Lucy Sante on collage and the elimination of possibilities

By providing your information, you agree to our Terms of Use and our Privacy Policy. We use vendors that may also process your information to help provide our services. I first encountered artist and writer Lucy Sante’s collages online. She began posting them on social media amid the first of the pandemic’s many waves. Although she started her experiments in collage as a teenager, and later distributed them in zines and Xeroxes, posting them publicly marked a generative and unexpected broadening in her artwork’s reception. Spanning 1979 to the present and set within New York’s American Academy of Arts and Letters elegant wood-paneled library, “Knots” is Sante’s first major-scale exhibition. The title refers to her characterization of the collages, which she refers to as “tightly held knots of ambiguity, like the best poems.” Sante’s collages have a propensity for seeming new every time you look at them. A personal favorite is Popularity, 2021, a postcard-size composition near the library’s entrance with the titular word emblazoned in capital letters across its upper half. In it, two split-level homes float atop a fluffy, cloudlike expanse of white surf before a golden sunset. A shallow, rocky foreground gives the sudden impression of peering over a cliff’s edge. At first, the work’s meaning felt bold yet untold. But then, over the course of several viewings, new recognitions dawned—on the social contract, illusions of class, and the artist’s deft use of color in this gorgeous study of red, white, and blue. We spoke about her art ahead of the exhibition’s opening. —Laura Brown I WAS ALWAYS CAUGHT by the drama and ambiguity of words and pictures working together. This obsession goes back to childhood. Around the early ’60s, there was a particular style of movie poster where the words would be these titanic blocks carved out of granite—Ben Hur, Hawaii—with pictures of the film’s actors surrounding them. So you’ve got a whole narrative being given to you through the poster that is not exactly the one from the movie—the story exists in some kind of third space. I’ve always been fascinated by that. I would have gone to watch an afternoon of trailers before seeing a film. It was all about impact. Something important about making a collage, which I usually try doing with as few elements as possible, is that the process involves killing one thing to make another. There’s this thing that Joan Didion said in the Paris Review about how writing is a matter of “eliminating possibilities.” The idea is that with your first sentence, you’re 50 percent committed. In principle, she’s correct. It’s even more true of making collages. Once you put down your first piece, you’ve eliminated so many options. You put down a second, and you might’ve completed the circle. The earliest piece in “Knots” is Haussman, or the Barricades, which I made in 1979. At that time, I was still making band fliers, and I also had a zine called Stranded that I put a lot of collages in. But I made this one just for me. I never make or write anything that I don’t intend to show people, so this was a rare exception. But really, this all started when I was much younger. I had family members who were news agents in a little village in Belgium. Every six months or so, my uncle would send us a box of random stuff. They’d throw in teen magazines for me, and I got all the crime novels too, because my father didn’t like them. For decades, my mother carried around a stack of my grandparents’ lotto bingo cards. When I found them, they gave me a whole new subgenre to work with. The sources for my collages were printed mostly between 1900 and 1955. I was born in ’54, so near the date of my birth is where it stops. After that, paper media gets a lot glossier, and a lot more knowing. It strikes me that this change occurred around the time when printed matter became so much a part of the human expectation—a data bank of images started forming in people’s minds, and a slippage began to occur between image and text and even between image and image. It’s the beginning of this sense of self-consciousness. In the early half of the twentieth century, people were simpler, easier to fleece. But at the same time, language seemed less deceptive then. In certain ways, things were more straightforward and out in the open before the gloss. I’m making my interventions into this continuing dialogue that collage has with visual nature and with the nature of meaning. I’m entering my statements into the compounding media sources in our minds. I’ve got this gigantic stock of magazines and books and things that I cut up. Some of that stuff I’ve been dragging with me since I worked at the Strand Bookstore in New York during the late ’70s. In the ’80s, I started collecting photographs from the flea market in Astor Place that was open twenty-four/seven. In the ’90s, eBay was a treasury. Recently, at my local supermarket book exchange, I picked up a popular medical manual from Germany. It has about eight hundred pages with illustrations. I love finding things by chance. I don’t have a big house, but I have a big basement, which serves as both my library and my office. Acquiring materials leads me to wanting to make art. I try to go into starting a collage with as rasa a tabula as I can. I don’t apply prejudgment. I work in spurts. I’ll have a physical itching for making one that just takes over, and I’ll make four or five of them in a night. That usually keeps on going for a few days. It’s like a Roman candle—this impulse will go on for a week or two and then burn itself out. I’m also very synesthetic; I’m always thinking about music and film. I think that time helps fuel the motor with writing. But in producing visual work, temporality is fixed or frozen. When I make collages, I’m dealing with space as well as time. In my writing, I usually strive for clarity. In the visual, I’m striving for ambiguity. Decades ago, I lived two blocks from Slugger Ann’s, a bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where Jackie Curtis used to work. It was her grandmother’s place. I’d go there sometimes to watch Jackie perform. I remember a stack of Xeroxed leaflets she’d made with her face superimposed onto a cosmetics ad. It read, “Jackie Curtis, the Quintessence of Ambiguity.” Writing has become so much easier for me since transitioning, as I have nothing to hide. There is a deep emotional kinship between the operations that go on in writing and then in putting together the collages. There’s a similar kind of forked path of decision-making that goes into all these procedures. Some things are more purely intuitive than others, but they are still choices. And ambiguity versus clarity is key. Over the past five years, the topical collages I’ve tried to make are the weakest. The more purely intuitive stuff is where it gets closest to poetry. You know, I went to Columbia University in New York to study with Kenneth Koch. Two years into that, I realized I was a prose writer, not a poet. I didn’t want to stop lines and cut them off. I wanted them to keep going. Having said that, I think of all of my work as poetry. Anything that’s good enough to share is poetry. So many things are collage, including in movies—Sergei Eisenstein and Luis Buñuel are two classic examples of montage. In music, collaging is referred to as sampling. I don’t know what shape this medium will mutate into next. Collage just underlies most of the Western art of the twentieth century. A lot of great artists not known for their collages made collages. It is something that belongs to the twentieth century. It’s also true that I am a very twentieth-century person. For me, collage really begins with Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists, and the photomontage of Alexander Rodchenko and John Heartfield. Collage is my violon d’Ingres—Ingres the painter played fiddle on the side. This is the title of the iconic Man Ray photograph from 1924 of Kiki de Montparnasse, with the f-holes of a violin collaged onto her back. Violon d’Ingres typically describes a form of art that is practiced seriously by someone for whom it is not their primary means of expression.