Barbara T. Smith’s idea to create art using a Xerox machine sprouted from a rejection—and a flash of inspiration from printmakers of the past and present.
In 1966, Smith was living in Pasadena with her then-husband and three children and had just begun experimenting with avant-garde art. She heard of a newly opened printmaking workshop, Gemini G.E.L., which collaborated with select artists to create lithographic prints. Intrigued, she drove over one day and asked the receptionist if she could work there on a print.
But the receptionist explained to her that Gemini only prints for established artists. And besides, German American artist Josef Albers was already busy printing something and she didn’t know when he’d be finished.
Disappointed, Smith left. “As I was driving home, all the way I was just fuming,” Smith remembered.
But then she started thinking about the history and purpose of printmaking. What, she wondered, is the most modern, most technologically advanced form of printmaking? The Xerox copier machine, she reasoned, which had been released in 1959.
“I went, ‘Ahh, that’s it,’” Smith said.
This literal “aha moment” kicked off a nine-month period of artistic experimentation that revolved around a Xerox machine. Smith published her artwork in a set of 25 unique hand-bound books she named the Coffin series. Each book featured a selection of her art made with a copy machine—a series of images of her children, her own body, and objects like flowers and lace, which Smith created by manipulating the Xerox machine.
In 2013, the Getty Research Institute (GRI) acquired most of the Coffin series, as well as seven additional “Coffin” artists’ books, five sets of Smith’s “Poetry” prints, and her “Xerox Journal” sketchbook. A selection of these objects is featured in the exhibition Barbara T. Smith: The Way to Be, on view through July 16, 2023, at the Getty Center. Smith’s memoir, The Way to Be, was published by Getty Publications in February 2023.
In 1966 Smith leased a Xerox machine and put it in her dining room, its clunky frame and steady whirs filling up the room. At first, she thought she’d try copying a few little sculptures and creating images to illustrate some poetry. But the machine was “totally fascinating,” she said. “You could duplicate anything.”
She started copying everything from figurines to kitchen staples like rice and flour. She ran the machine after writing in lipstick on the glass. Efforts to convince her husband to create erotic photocopies were unsuccessful, so she copied her own body. (In 1968 she and her husband would divorce.)
She photocopied photographs of her children. She copied transparent paper and film (they melted). It was all in the name of experimentation.
“Instead of saying ‘This is terrible,’ I started printing and seeing what it would do,” Smith said.
Fire proved to be the biggest risk of working with a Xerox machine, since the machine generated heat as part of its copy process. “The technology [was] just on the border of catching fire,” Smith said, and indeed, paper caught fire in the machine many times. But Smith would just grab the smoking paper, stamp on it, and get right back to work. (Later models of the Xerox machine included a built-in fire extinguisher and fire blanket.)
Creating the Coffin Series
After nearly nine months with the daily whir of the copy machine, and piles of paper, Smith told her husband that she didn’t know how to stop. He suggested she call up the Xerox company and ask them to take the machine away. “Which I thought was very funny because it was very unromantic,” Smith remembered. With the machine set to be returned in just a few days, Smith finished the remaining things left to try, and her great Xerox machine experiment was over.
Smith realized, though, that she now had hundreds of pieces of art piled around her house and no idea of what to do with them. She decided to turn them into books. Smith bound them herself and gave each one a black cover featuring a silver X within a circle embossed on top. As she later described in her memoir, Smith dubbed them the Coffin series as a testament to her awareness that her marriage was about to end, and life would never be the same.
“These books were coffins and memorials at once,” Smith wrote.
Smith was one of the very first people to use a Xerox machine to make art, slyly subverting the purpose of the machine (to make identical copies) by using it to make unique works of art. But while other artists, many of them women, also experimented with Xerox art—eventually leading Louise Neaderland to form the International Society of Copier Artists in 1981—the medium remained under-the-radar from established art circles. In the 1980s, photocopying became a crucial tool for creating and disseminating punk art.
“Smith was very prescient in terms of recognizing that this was not only a new way of reproducing images, but a new way of seeing,” said Zanna Gilbert, a senior research specialist at the GRI who is currently conducting research on copy art and women artists.
After finishing the Coffin series, Smith began pursuing other types of art, including performance art, and almost never exhibited the series. (However, the co-founders of Gemini G.E.L., Stanley and Elyse Grinstein, later became great supporters of her work, particularly her performance art.) But there’s a lot to learn from her copy art, Gilbert said: the power of allowing yourself to experiment, and the importance of taking new forms of art seriously even if they fall outside the bounds of established mediums or creators. Xerography was also the last analog image-producing technology before the advent of digital image technology, Gilbert pointed out. Consider how Smith’s piles of paper would, in today’s world, exist as digital files, saved and edited electronically.
“Whenever there is a new technological tool,” Gilbert added, “artists will experiment with it without fail.”
