Top: Lumpy leather and stone paperweight by Carl Auböck (eBay). Bottom: Similar lump on Walter Gropius' desk photographed by Leslie Williamson.
She is at her best, however, when exploring communities closer to home: staking out local bodegas, immortalizing Philly characters like the South Street clothing store proprietor Benny Krass, or putting a face to the urban tragedy of Camden, N.J., just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia... In these shots, and in the series as a whole, the highway is as much of a divider as it is a thoroughfare. It isolates neighborhoods or splits them in two, a condition emphasized by Ms. Strauss’s careful attention to seams, scars and lines of demarcation... It’s fair to say that Ms. Strauss has accomplished more in the past decade than many artists do in a lifetime. With more gumption than wherewithal, she spun a single idea into a magnum opus.
Review: Philadelphia Stories (NY Times)
Zoe Strauss: Ten Years opens on Saturday and continues through April 22 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Motown was down the street and they called me up asked if I wanted to do album covers, so I said I’ll send you an example. So, I sent them that ball of noise just to show my kind of disdain. I didn’t even know what it was at that time. It wasn’t anything. It was just a little record company down the street in an old house that said Hitsville, USA and I was a big time Detroit automotive advertising designer. I was too snobby to actually want to do anything for them. So I just sent them that ball of noise as a joke, just to end the whole thing. At the time I didn’t know what it was, nor did I care. It was just kid’s music and I was more interested in Jazz. I didn’t want to bother with this little shitty neighborhood record company that was just down the street from the building I worked in. I was just a snobby artist, even in high school. I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Elvis Presley or any of that kind of stuff. Beatniks didn’t listen to pop music. Beatniks listened to Shostakovich and Coltrane. When I was in high school the big thing was beatniks and so beatniks were high culture. They weren’t pop culture. If you were a beatnik, you were a bohemian artist type, so you would be into Classical and Be Bop Jazz and then finally folk music, but very authentic stuff. I listened to that Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music.
From an interview with Ed Fella.
Jenny Holzer, stickers from the Survival series (1983–85). From the exhibition Investigations 3: Jenny Holzer. Found in the ICA archive and re-installed as part of Up on My Back, and I Will Take You Thither.
