Women Artists Experiment with Xerox

I wanted hi thanks for being patient there might be people coming in because the tram stopped working so they might be making their way up there up the hill um before I begin I wanted to acknowledge that the Getty is situated on the ancestral and unseated land of the tongva people and I wanted to suggest that if you wanted to find out more about tongva history and what is now West LA um to visit Guru sacred Springs on Barrington Avenue which is only about 15 minutes from from the Getty um so thanks so much for coming to this conversation women artists experiment with Xerox we are here to celebrate Barbara T Smith's exhibition Barbara T Smith the way to be by taking a deeper dive into just one of the ways that Barbara was a Trailblazer her use of Xerox and I hope you've all had a chance to see the exhibition but if you haven't we'll be doing um walkthroughs after the event and the exhibition will be up until July 16th and so I hope if you don't have a chance to see it today then you'll still have time to see it we acquired the archive in 2014 um as well as a major set of unique Xerox artist books called the coffins and you can see some of that work in the exhibition um as has been the kind of uh kind of law by now um in 1966 Barbara T Smith leased the Xerox machine Xerox 914 and use it in her dining room for a nine month period of intensive experimentation and to put her work in the broader context of women experimenters with the medium we've invited the scholars and curators Michelle Donnelly and Taos Damani to discuss the work of Joan Lyons and Rita Keegan it's a very informal conversation and we all have some slides and Pietro regalo is going to talk about Barbara's work although the three artists who the focus of today's conversation were not in contact with one another the parallels and divergences between their works and different contexts La London and Rochester and across three decades well I hope provide us with inspiration for our conversation some of the topics we hope to touch upon are about the gendering of Technology the connection to print photography and performance multiplicity multiplicity and reproduction and marginalization the conversation is but a tiny sliver of ongoing research from the project geography and women artists 1960s to 1980s which I lead at the Getty in collaboration with Judith Delphine of the University of Paris Nantes that will result in a book in the coming years and if your interest is peaked please follow the project through the gra's website and I mentioned that there are tours after this talk we're also having two more events for the exhibition on June the 10th we're going to have a Xerox workshop with the artist Camila Janan Rasheed who is a contemporary artist that has explored Xerox in her work and on July 8th we'll be celebrating Barbara's birthday that's a bit of a surprise event there and at the Box what was that is online um this coming week at the Box Gallery um at 6 PM so that's on May the 11th so this Thursday there's going to be a walk through of the exhibition Treasures which is also focused on Barbara T Smith and her Circle um I'm going to introduce the speakers and just the last thanks to our av team thank you Chelsea Anderson for helping organize and to Judith Judith and all the other Xerox collaborators from afar who I hope will watch this later um so we're going to hear from Pietro first who will be talking about Barbara's work and then Michelle and then Taos so I'm going to introduce them in turn all at once now and then um we'll just follow through their presentations so uh Pietro regolo is associate curator at the Getty Research Institute he's the co-curator of Barbara T Smith the way to be and in 2018 he co-created the gri exhibition Harold Zaman Museum of obsessions Michelle Donnelly is a PhD candidate at the history of art at Yale her dissertation explores how women artists and artists of color expanded the parameters of printmaking outside the traditional site of the workshop from 1935 to 75. as a curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum she curated experiments in electrostatics photocopy art from the Whitney's collection 1966 to 1986. Taos the money is a French British and Algerian art historian writer and curator specializing in photography her projects explore the links between photography and politics including the visual culture of protests migratory narratives and intersectional feminist discourses Damani is the editor for the eyes magazine a trustee of the photo Oxford festival and is on the editorial board of Mia visual culture and feminism she's also associate lecturer at the University of London London College of communication so with those intros um I'd like to invite Pietro to come up we're going to have three short presentations and then we're going to engage in the conversation and hopefully Barbara will agree to join us on the carpet for that discussion thanks Pietra [Applause] hi everybody uh thank you Sana thank you Chelsea and all the team here at the Getty uh thank you Michelle in Taos for making it here and thank you all of you for being here today especially Barbara it's been an honor to have you here today um so in the exhibition you'll have the opportunity to see a selection of the coffin books Barbara Smith produced with the Xerox 1941914 machine I thought I'd use this opportunity today to present though the other major body of work they came out from that moment of experimentation a series of poetry sets which are also part of her archive and this will give me the opportunity also to read some of Barbara's poetry of that time which is truly truly beautiful the idea to develop her poetry further with illustration was the main reason actually is myth least the 914 in the first place together with the idea of creating some sculptures which we won't have time to analyze today the archive here at the gri has a massive amount of Preparatory material for the Poetry sets and virtually none for the coffin books this can be explained by the fact that she laboriously worked on the Poetry sets whereas the coffin books were made somewhat in haste at the very end of this hectic period of experimentation with the photocopies that were accumulating in her house it is therefore clear that the Poetry sets are the true laboratory where the different possibility of the machine were tested out here with the small selection of pages from some of the coffin books in the show you can get an idea of the different sources and methodologies that are at play in the books Smith works with pre-existing family pictures carries out actions on top of the glass plate uses photography that she commissioned specifically for the books and objects are placed directly on the plate contrary to the coffin books The Poetry sets are for the most part a series of loose sheets bearing one poem each and kept together in envelopes here for example we see the different sheets comprised in a set called Joy as you can see all the different ways to use the machine and the techniques adopted with the coffin books are already here with a major difference the main feature that make the Poetry sets poetry is of course text authored by his myth and the relationship between text and image is important an aspect that virtually disappears in the coffin books here I am showing an example of Preparatory material for a single poem called birth we can follow the composition of the sheet and the creative process in Barbara's dining room probably starting with this pencil sketch of a hand holding maybe pulling a baby and this poem that I will read quote that ancient distant memory feeling of distortion extension without limit Terror and Dread at our absolute vulnerability the need for feeling sensuality excitement to know we are at all birth becomes confinement exploded our first instant of Madness utter fragmentation that cries for definition creatures and monsters are on every side until we know they care unquote from here we can see how the initial sketch is developed farther how consideration about the color of the paper to use come into play as well as as first attempts at placing the text which then become more and more complex with the overlaying of different fonts and sizes and color until some somewhat final decisions are taken in terms of color and composition and then we reach the final version here beside The Disappearance of the text another main aspect that differentiate the Poetry sets from the coffee books is of course the fact that the sheets are loose not bound together in a fixed sequence a few examples though shows us early attempts at sequencing in quite interesting and surprising ways in these examples in which two sheets can be flipped at the top Smith uses a punch hole and a trath here a little red sticker here a tiny little nail here a pin with a pearly tip and here she Staples the pages at the top this in particular is a poem Smith seems to get back to over and over again rework in different pieces and we could draw some connections with our Christmas cards which are quite significant and you can read about in the book as well as in the exhibition and I'll read this poem quote in the spaces around love there shines a burning rabbit nibbling at the Moon whose cocoon he swallowed in an instant breeding the breath of Christmas fire unquote and then we have this amazing example of staple sheets that have to be lifted up against the light in order to reveal the text on the sheet underneath it has somewhat mimicking the process of photocopying itself so I have been asking myself when did these other heaps of photocopies became book and how exactly Barbara got the idea of books without words why would you get rid of words if you want to make books and what artist books could she have looked at at that time I thought Ed Rocher could of course be an antecedent Smith knew about and would have looked at by 1965 Rocher had already published some of his notorious books such as various small fires in milk and some Los Angeles apartments we know the two knew each other and we're both in the orbit of Walter hopes and the Pasadena Art Museum furthermore Jerry MacMillan the photographer who was shooting for Rocher at that time shot some of the pictures myth used in the coffin books I had the opportunity to talk to Barbara about all this and she confirmed she and her husband were collecting at that time and did own some of Russia's early books there weren't any other really to look at but she also kept stressing how Russia's book were completely different and how the idea to work with Xerox come came from the exposure to Prince in the collection of the Pasadena Art Museum where she was a volunteer rather than from thinking about books her thinking about the printing process her intention to produce a print and the experience of being rejected at the Gemini gel would indeed be the reason why she tried to get hold of his Xerox machine in the first place I want to conclude my remarks by showing you another set of loose xeroxed sheets which Barbara put together towards the end of her experimentation with the machine and that she called the ladder and later reworked in a small artist book called coffin in self-defense in May 1967 Smith had the opportunity to travel to New York for the first time where she met Robert Morris and his then wife Yvonne Raynor Maurice who already had quite a reputation for ripping off other artists seemed particularly interested in her stories about what she was doing with the Xerox machine back in Pasadena Smith recounted the meeting with Morris to Walter Hobbes who suggested her to write a dated and signed letter in which she presented her experimentation out of this this letter was born an attempt to reach out and to Mark the territory at the same time the latter offers sampling so full she had done with the machine up until then and it is interesting because it decidedly shift the focus from text to image language as you can see is used in a totally different way we have only one or two tiny words at the center of each page spelling out I thought you might like to see some of my work on the Xerox machine um so we can see how the just opposition Awards and images here often lead to ironic and comic effects which are not that present in the in the Poetry nor in the coffin books like for example they play on words I meaning myself and i e y e you having picture of herself to see showing again an eye and some anatomical diagrams some presenting tools of measure and and other means to calculate of my bringing up copying both as a technological process and maybe a hint at often male artists copying other often female artists and then signing the whole thing as the resident manager so to conclude it seems like the times myth spent with the Xerox machine allowed her to experiment first and foremost with herself to use art in a transformative way as she would keep doing for the rest of her career with her performances from rejection to finding a public finding somebody to speak to to a certain self-awareness and confidence that allowed her to use humor and irony in respect to her own work and her own position in the artwork thanks for listening [Applause] and now leave the stage to Michelle Donnelly okay thank you xanna for the introduction thank you Barbara for joining us tonight and thank you Chelsea for all your work and organizing today's event I am excited to speak with you all about the work of Barbara T Smith and Joan Lyons who are two artists I've been thinking about for a long time as as Anna mentioned I curated an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2017 on artists who use the copy machine as a hybrid camera printing press and both Barbara and Joan installed a xerox machine in the space of their homes in the 1960s and they use it to explore their most readily available subject their own bodies however they created radically different works because of their access to different Xerox Technologies so in this short presentation I'm going to unpack how they each exploited the distinct capabilities of their copy machine in order to explore the female nude and before I begin I also want to make a quick plug that Joan Lyons has a solo show on view at the memorial Art Gallery in Rochester right now on view through August 2023 so I recommend you check it out so Barbara lease the Xerox 914 which is the first automatic plain paper copier that came out in 1959 it's on view in the exhibition and as you can see in this advertisement it was an L-shaped desk you would place the item to be copied on top of the glass flatbed underneath which was a lens the user would press the print button a light bar would scan the document and then after just a few seconds a copy would emerge as you can also see in this image it hit just below most people's hips at 30 inches high so it was the perfect height for artists to want to lay their bodies on top of it and Barbara has discussed how she envisioned creating prints in collaboration with her husband in which they would each take turns placing their naked bodies on the surface of the machine at the time their relationship was deteriorating she was feeling entrapped in her domestic role and she was longing for a sense of intimacy so she fantasized about creating this erotic imagery in which the machine would act as an intermediary between their two bodies her husband rejected this proposal but she decided to go ahead without him and use the copier to explore her sexuality so as Pietro mentioned these are images from her coffin series these are just two of those books in which they a black cover opens up into this accordion fold of images and each image offers a closely cropped view of her body in increasing states of undress from the limitations of the flatbed you also get a sense of the containment and entrapment that she was feeling in the domestic sphere at this time in Pasadena the flatbed was designed for standard size business documents at 9 by 14 inches so we can see in these images how Barbara is awkwardly contorting her body to fit within this tight spatial frame she is pressing her body against the flatbed which in turn is you know compressing back and distorting her body so it's really expressing the sense of containment and entrapment that she was feeling in the domestic sphere but at the same time this is also a space of Liberation for her and I think that we get a sense of that feeling of sexual Liberation from her serial layout of the images so they're arranged in the order that she created them presented edge to edge like a film strip these images essentially reanimate her bodily movements so she becomes a subject in motion rather than a subject who is merely entrapped on the page Joan Lyons also used a xerox machine to picture her body in the space of her home whereas Barbara put it in her dining room Joan installed it in her home studio but she wasn't seeking to create conventional self-portraits in which she is an identifiable subject instead she used her body as a site to investigate feminine archetypes or generic characters that have occurred in Visual and literary culture so on the left she is posing as the huntress with her searching eyes and active stance in the center she's embodying the witch with her suspicious stare and on the right she is personifying the temptress with her chest bear and legs open like a centerfold model while Barbara was based in California Joan lived in Rochester New York which was the home of Xerox headquarters and from her local connections she was able to get hold of an obsolete Xerox copying system that was no longer readily available it was called the haloid Xerox standard equipment and it was the original Xerox system from 1948. it was composed of four units a copy board a camera a processor and a heat fuser unlike Barbara's copier it did not have a glass flatbed for you to lay documents on and instead operated upright like a view camera it also wasn't automatic you couldn't just press print instead you had to conduct 50 manual procedures to create a single copy so I'm just going to very quickly walk us through this process as the woman from the operating manual illustrates for us first Joan slid a selenium plate into the processor and she pressed the charge button to make it light sensitive next she transfer the plate from the processor to the camera and she held a pose in front of the lens for approximately 10 seconds then she moved the plate to the developing tray in the processor repeatedly rotating the tray to evenly Cascade developer beads coated with a carbon black powder called toner across the plate the exposed areas of the plate rejected the toner while the unexposed positive charge areas attracted the toner then she laid a sheet of paper Atop The developed image reinserted the plate into the processor and flipped the transfer switch to make the paper attract the toner finally she lifted the photocopy from the plate at this point though the toner was not yet bonded to the paper it can still be manipulated like a charcoal drawing it wasn't until she placed it in the heat fuser that it permanently adhered to the surface so as you can see this was a highly complicated process but because it was manual she was able to create a series of interventions into her imagery that she couldn't have done in an automated machine before she placed it in the heat fuser so while the toner was still loose and malleable she used a tool called a hot wire to manipulate her imagery this as we can imagine was not endorsed by Xerox it was an independent invention by her colleague Joel Schwartz who was also an artist based in Rochester and he worked independently with a Xerox engineer named Robert gunblack so through their guidance she connected a wire tip with a metal needle to the charge rail of the processor and then she used this Implement to harness volts of electricity to shock the unfixed toner off the page and onto another surface I unfortunately don't have pictures of Joan using this tool but I do have pictures of her colleague Tom Carpenter using it from a workshop that we organized so as we can see on the screen after Tom pulled the photocopy from the plate he placed it face down on a blank sheet of paper and then he used the hot wire to transfer the toner from the top sheet to the bottom sheet so it created this Mirror Image leaving behind some residue like a ghost print so whereas Barbara was limited to 9 by 14 inch sheets of paper because of the automated system Joan was able to quite literally break her figures out of the confines of the standard size sheet so she created this work by transferring and recombining multiple prints of her body onto a large sheet of drawing paper using the hot wire as part of her broader aims she was curious how the female nude could be transformed through the Gaze of a woman artist like many feminists in the 1970s she had become increasingly aware of how women had been traditionally portrayed in the history of art as passive objects on display for the pleasure of the viewer and she thought to challenge this through the use of the hot wire by deconstructing and reconstructing her body so here we can see how she is conjoining two different prints of her bent legs we can actually see the edges of the one print right here and so by doing this her leg seems strangely linked with her hips and her genitals seem oddly Askew attached at a different angle than the rest of her body her face also appears shattered she has two mouths and three eyes with one hovering in the center of her forehead so her body doesn't appear intact and whole but shifting and oscillating her body defies easy visual consumption so she's not submissively surrendering to the gays the viewer but forcefully looking back so both Barbara T Smith and Joan Lyons reimagine the possibilities of an administrative device to explore the subject of the female nude neither of them passively put their bodies on display but they were active subjects who investigated their bodies on their own terms there's a lot more to say about these works but I will leave it here for now and I look forward to thinking through these practices with all of you so thank you [Applause] hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us on such a nice and sunny day and I would like to start by thanking Zanna and Pietro for the invitation to speak today and the incredible opportunity to be able to share Keegan's work here the Getty today and I guess I'll just um Jump Right In with my introduction um in the spring of of 2019 after a few exchanges and via Facebook the only way I had then found to connect with her Rita Keegan invited me to meet her at her home in Vauxhall in South London to talk about her life and her multiple artistic practices when the moment came for her to show me her Xerox art the reason why I had contacted her in the first place she proceeded to retrieve folders from behind the sofa where we were sitting for decades her living room had been the informal location of of her personal archive it was in the in this rather unorthodox context that for the first time or so manipulated and photographed reader's zeographic work as she was sitting in the corner of her velvet sofa by the bay window telling me stories about her life between New York and San Francisco in the 60s and 70s and her subsequent move to London in 1918. today my presentation will merge account of her life and practice since the facts of her biography and artistic Endeavor still remain under research and thus little known focusing on focusing on a xerographic work in the mid-1980s so I'll start with um a tale of her translate Atlantic Journey born born in the Bronx in 1949 to a Dominican mother an African Canadian father Rita Keegan went to the High School of Art and Design in Midtown Manhattan if most of her early life was spent on the East Coast Keegan left for the West Coast for her under undergrad training in 1969 she started at the San Francisco she she studied at the Start Center San Francisco art institute from where she graduated in 1972. after having followed the teaching of American photographer Imogen Cunningham African-American painter Mary Lovelace O'Neill an African-American assemblage artist Betty saw for this for the young Rita Keegan these artists and especially only lensar offered the freedom of putting herself in the center of the frame and doing so through experimentation with a multiple of mediums indeed at the San Francisco Arts Institute Keegan painted designed and made garments early on as a result of her education Keegan did not conceive of high Keys between her practice as a painter and her fashion related Endeavors giving us early pointers to her non-interest in traditional or conservative distinctions between visual arts and crafts and any kind of art related primitive value two other elements persuaded with the Keegan as early as her childhood of of the possibility of becoming an artist even while growing up in segregated USA first her early knowledge of the early Renaissance and then her relationship with her Uncle Keith Simon born in 1922 and passed away in 2013 a hold Howard educated Caribbean painter member of the Caribbean Arts Movement who had an exhibition in 1971 at the Commonwealth Institute in London however despite the positive start as a young artist considering the socio-political context of the states Rita Keegan struggled to find her place in the New York and California art scenes and as a result decided to move to London in 1918. a second-class citizen in a country of origin she discovered her americanness in Margaret Thatcher's England and quickly made friends with the artist of the emerging Black Street Scene black British scene during our conversation Rita Keegan described her arrival as England as such and I'm quoting her here being here meant I got to be American for the first time being American was first was fascinating because culture trumps race end of quote as she experienced another kind of race relations in London at a moment when black British citizens were fighting for the rights and freedom Keegan also encountered the British art establishments rules and Regulation and she explained that I'm quoting her again here in the state if you can put it on the wall or a plane it's it's art then they can sell it I did not grow up artistically in a world that had hierarchies of making whereas in Europe it is very entrenched in what art is end of quote despite normative and conservative European constraints her life in London in the early 1980s was both alternative and radical she was taking part in feminist CR groups teaching white feminists about the intersection of struggles was partying in SoHo where a mixologist even named a cocktail after her and in 1981 she helped establish the Brixton Art Gallery where she created the show Mirror Mirror reflecting Darkly displaying only works by black British women artists as an organizer of diverse events from parties to exhibitions Keegan first used copying to produce modest exhibition catalogs pamphlets and posters for the Brixton Art Gallery this is how in 1983 she discovered Community copy art then still a traveling Endeavor providing mobile workshops with a single photocopier and a van in 1984 Keegan helped copy out get established in a building in King cross with support from the Camden Council in greater London Arts copy art functioned as a co-op with seven part-time posts one of them being filled by Rita Keegan herself considered by its Founders as and I'm quoting here a structure of resistance copy Art became a means of building an oppositional public space it offered the possibility of making reasonably priced photocopies both for Community associations and activist organizations as well as For Young Artists exploring the possibilities of copying for the young creative The crucial difference between copy art and any other copy shops and was the freedom to handle the machines themselves and have access to wide variety of materials as Keegan said and I'm quoting her again here if you have access to it you are going to do stuff to it end of quote in 1984 Keegan began a long period of work using a Canon np2010 photocopier with five toners of blue red green brown and black inks free access to a color copier offered her the opportunity to explore the art of Montage armed with a t-pex print stick and ex-acto knife Keegan's montages were composed and constructed with the expertise and delicacy she knew through suing and dressmaking affordable and transportable Xerox art did not require a studio or a permanent place to live as a result this DIY attitude inherented Xerox art ought not to be considered as an aesthetic Choice only but the a real driving ethic Xerox art was a celebration of poor Productions to cite hito starvel and she told me and I'm quoting her again here I have no problem with people's media because people need a voice end of quote even if limited to A4 and A3 formats Keegan produced in multiple of collages experimenting with layering composition and color however kicking Xerox practice chiefly focused on the representation of the self Rita Keegan's art of immediacy as she names it herself may be understood as a search for individuality within optic and emotional multiplicities her Xerox work is in a way for looking Xerox work is a way for licking for uniqueness in replicas Keegan's xerox's art is dedicated to the appropriation of photographs of herself and her family indeed in addition to her flamboyant outfits in the suitcases she bought from with her from America have were family photographs of her middle class black family dating back to the early 1900s Keegan explained that and I'm quoting her again um photographs were part of the fabric of my childhood end of quote Keegan's Montage were a way of exploring her paternal Roots which date back to the time of the Underground Railroad used by slave to escape to Canada merging this narrative over Caribbean route from her mother signed as writer and curator Naomi Pierce explained mm coaching Naomi here Rita used a photocopy photocopier as a time traveling device drawing together what had been kept apart end of growth she used and reused countless of times the same pictures of from her family album and where there is a reputation and where there is repetition there is insistence making Keegan self-portraits from fundamentally political as an associate assertion of herself as a black woman artist playing with Notions of time and space kicking an art incorporate Incorporated family photographs and engages the viewer with the with her presentation of the diasporic family archive as a confirmation of existence and endurance a refusal to be erased situating her family within the narratives of modernity Keegan's Montage also gave a framework of her visual references hero Xerox art is not only an art of copying but a not of repetition and variations beyond the work of beyond the work on Family Photos Keegan uses a tight iconography with the recurrence of two main motifs flowers and shells um yeah flowers as a motif were evidently inspired by Frida Kahlo self-portraits portraits which he admired at um which she admired as her 1990 is that yeah as in 1988 um homage to Frida Calo attest to if the Mexican painter known for her many self-portraits is an obvious reference for Keegan's own practice of self-representation Callos iconography inspired by South American nature and floor nature and Flora evidently influenced Keegan's montages interest in the depiction of her own family and Roots must have had an impact on Keegan's reflection but I would like to sort of draw another parallel with Barbara T's missed Eric's work in the late 60s using also her face and her body as key element of the composition but also more recent work where flowers take Central stage visiting the visiting the Getty exhibition the way to be this morning I also noticed the use of flowers in first class mail and the wallpaper of timepiece Yellow Rose and Rose Ball all made at the end of the 60s shells are also used in timepiece fuchsia Rose in the 1966-67 Xerox books and I wondered about the value of symbolism that might um that that flowers and shells might have for Smith and I might ask her later Keegan's and Keegan's other sort of Keegan's other Motif shells is often considered within the black community as a symbol of immortality and as a mean of guiding the disease in the afterlife especially in the context of slavery shells bring the reading shell to bring the reading of Keegan montages into the sphere of the symbolic to conclude I would like to highlight the fact that using banal sort of office technology and turning it into a creative machine and I would like to propose sort of understanding Keegan's Xerox montages as sort of phoenix-like as the colors are burned by the copy machine they are reborn in all their wandering capacities in light with what Scott Herring named a queer sonography xerography regarding Keith haring's practice we can easily name Keegan's work as an import as embodying and sort of intersectional feminist zerography of sorts the results of a critical radical and personal practice of copying and as I said in my introduction video Keegan struggled to find her place in the New York or California art scenes in the 70s and now as a result decided to move to London in 1980 since then she has been named the Godmother of black art by black British Artist Keith Piper yet Richard Keegan has been excluded from official narratives made by ADI sawyans but also often left out of alternative accounts made by black British male artists as ego away sawinski who later led the Rita Keegan archive project stated Keegan has demonstrated demonstrated pursuance persistence and resilience and continued making works even if relish rarely shown regularly showed them nonetheless even if in alternative venues and above all I card them all in the hope of later interest research and commentary thank you [Applause] thank you to all the speakers and can I invite you all to come and sit down and Barbara too um and we will have a little discussion um thank you all so much for your presentations and thank you Barbara so much for joining us and I wanted to start obviously we've seen quite a range of different practices but something we've been really interested in in our sort of ongoing research and project is about how far the kind of Standards secretary and xerox's advertising of women as The Operators of these machines um provided a kind of foil for these women experimenters so I guess my first question and which you can all weigh in on is how much that was a sort of muse the the Sexes stereotyping of the figure of of secretary or and how perhaps it provided a path um you know instead of taking orders and fulfilling the needs of somebody else instead fulfilling one's own needs and perhaps I'll pass it first the word first to Barbara um so how the kind of Ideal the figure of the secretary as the operator of the Machines of provided inspiration for you um versus uh well obviously maybe not at all no I never thought about um being um making work as against the image of a woman as a secretary um yeah I didn't relate it to business at all because it just became a um a tool for me to make art and um and I guess the reason I got into that was because I don't know if you want me to tell the story now but sorry okay well I was I went to Gemini the um I think it's lithography is that what they did anyways it was a artist's um it was a artist Studio Workshop business where they would bring artists in to make series of prints that they would then sell to the public and show and shows and I thought well I have a I had a wonderful drawing idea of of and a lithograph is done on a stone I mean and the image is made on the stone in um in an oily ink it's a whole thing but the process is called planar and um because it doesn't bite into the stone and it doesn't lift off the stone it's just on the same plane as the stone and they roll it under a press and a paper comes down and the image is printed off of it and so I want to to Gemini with my idea for a great Stone I was it was whole play on the tombstone so it's a stone on the stone and all this and I thought it was such a super good idea and they looked at me and said well you know um you don't have a gallery do you and this in other words well you know I I we have people waiting to work here as a backup and and um uh who's in a famous artist I can't think of his name right now listen currently what it was Alba's yeah Albus was working there and so in and we don't know how long it was going to take in other words they were completely shining me on because they didn't know who I was at all and and so I left and I was just miffed and I was drawing drawing home and I had learned a lot about the history of famous of of artists great printmakers in other words print making as an art is really an offshoot of a a piece of equipment that's used to give information to the public and so you know etchings and Engravings were done to announce um whatever Wars or whatever but but certain artists would take them over and turn them into an art tool and so and I thought each each era has their own famous artists that were working with a particular methodology and so for lithography we have Don domier and um Kathy callowitz and and they made these great Prints but they were the anomaly and so I thought well what is the art making the print the information processing medium of our time and I I said well it's Business Machines so then I thought is there a business machine who's technology is unique and because most of them like a mimeograph and a ditto machine those are all basically the same Technologies of lithography and so forth and so so uh I researched all these machines and it turns out that Xerox is completely unique because they're they don't use ink they use this little bead of plastic which is a toner called a toner and it's um it's the print is photographically copies what's on the plate and then it moves to another part of the machine and it goes through a heat process called sintering and it it melts the little bead onto the paper so that the talk technology is entirely different and so I thought so that's what I got so I looked into Xerox and that's how I got in the machine I mean I think it's um you know print making looms very large obviously in Xerox but then photography and and particularly in the way that you use Xerox performance as well um and then of course the transformation into artists books so this kind of intermediality and sort of intersection of different media I think comes across in all of the presentation so um I guess that's another question maybe for Michelle and tell us about um how where does Xerox fit in and why the artists wanted to use Photography in their work um you know what what possibilities did it offer to them okay um to answer your first question I will say that Joan was very aware of these sexist advertisements and I think that she was consciously trying to um upend those advertisers in her practice and I think it's not a coincidence that she's picturing the feminine body on a machine that's traditionally associated with feminized labor and then for your second question regarding intermediality Rochester is a historically photographic Community um Eastman Kodak company was founded there so this is a city that revolutionized the accessibility of Photography and they're also a wide range of other photographic companies that were based there like photographic lens companies photographic paper companies so it was really this photographer's Mecca and then when Joan moved there she moved there in 1960 with her husband Nathan Lyons who became a very major curator at the Eastman house which I should also note was the oldest photography museum photography collection in the world and um she became as she describes it a fly on the wall to this photographic community in which Nathan was organizing these workshops in their home of photographers who were interested in contesting straight photography so it was these photographers who were interested not in the image that is just like perfectly framed for you but they were interested in calling attention to the surface so they wanted to draw on the surface of the print they wanted to sew into the surface of the print so I think it we can see how Joan who's like observing all these strange photographic practices in Rochester then turns this machine that's quite photographic where it operates like a view camera and allows you to mess with the surface in the way that her colleagues are um I guess for Rita's work in a way copying is only a phase um it's mid 80s 85 85 86 80s not even 87 just two years um she had a wide practice between performance painting installation textile and at that time in her life in London she was squatting she didn't have a home she didn't have a studio and there was just this place where she could go where they could take they could they could have the copying machine available to her and she could go and paint very little money and just so it was sort of a way of being creative in a very sort of um cheap accessible way I think there's a massive practical aspect to why she turned to copying um and she found it exhilating and sort of exciting and fun and she just had loads of fun with it and then moved on to something else it was just a moment in her life I think for like very practical reasons I wanted to also ask about time in these works because it's something that came across in all of the different presentations about um the sort of quality of time there's this kind of idea of the uh of immediacy um I think Barbara you also took about it as this kind of immediate um register but then on the other hand um there's also this kind of slow playing out and intervention and sort of almost dissection of the media so I wanted a little bit um also in terms of um the sort of leafing through and um in the case of what Pietro showed the um the book almost as a sort of durational time piece that you kind of spend time over you know and all of these different kind of aspects of time that appear in in the different works so on the one hand it's like immediate and on the other it could be very slow or drawn out or durational or even time-based if you see it as like a performance um well I hadn't started doing performances when I did these books that they I hadn't even thought of it so I didn't it wasn't related well only in that I was you know using my body but that was they were not related in any other way yeah you you had done already the black glass paintings though right yes at that point do you see any connection between the Xerox work and the black glass paintings I've always wondered um in the sense of you know a reflecting surface the black glass being maybe uh no no I never thought of it we see more than that's a good idea you know a glass surface you somewhat perform in front yeah or on top of yeah [Music] yeah student slowness especially when we think about it in relation to this capitalist Enterprise of the Xerox machine how it's a machine that's created to be efficient and productive and it's created at the same time as all of these scientific efficiency studies in which companies are analyzing how to most efficiently use a machine and actually the standard equipment is study to see how it can be most efficiently used apparently it can be used in one and a half minutes which I don't believe um but anyway so I think that when we think about her using this machine not this slow machine as laboriously as possible I think of it as in resistance to this workplace desire for efficiency that she's choosing to use it slowly over the course of an entire day and so just for instance the one work that I showed before um she would have spent an entire day making it so that's very much in contrast to Barbara's practice where she probably could have gone through a whole room of paper in one day with the Xerox machine um one thing about um oh I'm forgetting what I was going to say um time I was going to talk about it'll come back we can come back um I think I remember in um the copy uh Community there was this kind of alternatives are possible to capitalism and that the photocopies had always been used in the service of capitalism and that there was this other opportunity to use the medium for something else copy art was very much a radical sort of um Collective and sort of community but I think thinking about time in terms of reader's work there's two ways of looking at it there's the possibility of going there and spending a couple hours a couple hours and then taking her copies in putting them in a folder and moving on to something else and then I would also like to suggest another way looking at time in in her work is to sort of dialogue with her family and different generations and being able to go back to the US in a way go back to like travel sort of history in time um and sort of read finding a way of sort of owning it and sort of making it hers um I think there's yeah there's something about sort of time in sort of linked to history there that would be quite interesting to explore in Rita's work I wanna oh sorry I remember what oh you remember great you go yeah well the thing about the Xerox machine is that you know I started when I got it I had these certain ideas like those poetry sets I was going to do that and then there's certain things that turned out to be sculpture which they didn't show I was going to do that and when I started working the machine became like the salt seller at the bottom of the sea it just cranks out it's endless I I just couldn't I couldn't stop and I'd go around my house and I'd find all these weird little things I wonder what that would look like and so it you know it just could not stop working on it and and in fact I was telling my husband I don't know how how we can ever stop this didn't he just tell you to send it back he said call them up and tell them to come and pick it up so yeah it was that was what I wanted did you well just thinking a little bit more about time I was thinking also about the choice of calling the book coffins um which is quite significant but in terms of your family history you know being your father being a second generation uh mortician and funerary home director but also in the relation with the history of your family and what was going on in your personal life at that moment and the breakage of your marriage so and and the logo you design for the books you know that you talked about as representing a moment in time where you reach kind of a point in which there's somewhat no no turning back and there's no answer you don't know I mean there's certain times in your life where everything comes to complete stop and you don't know it's sort of like no nothing that you know to do and so that's what this was the coffins for that yeah we're running a little short on time because we started late and we want to make sure that there is time for people to go on the tours but um I wanted to open up to see if there's any questions I see a question from Sally should I bring this oh I think there's someone to bring you a microphone it will be yeah yeah it works um first of all this is a great event and the auditorium should be completely full because this is so exciting I think it was Pietro who brought up early the question of ruchet and his books but I was thinking looking at the imagery of rauschenberg and the whole idea of the combine and I but I suddenly realized I don't know when I mean Warhol of course came out here but did rouseham was rauschenberg's work scene out here did he come out here um and were you interested in rauschenberg's collaging and combines sure thank you yeah yeah but I don't know if it directly related but yeah and I was so interested also in hearing about the machines coming into the house or the studio because it reminded me of this whole 19th century notion of the machine in the garden meaning the railroad but this is like uh the new business machine coming into the house and then the way it got reappropriated it seems by women more I I also would love to hear a little more about Sonya Sheridan um who was also working in Upstate New York as well but there's not enough time you'll have to follow after the research project yeah and well um are there any other questions okay um thank you so much for thinking so um yeah I think we'll draw it to a close just because we want to get onto the tours but thank you everybody for coming and thank you Barbara for being here thank you Pietro and Michelle and Taos for your presentations well thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Getty Research Institute

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Id: rRuL3x6orfA

Length: 61min 48sec (3708 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023