For 45 years the writer Lucy Sante has walked her readers through the visual record of the modern era. In her spare time, she mutilates it.
Sante, a critic and historian, may be best known as the author of “Low Life” (1991), a revelatory history-from-below of New York in the Gilded Age that uses granular archival research — newspaper squibs, snapshot photography, arrest records — to resurrect the tenement era with an almost present-tense clarity. A staple of bookstores’ New York sections ever since publication, “Low Life” brought scholarly rigor to a generation already primed to make art from detritus.
In an interview last month at her home in Kingston, N.Y., material seemed even more literally the message as Sante readied for exhibition the small collages she makes in her spare time. This is not a new practice. Several dozen are on view in solo exhibitions in Manhattan: “Two Strikes on a Snow Man” at the Picture Theory gallery in Chelsea and “Knots” at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan.
She waved with a behold gesture to the yellowed periodicals that crowded the floor of her basement office in tidy Rubbermaid bins. As snow fell in blankets outside, Sante (rhymes with “flaunt”) crouched before decades of acquisitions from flea markets, collector fairs and the brocantes, the antiques markets, of her native Belgium and across Europe. More recently, she has scoured eBay auctions.
Stacks of postcards mailed between the World Wars. Montgomery Ward catalogs from the Depression, dense with technical illustrations of carpet rolls, cameras, carburetors. Magazines from the 1950s, with their bright, campy typography and beaming families in Buicks.
“Lately I’ve been searching for 19th-century chromolithographs,” she said of the color images used in household prints. “I also bought these remarkably dirty comics,” she said, handing me one called Super Rabbit. “They look like they were stored in a crawl space for about 75 years.”
Sante, 71, wears a fine, flaxen bob at shoulder length and a deadpan, slightly intimidating look of scrutiny. As she hit her vape, a cloud followed her like a thought balloon.
“I suppose I have a kind of version of scopophilia or something,” she said. “There’s definitely greed involved in just acquiring images.”
Since 2017, and especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Sante has been slicing and gluing pictures from this trove. She first posted them on Instagram. Then gallerists like James Fuentes, and Rebekah Kim of Picture Theory, began showing the work.
The collages are small, economical, punning, sometimes bleakly ironic about the vestiges of culture that comprise them, and usually word based.
One at the Academy seems to quote the painter and ironist Ed Ruscha. It is a postcard of a cathedral interior, onto which Sante has pasted an illustrated boy. The boy blows a big pink bubble with his gum. Above him floats Ruscha’s pet phrase, “OOF,” cut from a magazine.
Collage speaks, in part, because it espouses a private reality using pieces of the shared one. Whereas Ruscha’s painted OOF (at the Museum of Modern Art) feels chosen, Sante’s OOF has been chanced upon. This invites association. In the heading you might hear “oeuf” (“egg” in French). You might connect the word with fertility. Or with fragility. The tip of the crucifix in the nave hangs so close to the boy’s bubble you can almost hear it go pop.
“The Surrealists were very, very important to me,” Sante said. “My first art-world influence is Magritte, of course, because I’m Belgian. And nobody did more with words and images than he did.” Magritte’s colleagues like André Breton and Kurt Schwitters helped turn collage into a fine-art version of wordplay. Sante also admires the later collagist Joe Brainard.
Association runs free in the setting of the Academy show, in the wood-paneled library of its McKim, Mead & White building from 1923 in the Washington Heights neighborhood. The curator Kristin Poor has arranged Sante’s postcard collages horizontally under glass, along the counter ledge of the bookshelf, so that they might chime to the books above.
When you reach Sante’s collage of a man aiming binoculars at the word “CRIMES” on the wall onto which he is pasted, you can follow his line of sight, right off the edge of the collage to the volume on the shelf: “What ‘Mein Kampf’ Means to America,” by Francis Hackett, published in 1941.
“Lucy has an ability to pull a visual moment out of all of these sources and make it into something else, in the same way that you can comb through decades and decades of old newspapers and then spin it into such a fascinating story,” Poor said.
“I don’t think there’s a New Yorker who doesn’t love ‘Low Life’ who’s had a chance to read it.”
To Sante the collages are sensations as much as stories. “I never use anything but original material,” she said. “I love wear.” The conflicting layers of patina in her ingredients suggest their own strange relationships.
For example, the opening collage at the Academy. Its base is a splayed cover of “Friendship,” an excerpt from Thoreau’s “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” from 1903.
A friend had brought her the Thoreau. “Almost the minute he left,” Sante recalled, “I took out the insides and recycled them because the cover was just so beautiful” — a midnight-blue suede embossed in gold.
“One principle of collage, for me,” Sante said, “is you have to kill one thing to make another. It’s a small-scale model of revolutionary behavior.”
Atop the book boards went a cutout of an astronaut, surrounded by 13 cot mattresses from an illustrated catalog. Sante titled it “Friendship 7,” a homage to the first piloted American spacecraft to orbit Earth, launched when Sante was 7.
If you want, the title also mocks social ambition in a world of individualism. Thoreau is best known for his loner manifesto “Walden.” The Friendship 7, ironically, carried one person, John Glenn. And these mattresses, with different patterns of ticking, must have felt glaringly unpeopled, like empty vessels, to the catalog’s first readers. They certainly do today.
As a retired professor of the history of photography at Bard College, she wields an uncommon sensitivity to ephemera, to graphic items that were never intended for scrutiny but which preserve the life of the past, almost like amber. One of her gifts is the ability to explain how this detritus accumulates over time, in the lives of people and cities.
Her books “Evidence” (1992) and “Folk Photography” (2009) are classic studies of homicide photography and of the American photographic postcard. Her essay collections — the third, “My Heart and I Agree,” will be published this month — contain rousing close reads of the handbills, business cards, tabloid covers and nightclub drink tickets of 1970s Manhattan, the scene in which Sante found her author’s voice, first as a poet, then, after a job at The New York Review of Books, as a critic and journalist.
At age 18 she moved to Manhattan from New Jersey to attend Columbia University. She published her first collages then: fliers for her poetry readings with Jim Jarmusch, the artist and filmmaker, and Darryl Pinckney, the writer; fliers for Jarmusch’s band the Del-Byzanteens; Sante’s Xerox zine Stranded, in which she published co-workers from the Strand bookstore and her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The raw materials from those photocopies now live in an archive called the Lucy Sante Papers at the New York Public Library. You can go see them. They are sophisticated examples of post-punk tear-ups involving ransom-letter typography, alarming press photos, book text redacted with a Sharpie, a burned matchstick.
“Lucy’s collages are sharp-edged, colorful and visually demonstrative,” Jarmusch said in an email. “My own small collages, in contrast, are minimal and reductive, texturally fuzzy and rough-edged,” he explained. “I might say this contrast aligns somehow with the differences in our mental clarity and articulation.”
At the Strand, as whole libraries came into the store, Lucy said, she would pluck the most interesting ephemera for a Redweld folder that grew over the years. Scraps found their way into her assemblages.
One is hiding at Picture Theory, in a colorful, ghostly, possibly bloody collage from 2017. In one corner, a torn fragment of newspaper caption reads, “Sid Vicious is led from the Chelsea.” The reference is to the Chelsea Hotel, where Nancy Spungen, Vicious’s girlfriend, was stabbed to death in 1978, possibly by him. (Vicious died of a heroin overdose before he could be tried.)
Today she is more interested in ingredients that predate her. “Even in the late ’50s, everything starts getting too glossy,” Sante said as she bundled some magazine advertisements. “It’s also too knowing. There’s a certain kind of innocence before that, especially addressing working-class customers.”
The only child of two such working-class customers, Sante was brought to New Jersey from Belgium in 1960, where the family found unsatisfactory work and cultural alienation.
Sante’s “Factory of Facts” (1998), one of the great immigrant memoirs, makes clear how the acquisition of a second language — especially American supermarket-speak like Chock full o’Nuts — is as much a visual project as a verbal one, and is subject to collisions of meaning.
As Sante climbed the stairs to the living room sofa, she denied that her recent collages, with all their offset-color ingredients and midcentury sincerity, indulge nostalgia. (Her definition of that word, in the preface to “Low Life,” may be the most psychologically aware in English.)
She also dismissed the possibility that the recombining of existing materials had any parallels to her own gender transition. Sante came out as trans five years ago, and she speaks frankly about all the doubt and relief it has entailed. “I have a real big difficulty associating myself with groups,” she said, hitting her vape.
But true to the medium, the collages have it both ways. One at Picture Theory is a nude boy on a pedestal, a postcard of a sculpture from the Musée de something. (The caption is obscured.) His torso has been replaced by that of a heavy-lidded blond woman from a comic book. At the bottom of the picture, in headline type, appears the cutout word “Adequate.”
Two Strikes on a Snowman
Through April 18 at Picture Theory. 548 West 28th Street, Manhattan; 917-345-5505; picturetheoryprojects.com.
Knots
Through July 3 at the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Audubon Terrace, Broadway between West 155th and 156th Streets, Manhattan; 212-368-5900; artsandletters.org.
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