SCUMB Pages (Los Almos Revisited)

2021

In 1967 the radical feminist and writer Valerie Solanas sold copies of her newly
authored SCUM Manifesto on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village.
Solanas didn’t mince words: the ambition of the Society for Cutting Up Men, or
SCUM, was to eliminate the male sex and work toward an all-female utopia.
Inspired by Solanas’s vision, Justine Kurland began to purge her cherished library
of photography books authored by white men, creating her own SCUMB
Manifesto in the process (SCUMB stands for Society for Cutting Up Men’s
Books). Seeking and picturing freedom is at the core of much of Kurland’s
work, and in this project, liberation is found in the artistic act itself. She chopped
up images by figures whose work is considered foundational to photographic
history, as well as those by their contemporary male heirs, then reconfigured them
into collaged compositions. The nature of collage—heterogeneous, disjointed,
shape-shifting, cyborgian, fantastical—has long made it a feminist strategy both
in life and in art. Kurland’s is a restorative ritual: each collage is a reclamation of
history, a dismemberment of the patriarchy, and a gender inversion of the usual
terms of possession.

To create this new, SCUMB Pages, Kurland recycled the pages of William
Eggleston’s three-volume set, Los Almos Revisited as a multi-layered collage using
negative space created by each of her cuts. Here, the book form is reiterated in a
collaged form, as a stack of pages bound together. The progressively smaller excisions
vibrate with a kaleidoscopic effect. The layered openings invaginate what remains
on the page, locating the latent feminine in the work of one of the most revered
fathers of American photography.

Analog Perspectives

Cannery Village GalleryProject Rooom

Cannery Village Gallery
Project Rooom