Content area
Full Text
Justine Kurland
Higher Pictures Generation
Justine Kurland’s latest exhibition “SCUMB Manifesto” found her swerving for the first time from photography to a more plastic medium and a loosely conceptual framework, yet with her usual mode of expression still in mind. Kurland has taken up collage, but with a provocative and very specific set of raw materials: The artist culled her extensive photo-book library of its roughly 150 volumes by white men and went at them with an X-Acto. SCUMB (Society for Cutting Up Men’s Books) is, obviously, a tribute to Valerie Solanas’s hilarious, violent, and critically perspicacious SCUM Manifesto (1967). As a kind of coup de grâce, when showtime rolled around Kurland offered to sell each of the sixty-five artworks she’d completed to the man whose imagery she’d reconfigured. Not a single one took her up on the offer.
If Kurland had scripted that response herself, it could not have been more perfect. A geek-macho culture has pervaded photography throughout what one might call its classical postwar form—that is, the cargo-vest, it’s-an-art,...