insane, because that's basically what it seems to have been meant to be. Manifesto is brief, sensationalist, witty, and extreme, and is about the desirability of the destruction of the entire male gender. Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.The S.C.U.M.
Each work in SCUMB sounds an electrifying call for freedom - the freedom to create, to destroy, to imagine, and to reshape our visual and social world. While markedly different in style, the defiant female visions pictured in these compositions are a continuation of those depicted in Kurland’s earlier photographic projects Girl Pictures (1997–2002) and Mama Babies (2004–07). Kurland's ritual is restorative and loving: each work is a reclamation of history a dismemberment of the patriarchy a gender inversion of the usual terms of possession and a modest attempt at offsetting a life of income disparity.
The nature of collage - heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy - has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. This volume presents a collection of collages Kurland created by cutting up and reconfiguring photobooks by male artists, as she went through the process of purging her own library of roughly 150 books by straight white men that have monopolized the photographic canon. Inspired by Valerie Solanas’ iconoclastic feminist tract SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, SCUMB Manifesto introduces us to photographer Justine Kurland’s own uncompromising initiative: the Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books.
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