by Justine Kurland and Ariana Reines
Release date: September 2024
Published and distributed by Dashwood Books
First edition
Zine, 32 pages
Dimensions: 7.16 x 7.25 inches
Suggested retail price: $28
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Dashwood Books Item #27764
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 images 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.
Reines’s poem “Theory of the Flower” from her forthcoming book The Rose (Graywolf: 2025), centers the heroine of Joyce’s Ulysses, Molly Bloom. It draws on the lineage of medieval troubadours’ erotic poetry, and employs the feminine, sexual symbology of the titular flower. In Reines’s poems, inherited ideologies of femininity and masculinity are replaced with a bold vulnerability, and the overturning of gender dynamics transforms the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and transmutation.
Justine Kurland is an artist based in New York City. Her most recent publications are This Train (MACK, 2023); SCUMB Manifesto (MACK, 2022); The Stick (TIS, 2021); and Justine Kurland: Girl Pictures (Aperture, 2020). Recent exhibitions include This Train, Higher Pictures, Brooklyn (2024); SCUMB Manifesto, Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago (2023); and Bonds of Love (with Moyra Davey), delpire & co, Paris (2023).
Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, Obie-winning playwright, performing artist, and translator. Her poetry collection A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019) won the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was long-listed for the National Book Award. Her book The Cow (Fence, 2006) won the Alberta Prize. Her new books are Wave of Blood, out this Fall from Divided and The Rose, which will be published by Graywolf Press this spring.