Title: SCUMB Manifesto
Artist: Justine Kurland
MACK Books, March 2022
24.5 x 32 cm
282 pages
116 plates
18 gatefolds, with 2 paper stocks
48 x 60cm poster inserted into back cover
Swiss bound paperback with sillkscreen printed gauze on spine
Design by Morgan Crowcroft-Brown
Essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, Ariana Reines
English
ISBN 978-1-913620-56-1
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. 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. The nature of collage — heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy — has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. 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. 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). 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.
Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.
- From the publisher's website
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. 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. The nature of collage — heterogeneous, pulled apart, shape shifting, disrupted, cyborg, fantasy — has long made it a feminist strategy in life and in art. 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. 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). 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.
Includes essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.
- From the publisher's website
