SCUMB Manifesto
Justine Kurland
MACK
English
Essays by Marina Chao, Renee Gladman, Catherine Lord, and Ariana Reines.
Softcover
282 Pages
245 x 320 mm
2022
ISBN 9781913620561
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 like an electrifying call for freedom – the freedom to create, to destroy, to imagine, and to reshape our visual and social world.
About the Artist
Justine Kurland (b. 1969, Warsaw, New York) lives and works in New York. Justine Kurland is known for her utopian photographs of American landscapes and the fringe communities, both real and imagined, that inhabit them. Her early work comprises photographs, taken during many cross-country road trips, which reveal the double-edged nature of the American dream.
justinekurland.com
(source: https://www.miandn.com/artists/justine-kurland#:~:text=Justine%20Kurland%20is%20known%20for,nature%20of%20the%20American%20dream.)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
