VOICEOVER: This episode of "The Art Assignment"
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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.
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