Cultured Magazine: SCUMB Flowers by Justine Kurland at Dashwood Projects.
Wednesday, Oct 02, 2024
The photographer Justine Kurland invokes The Society for Cutting Up Men, an apocryphal organization referenced in the 1967 pamphlet SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (the misandrist philosopher and would-be Warhol assassin) in a project of more moderate—or rather, symbolic—violence. With her ongoing SCUMB series, Kurland cuts up men’s books. For this exhibition, “SCUMB Flowers,” she takes as her target William Eggleston’s epic project The Democratic Forest, first published in 1989—a gorgeous, collectible, ten-volume set including more than one thousand images. Not immune to the super-saturated color and keenly observant pictures of the male photographer, nor to the scope of his achievement and the beauty of these books, I gasped slightly when I read of Kurland’s premise. by Johanna Fateman