VOICEOVER: This episode
of "The Art Assignment"
is brought to you
by Squarespace.
We are in Washington,
DC today, and we're
meeting up with the
artist Molly Springfield.
For the past 10
years, Molly has been
making careful, laborious
graphite drawings
of photocopies of book pages.
She draws from a
wide range of texts.
Among them, seminal
books on conceptual art,
Walter Benjamin's
"The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,"
and several translations
of Proust's "In
Search of Lost Time."
Her work encourages
you to consider
the materiality of text as
not just something to be read,
but as an image to
be closely observed.
She's interested in our
individual relationships
with text, and the
notes, symbols,
and annotations we add to
chart that relationship.
The marginalia archive is an
ongoing work of Molly's that
collects copies of inscribed
pages from personal libraries
and files them along
with information
about the participant.
Other recent works include
this document, a book
and 20-panel drawing that
breaks apart and reassembles
one underlined sentence
from a Douglas Huebler quote
as it was reprinted in Lucy
Lippard's book "Six Years--
The Dematerialization of the
Art Object from 1966 to 1972."
Challenging the idea of
perfect reproduction,
Molly's work transforms
copies into originals,
and shows us how books
are not closed documents
but could be raw material
open to interpretation
and translation.
Hi, I'm Molly Springfield, and
this is your art assignment.
I started making my first
drawings of photocopies
immediately after grad school.
When I first started making
those, it was around 2005.
I've made photocopies of
books about the philosophy
of language or language in arts
and language in literature,
and they were just basic
8 1/2 by 11, 11 by 17,
straight up hand-drawn
copy of the photocopy.
And then it grew from
there, and then things
have evolved a
little bit from that.
But that's still a pretty solid
foundation of my practice.
Even though I'm very
familiar with making copies
and I can make a
good guess, you still
never know what's
going to come out.
I like the parameters that
a photocopier gives you.
I'm not the kind of
artist who responds
well to having every
option available.
I like to have a set of
parameters, and a photocopier,
you could only enlarge two
400 percents at a given time.
You can only darken
an image so much.
You can only print
out on whatever paper
you can load into the copier.
So it has all of these
built-in parameters,
and you have to try
to work within them.
And I like that a lot.
The first step of
this assignment
is to pick a page from a book.
It can be any kind
of book, one that
has personal
significance for you
or one that you maybe
just pull at random
from the bookshelf at
home or in the library.
Next, you're going to
make a photocopy of a page
from that book.
And this first photocopy
should be a standard 8 and 1/2
by 11 or 11 by 17
photocopy, depending
on the size of your book.
Then you're going to make a
photocopy of your photocopy.
And this time, try manipulating
the settings on the copier
to change the image.
So you could increase or
decrease the image size.
You could play around with the
density or sharpness settings
on the copier.
You could even experiment
with the mirror image
or positive to
negative functions
if you're a
photocopier has those.
Then, you're going to make
a copy of the photocopy
of your original
photocopy, again
playing around with the
settings on the copier
to change the image.
And you'll continue that process
until your final photocopy
is a transformed
image, something
that looks very much removed
from your original photocopy.
So Sarah, I often think
about how important copying
is to the history of the world,
because is if people hadn't
meticulously copied
texts over millennia,
we wouldn't have knowledge
about, for instance,
Ancient Rome.
Mm-hm.
Well, and what Molly's
work does so effectively
is show and sort of
glorify the value in that
copying, and meditating on
something that is existing
and that you can sit
there and mull on
for an extended period of time
and not just copy and paste.
Yeah.
And it does change by
the act of copying,
as we're going to see in
this process of photocopying
a photocopy, a
photocopy, a photocopy.
Right.
The kind of loss that happens
over time when something
is copied and copied
isn't always visible,
especially digitally now.
But I believe whether or not
you can see that kind of lost
from copy to copy, it's there.
And this assignment
makes it visible.
So Sarah, now I'm interested
in how photocopying has
been used in art in the past.
And I assume that's what
today's animation is about?
You're correct.
The dawn of the
photocopier in the 1960s
coincided with that
of conceptual art.
It found use beyond
the office by artists
like Mel Bochner who, in
1966, curated a show by asking
his friends to submit works
on paper that didn't even
have to be art.
The gallerist wasn't
thrilled with the work
and refuse to have it framed,
so Bochner used a photocopier
to make four sets
of the drawings
and presented them in
binders on pedestals.
Remember, a hallmark
of conceptual art
is letting the idea come
before the physical object.
So it should come
as no surprise that
along came a show in 1968
that took up no space at all,
existing only as a book.
For their Xeroxed books, Seth
Siegelaub and Jack Wendler
invited seven artists
to create a 25-page work
to be copied and included.
Also in 1968, Ian
Burn looked closely
into this new means
of reproduction.
He began with a blank
sheet of white paper,
ran it through the
copier, and then
used that copy to produce a hard
copy, and so on and so forth
100 times.
Scratches and static came
and went with each pass,
getting darker
and lighter again.
Burn let the idea
ruled the process.
Molly is asking you to let
the process be your guide,
starting with a page of text
and ending up who knows where.
The actual photocopies have
material qualities as well,
and depending on the
photocopier they're
going to be varying quality.
If you use a photo copier
in your school library
that gets lot of
use, that's going
to make a very
different photocopy
then a photocopier at your dad's
office that is really fancy.
It's going to produce
a better-quality image.
So negotiating those
things, as well, I think,
can be really interesting.
What is a bad photocopy?
Generally you try to
avoid them, but here I'm
kind of asking you
to purposefully make
a bad photocopy.
So we're going to
leave the studio
and head over to American
University where I teach,
and borrow the art
department's photocopier
to make some copies.
And I'm going to bring a
copy of "Six Years," which
is a book I've used
a lot in my work,
and also a couple other novels
that have text and image.
I think it'll be fun to
experiment with those two.
I think you could pick a book
that has personal significance.
Or because the final
copy isn't meant
to resemble that original,
you could just kind of
pick a book at random.
I think you could share
the whole process.
You could have every
step that you did.
Or if you would rather it
be a more mysterious image,
you could just have that final
photocopy or final drawing
or painting or whatever
you ended up making.
When an image is reproduced--
and I consider text
to be an image-- when
something is reproduced,
I think normally
information is lost.
And I'm interested
in what happens
when new technologies
are adopted
and what gets lost in
the process of going
from analog to digital.
And so when I'm at
the photocopier,
I'm not standing there
thinking about that.
But it's part of what
is driving the work.
I want to kind of
strike a relationship
between the act of making
a physical analog version
of something that could
have been done digitally.
It's not 1966 anymore.
We don't have to do that.
But the technology
is still there,
and we can still use it
in a way to say something
about new technology now.
This episode of
"The Art Assignment"
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Maybe don't
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[PLAYFUL MUSIC]
