For her part, Judith was writing a book about San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo and her experimentations with xerography. Judith and I began planning a major international symposium at the National Institute for Art History in Paris. 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. 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.
Several reasons for these women’s intense attraction to the photocopier have emerged from our research project. 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. 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.
Access to photocopiers was also key. In her new autobiography, Barbara T. Smith relates that she leased a Xerox 914, a 650-pound copier available to the general public, and installed it in her dining room after a well-known printing press turned her down for being “basically unknown.” Artists with fewer financial means, meanwhile, used the copy shops that were beginning to proliferate or took advantage of their access to copiers at work. In some regions, like Eastern Europe, photocopiers were effectively banned, so there is little copy art from the region. What is interesting to me, though, is that some artists, aware of copy art, even if they weren’t actually using the technology, still applied its aesthetic and logic through other print mediums.
The art the women made with the photocopier created a new visual language that was often otherworldly. Using Canon’s 3M Color-in-Color machine in the mid-1970s, for example, Chicago-based Sonia Landy Sheridan created images of flowers that are beautifully ephemeral and color saturated. Smith, Lyons, and British artist Helen Chadwick created intimate images of the female body that defied sexist representations in the mass media. The women used the effects of the photocopier, such as the fading created by repeated copying or the ability to collage together family photographs and other assembled elements, to fragment the body and play with the impermanence of memory. Some artists wrote about their relationship to the machines in unusually intimate terms and felt that the process of copying their bodies facilitated a kind of self-transformation.
It’s incredibly important to focus on women artists who have been ignored or systematically written out of art history. And we must note that they were extremely technically accomplished, in contrast to the claims of those early Xerox company ads. Some intervened in the engineering of the machine to get the photographic effects they wanted. Also part of the story: photocopying was essential to spreading messages and forming feminist communities through zines, flyers, and posters.
This November, Judith and I organized another more intimate gathering to brainstorm the common themes in our collaborators’ research with a view to publishing a book and organizing an exhibition. Looking forward, we’ll hold a public event this spring related to the exhibition Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be, which runs from February 28 to July 16, 2023, and is curated by my colleagues Pietro Rigolo and Glenn Phillips. The exhibition, complete with a Xerox 914 copier on display, is a wonderful chance to learn about Smith’s work from her own perspective; it uses her own autobiographical narrative to tell the story of her career.
