Splitting Image

John Vettese sees what develops

by John Vettese

Zoe Strauss (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Zoe Strauss is all about reclaiming art from the highbrow.

Her long-running annual "Under I-95" art show creates an informal, open-air gallery where her photographs are sold for $5 apiece — a price much more blue collar than blue blood.

The stuff she shows and sells there is part of her 10-year venture — the Philadelphia Public Art Project — which documents the rough-hewn faces and ramshackle places of her native city. The comparisons to Diane Arbus or Mary Ellen Mark are easy, but Strauss is more of an empathetic insider than an exploitative gawker.

Most importantly, she's a self-described "huge proponent of fun." Which is why, when leading her workshop at the Megawords Storefront tonight, Strauss is bringing a stack of photos torn from magazines, some scissors, paste and poster board, and having her attendees go to town. (The pictured photomontage is just an example of what she anticipates might come out of the session.)

In short, it's a collage night. Arts and crafts, if you will, followed by a discussion about the results. But even "discussion" sounds too highfalutin; maybe "chitchat" is better. Basically, it's the antithesis of the graduate-level formal crit.

"Those things are just insufferable," Strauss says, recalling a particularly maddening crit she attended this year at New York's School of Visual Arts. One classmate's half-baked work seemed to irk everybody except the scholar leading the talk; that person praised the "opticality" of his photographs.

"That's not a word!" Strauss hollers, clearly traumatized by the event even months later. "Are you out of your mind?"

If you find Strauss' reaction to be somewhat extreme, you probably haven't been made to endure one of these things before; humdrum artwork gets explained away through theoretical jargon like "neo-baroque post-structuralism" or "pictorial semiotics." Or perhaps some lengthy phrase in French or Latin. Anti-intellectual? Perhaps, but there's also such a thing as the overly intellectual, or overly academic. It's the school of thought that says you, humble viewer, aren't smart enough to understand what makes a good photograph. Strauss doesn't buy into that.

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So rather than drone for the duration of her Megawords workshop about opticality, she wants to engage her group in the process of using existing images to create their own artwork, then see what those images might say. The 20th century has a rich history of this: Collagers and photomontagers like German surrealists Hannah Höch and John Heartfield made subversive work that took down Nazi propaganda during World War II and commented on male dominance in the art world. By comparison, you've got contemporaries like Scott Mutter, who don't make grand statements with their photomontages as much as they just combine images — say, escalators leading to the surface of the ocean — that look nifty together in coffee-table books.

These people might come up in conversation at the workshop. Or the crowd might simply be left to go nuts with glue and scissors, since the result of the process — images cut, culled and reconstructed — would be the same either way.

Strauss says it's not too far off the mark from what she does as a photographer.

"You're recording something — you're taking an image and you're making it your own," she says.

We can see this in a standout photo from the "Under I-95" exhibit. The banal bricks-and-mortar of a vacant department store building fills the frame. The exterior paint is chipping, the parking lot is deserted and above two protruding sidewalk lights, you can see the faint outlines of long-gone lettering: "Satisfaction Guaranteed."

To the highbrow crowd, this might be called "observational irony."

To Strauss — and to the audience she prefers to connect with — this is simply fun.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)

Zoe Strauss' collage workshop (BYO magazine clippings), Thu., Sept. 18, 7-9 p.m., free, Megawords Storefront, 125 N. 11th St., 215-300-7391, megawordsmagazine.com.