During 1967, a key text of the most radical feminism began to circulate through the streets of Greenwich Village in New York, the SCUM Manifesto.
Women could buy it for a dollar, men for two.
It was distributed by its own author, Valerie Solanas, a revolutionary writer, vagabond and prostitute who, a year later, would achieve much more than fifteen minutes of fame after shooting Andy Warhol with a .32 caliber revolver. The bullets pierced the stomach, the artist's liver, esophagus and lungs.
Hours later Solanas turned himself in to the police.
Warhol did not press charges and the following year he posed for Richard Avedon showing his scars.
Her aggressor was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and would serve part of her three-year sentence in a psychiatric hospital.
"I do not regret anything",
she told a reporter after being arrested.
"Read my manifesto and you will know what I am."
'Exhibit A, 2020', from the book 'SCUMB Manifesto' (MACK, 2022).
Courtesy of the artist and MACK. JUSTINE KURLAND
'New York in Color, 2021', from the book 'SCUMB Manifesto' (MACK, 2022).
Courtesy of the artist and MACK. JUSTINE KURLAND
'Earthly Bodies, 2021', from the book 'SCUMB Manifesto' (MACK, 2022).
Courtesy of the artist and MACK. JUSTINE KURLAND
'Nudes (After Jay DeFeo), 2021', from the book 'SCUMB Manifesto' (MACK, 2022).
Courtesy of the artist and MACK. JUSTINE KURLAND
'The Bikeriders, 2019', from the book 'SCUMB Manifesto' (MACK, 2022).
Courtesy of the artist and MACK. JUSTINE KURLAND
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
If Warhol hadn't been shot, Solanas's manifesto—an angry call to overthrow the government, eliminate the monetary system, complete automation, and destroy the male sex—would possibly have been forgotten.
In her background runs a corrosive and drastic response to Freudian theories, theses that exasperated the young woman, a victim of sexual abuse by her father during childhood.
SCUM
means scum in English and is also the acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men (usually translated as Organization for the Extermination of Man).
In an effort to pay homage to the controversial manifesto, the photographer Justine Kurland (Warsaw, New York, 1969), —known mainly for her photographs of teenage rebels and whose vision is radically opposed to the image of America most stereotyped by the masculine gaze—, has used the blades to shape a provocative book
,
SCUMB Manifesto
(MACK).
It is the letter B (for
book
, book in English) in charge of warning that, on this occasion, it is books that have been severed.
Monographs whose authorship belongs to male photographers.
“A call to end the graphic representation of the masculine canon”, as the artist writes on the cover of her new book.
"I'm coming at you with a blade," she threatens herself.
The threat was carried out in several cases.
Kurland cut out and reconfigured 150 photography books from his library.
All of them signed by white photographers, whose names appear in some of the most notorious volumes in the history of the medium:
Paris by Night,
by Brassaï,
The Americans,
by Robert Frank,
The Bikeriders,
by Danny Lyon.
Others like
Think of England,
by Martin Parr,
American Surfaces,
by Stephen Shore,
Sleeping by the Mississippi
by Alec Soth,
Tulsa
by Larry Clark or
Los Alamos,
William Eggleston's are also among them.
A subversive cut and paste exercise that some could describe as cultural vandalism, a possibility contemplated by the author within the punk spirit that initially gave rise to the work.
In the end, it would result in an act that is as destructive as it is creative and repairing, with a background tone of parody, in which the author claims her freedom to reconfigure our visual and social history and free herself from the influence of the masters, whom she actually appreciates, as well as of the canons marked by museums and publications.
An act in keeping with the sign of the times, in which the collage allows the artist to distance herself from the single perspective, claiming a multiplicity of points of view.
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
Female bodies dominate Kurland's collages.
In
Nudes (After Jay DeFeo, 2021)
the different cutouts of a woman's body are regrouped around triangular pieces of pubic hair to evoke the image of a flower.
"The composition is presented as the amendment to a certain type of photographic education", writes Marina Chao in the monograph, "where women's bodies have been consumed as easily as flowers, trees and landscapes".
In this way the figures acquire a new life through their mutilation.
Georgia O'Keeffe's hands are freed from the fetish condition that Alfred Stieglitz thrust upon them.
It is a challenge for the reader to try to identify the author of the original images through the cut pieces.
Each collage bears the name of the book from which the author obtained the material, without citing the author's name.
Kurland offered her work to some of these photographers.
Most of them did not respond.
With a few exceptions: Tod Papageorge was flattered, Stephen Shore offered her a trade for a print copy, and Jim Goldberg sent it
Raised by Wolves
as material for another of her works.
"I have not tried to single out anyone," the author assures the British critic Sean O'Hagan.
"It's about a system and power structures, not individuals, although I have to say some of these guys have been taking up too much space for too long."
Inevitably, the monograph raises issues related to appropriation and authorship.
“Solanas didn't shoot Warhol because he was a man;
he shot him because he stole his play, the typescript of his script,
Up Your Ass
Kurland writes in the book.
The truth is that the writer appeared at the Factory with the intention of recovering the text that she herself had sent to the artist.
Convinced that her publisher, Maurice Gorodias, was conspiring with Warhol, she went first to the businessman's office to kill him, and not finding him, she set out to unleash her anger on the artist.
It seems that the versatile creator was never really interested in the script and misplaced it.
Not being able to return it to her owner, and after her insistence, she offered him to participate as secondary in one of her films.
Three days after the shooting, the publisher printed
SCUM Manifesto
.
She never paid the author her share of profits.
The script turned up years later among the belongings of one of Warhol's collaborators and is now in the archives of the Warhol Foundation.
Solanas died in 1988, alone, from pneumonia and in a foster hotel in San Francisco.
Her mother burned all of her unpublished manuscripts.
Image belonging to the series 'One in Three Women', by Nieves Mingueza.Nieves Mingueza
From the Dadaist Hannah Höch, as well as Mary Beth Edelson and Martha Rosler in the seventies, to the African Wangechi Mutu today, many artists have come to confirm the suitability of collage as a formidable transmitter of feminist claims.
SCUMB Manifesto
is one more link in this tradition to which the Spanish photographer Nieves Mingueza joins with
One in Three Women
.
It is a series, or chapter, belonging to a more global and ongoing project, through which the author conceptualizes gender violence in order to give it visibility.
To do this, she mixes vernacular photography with a series of texts and archive material.
"According to a report prepared by the United Nations in 2021, violence against women and girls is one of the most widespread and persistent violations of human rights in the world," highlights the author from Cordoba, who uses statistics to incorporate them in his work.
The series opens with the intervention of what could be an academic fringe photograph, from a specialty exclusively for women.
Mingueza abruptly cuts her faces, showing her rage in the harshness of each cut.
Thirty-three percent of the faces appear dotted with a red background, a fact that is associated with the text that accompanies the image,
“One in three women globally are subjected to violence (One in three women is subjected to violence globally).
Other times the handwritten texts will be incorporated on the back of the photographs, a way of insisting on the invisibility of the problem.
Part of the series focuses on the domestic environment: in kitchens, in bathrooms, in bed or on the sofa.
With a simple intervention, be it a cross, an arrow, or a number, the artist cleverly manages to stimulate the viewer's imagination and points to objects that could well be used as weapons, inside the pale rooms of anonymous owners that immediately become the scene of a crime.
"With my interventions, he transformed interiors in the same way that violence transforms homes," says Mingueza.
Settled in London for seven years, she has developed a career that has led her to exhibit in collective exhibitions at the Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, as well as in PhotoEspaña.
This year she repeats in the Encounters of Arles,
Case 3181
.
A photo essay in which fiction and reality come together to reconstruct a femicide in which the victim is represented by a mannequin.
The event will take place on July 9 within
Night of the Year
.
'
SCUMB
Manifesto'.
Justine Kurland.
MACK Books.
282 pages.
75 euros.
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