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The Chicago Triangle 

 

Haifa Museum of Art, 2014

​Curator : Ruti Direktor

 

The room created by Rakefet Viner Omer is the room that Valerie Solanas could have had.

At the same time, the bed is also reminiscent of the famous Bed created in 1993 by Tracey Emin - another art-world "bad girl."

 

 

Valerie Jean Solanas

 

1936, New Jersey, USA

1988, San Francisco, USA

 

Valerie Solanas is best known for her attempt to assassinate Andy Warhol; in addition to her 15 minutes of dubious fame, she was also a radical writer and feminist thinker. In 1968, she published the SCUM Manifesto, in which she argued that the male species must be exterminated in order to free humanity of the shackles of capital and war. She claimed to have been sexually abused by her father throughout her childhood. Following her parents' divorce, when she was 15, she became homeless. She graduated from high school and paid her way through college, earning a degree in psychology by working as a prostitute. When she was 17, she gave birth to a son and raised him on her own. In 1967, she met Andy Warhol and asked him to produce a play she wrote, whose protagonist was a man-hating prostitute. Warhol agreed to read the manuscript, yet seems to have lost it - an event that led to Solanas' attempt to assassinate him. On June 3, 1968, she ambushed him outside of his famous studio, the Factory, and shot him and other people who surrounded him. Warhol was rushed to the hospital, where he was pronounced to be clinically dead, yet eventually recovered. He described this event as one of the peak experiences of his life, and as the ultimate confirmation of his status. Solanas turned herself into the police, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to three years in prison. Following her release, she kept following Warhol and his group, and was hospitalized several times in a psychiatric hospital. She became addicted to heroin and returned to prostitution. In 1988, she died in a homeless shelter in San Francisco after contracting pneumonia.

 

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