Valerie Solanas

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Valerie Jean Solanas (born April 9, 1936 in Atlantic City , New Jersey , † April 26, 1988 in San Francisco , California ) was an American radical feminist writer who, through her attempted murder of Andy Warhol and as the author of the SCUM Manifesto got known.

Life

Solanas was the elder of two daughters of Dorothy Biondi and Louis Solanas, who worked as a bartender . Solanas graduated from Oxon Hill High School in Maryland in June 1954 and then began studying psychology at the University of Maryland , which she graduated in 1958. The following year, she dropped out of her Masters course at the University of Minnesota to tour the country.

According to a psychiatric court opinion from 1968, Solanas' childhood and adolescence were "quite sad" and marked by a "broken home". She was sexually abused by her father and often placed outside the family. Solanas said she had sexual experiences at the age of thirteen and found shoplifting normal. When she was fourteen she was placed in a boarding school, which she felt was a temporary salvation. She told a fellow student that she financed her studies through prostitution .

In the mid-1960s, Solanas lived in Greenwich Village in the New York borough of Manhattan , where she over-sold her essay " SCUM Manifesto ", was homeless and ate leftovers. She got to know Andy Warhol and was soon a frequent guest in his factory . She wanted Warhol to produce her play Up your Ass (in German meaning “Lick me”). Since he seemed interested, she entrusted him with her only manuscript, but the papers disappeared in the factory. As Solanas later became delusional, her conviction grew that Warhol had stolen the piece from her.

In 1967 Solanas met the publisher Maurice Girodias , who at that time mainly published underground literature and pornography . He was enthusiastic about her “pun” and described her as an “ iconoclast ”. He bought her the rights to the SCUM Manifesto .

That same year, Solanas played a role in Warhol's film I, A Man . She felt that Warhol and the artistic hierarchy of his factory had taken advantage of her and asked for a higher fee. After she phoned him about it, she was expelled from the factory. In the fall of 1967, her accommodation at the Chelsea Hotel was canceled and she began to believe in a conspiracy between Warhol and Girodias. Beside herself with anger and despair, she berated Warhol on the phone.

On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas Warhol stopped in front of the new premises of his factory and shot him three times. Warhol was badly injured in his spleen , abdomen, liver and esophagus from a shot . She also shot art critic Mario Amaya in the hip and tried to shoot Warhol's manager Fred Hughes in the head. Her pistol blocked . Hughes told her to go, and Solanas left the factory, leaving a paper bag with her address book on a table. Warhol was taken to the Columbus-Mother Cabrini Hospital and had to undergo a five-hour operation, which was successful.

Girodias used the public attention generated by the scandal to publish Solanas' SCUM Manifesto . Solanas was sentenced to three years in prison at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane . After her release in 1971, she was mostly homeless; in the 1980s she lived in California . On April 25, 1988, she was found dead by the caretaker of a homeless shelter in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco . She had suffocated from emphysema at the age of 52 .

Solanas' life and the background to her shooting at Warhol was filmed in 1997 by Mary Harron under the title I Shot Andy Warhol . The main role played Lili Taylor .

plant

  • SCUM manifesto , Olympia Press, London, 1971, ISBN 0-7004-1030-9 .
  • Manifesto of the Society for the Destruction of Men, SCUM , March Verlag, Darmstadt 1969. Licensed edition by Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-86572-666-7
  • Play Up Your Ass (meaning "Lick me")

Movie and TV

  • Solana's story was filmed in 1996 under the title I Shot Andy Warhol .
  • The SCUM Manifesto was filmed in 1976 with Delphine Seyrig .
  • The episode Valerie Solana died for your sins, bastard! from the seventh season of the American Horror Story ( Cult ) series is dedicated to Solanas and SCUM and builds a (fictional) bridge to the deeds of the Zodiac killer .

literature

  • Mary Harron, Daniel Minahan, Valerie Solanas: I shot Andy Warhol . Grove Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0-8021-3491-2 . Again: Avalon Travel Publ., 2000 (same ISBN) script of the film

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary Harron, Daniel Minahan, Valerie Solanas: I shot Andy Warhol Grove Press, New York 1996, ISBN 0-8021-3491-2 , p. Xi.
  2. ↑ Susan Ware, Stacy Lorraine Braukman, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, ISBN 0-674-01488-X , p. 602.
  3. ↑ a b c d EMMA March / April 1997: The Destruction Retrieved on December 25, 2010.
  4. ^ A b Alan Kaufmann, Neil Ortenberg, Barny Rosset (eds.): The Outlaw Bible of American Literature . Thunder's Mouth Press, New York, NY 2004, ISBN 978-1-56025-550-5 .
  5. ↑ James Martin Harding: Cutting Performances: Collage Event, Feminist Artists and the American Avant-Garde . University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI 2010, ISBN 978-0-472-11718-5 .
  6. ↑ Jane Daggett Dillenberger: The Religious Art of Andy Warhol . Continuum, New York, NY, ISBN 0-8264-1334-X .
personal data
SURNAME Solanas, Valerie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Solanas, Valerie Jean (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American radical feminist writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1936
PLACE OF BIRTH Atlantic City , New Jersey , United States
DATE OF DEATH April 26, 1988
Place of death San Francisco , California , United States