SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 35

by women”). The film was shown six times within the context of this event, alongside nineteen other videos.

In the United States, Valerie Solanas heard about the Insou-muses’s videotape, as evidenced by the six postcards she sent dur-ing the spring of 1977 to Danielle Jaeggi, whose had been designat-ed as a contact for the MLF. In laconic letters, the writer explains that she is looking for the contact details of the collective Mon Œil in order to get hold of a copy of the videotape and of the transcript of the commentary. She also requested Delphine Seyrig’s address and phone number, and asked Danielle Jaeggi for the name of the co-director, as well as further information regarding the passage about her in Françoise d’Eaubonne’s book Le Féminisme ou la mort (Feminism or Death), published in 1974 by Pierre Horay, and the ru-mor that she was dead.

Today, SCUM Manifesto represents one of the most recog-nised militant videotapes within the context of heritage institu-tions — which are increasingly concerned with women’s heritage or rather “Herstory” — like the Bibliothèque nationale de France within the framework of the project around “vidéo des premiers temps” (“Early video”) 29, as well as museums, many of which dis-play the video in exhibitions and film programs. The videotape is indeed esthetically similar to videos made by artists engaged in the exploration of this new medium’s performative possibilities. However, the recent inclusion of SCUM Manifesto within the legiti-mised field of Video Art does raise some issues. The process of “ar-tification” 30 and the “museumification” of these kinds of produc-tions often tends to decontextualise and depoliticise practices and