One of our collaborators, art historian Michelle Donnelly, has shown how artist Joan Lyons deliberately played with both the standardization of copying and the stereotype of the submissive secretary by creating photocopied self-portraits in which she intervened mid-copying process with an electrified wire.Īccess to photocopiers was also key. For one, the copier was strongly identified with women’s gendered roles as secretaries and office workers-there were even extremely patronizing ads in magazines and on TV showing that “even a woman” could operate these machines-and the artists may have been propelled to challenge this representation. Several reasons for these women’s intense attraction to the photocopier have emerged from our research project. It was disappointing to miss out on this long-awaited in-person gathering, but I was thrilled that the history of these radically experimental artists was finally being told. The symposium would be delayed three times by the COVID-19 pandemic, and I would end up giving my introductory address at 2am from Los Angeles, heavily pregnant. Judith and I began planning a major international symposium at the National Institute for Art History in Paris. After a 2019 conference panel that John and I convened in Brighton, England, Paris Nanterre University’s Judith Delfiner and I, over fish-and-chips at a local pub, decided there was clearly a story of women artists and technology to be told.įor her part, Judith was writing a book about San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo and her experimentations with xerography. He even trained to become a photocopier repair person to get closer access and a better understanding of the machine.Īs we continued to research, though, it became clear that many of the artists deeply exploring this new art form were lesser-known women pioneers like Barbara T. Queer artist Hudinilson Jr., for example, photocopied his body for a piece he called Xerox Action and distributed the resulting sheets in an envelope that acted as a discreet book cover. to have mass access to copy machines in the 1970s-and for artists there looking for new and more democratic ways to address their audiences, the impact of that access was immediate. As we researched the collections and convened panels at art history conferences, we soon encountered a whole global history of artists experimenting with the photocopy.īrazil, for instance, was one of the first countries after the U.S. The GRI has many rich examples of “copy art” in its collections, including Wallace Berman’s esoteric work with the early Thermofax copier and the better-known 1968 Xerox Book organized by Seth Siegelaub with Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, and other well-known conceptualists.
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