Xerox art (sometimes, more generically, called copy art, electrostatic art, scanography or xerography ) is an art form that began in the 1960s. Prints are created by putting objects on the glass, or platen, of a photocopier and by pressing "start" to produce an image. If the object is not flat, or the cover does not totally cover the object, or the object is moved, the resulting image is distorted in some way. The curvature of the object, the amount of light that reaches the image surface, and the distance of the cover from the glass, all affect the final image. Often, with proper manipulation, rather ghostly images can be made. Basic techniques include: Direct Imaging, the copying of items placed on the platen (normal copy); Still Life Collage, a variation of direct imaging with items placed on the platen in a collage format focused on what is in the foreground/background; Overprinting, the technique of constructing layers of information, one over the previous, by printing onto the same sheet of paper more than once; Copy Overlay, a technique of working with or interfering in the color separation mechanism of a color copier; Colorizing, vary color density and hue by adjusting the exposure and color balance controls; Degeneration is a copy of a copy degrading the image as successive copies are made; Copy Motion, the creation of effects by moving an item or image on the platen during the scanning process. Each machine also creates different effects.
Xerox art appeared shortly after the first Xerox copying machines were made. It is often used in collage, mail art and book art. Publishing collaborative mail art in small editions of Xerox art and mailable book art was the purpose of International Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) founded in 1981 by Louise Odes Neaderland. [1] [2]
Throughout the history of copy art San Francisco [3] and Rochester are mentioned frequently. Rochester was known as the Imaging Capital of the World with Eastman Kodak and Xerox, while many artists with innovative ideas created cutting edge works in San Francisco. Alongside the computer boom a copy art explosion was taking place. Copy shops were springing up all over San Francisco, [4] and access to copiers made it possible to create inexpensive art of unique imagery. Multiple prints of assemblage and collage meant artists could share work more freely. Print on demand meant making books and magazines at the corner copy shop without censorship and with only a small outlay of funds. Comic book artists could quickly use parts of their work over and over.
The first artists recognized to make copy art are Charles Arnold, Jr., and Wallace Berman. Charles Arnold, Jr., an instructor at Rochester Institute of Technology, made the first photocopies with artistic intent in 1961 using a large Xerox camera on an experimental basis. Berman, called the "father" of assemblage art, would use a Verifax photocopy machine (Kodak) to make copies of the images, which he would often juxtapose in a grid format. [5] Berman was influenced by his San Francisco Beat circle and by Surrealism, Dada, and the Kabbalah. Sonia Landy Sheridan began teaching the first course in the use of copiers at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1970. [6]
In the 1960s and 1970s, Esta Nesbitt was one of the earliest artists experimenting with xerox art. [7] She invented three xerography techniques, named transcapsa, photo-transcapsa, and chromacapsa. [7] Nesbitt worked closely with Anibal Ambert and Merle English at Xerox Corporation, and the company sponsored her art research from 1970 until 1972. [8]
Seth Siegelaub and Jack Wendler made Untitled (Xerox Book) with artists Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Lawrence Weiner in 1968. [9] [10]
Copy artists' dependence upon the same machines does not mean that they share a common style or aesthetic. Artists as various as Ian Burn (a conceptual/process artist who made another Xerox Book in 1968), [11] Laurie-Rae Chamberlain (a punk-inspired colour Xeroxer exhibiting in the mid 1970s) and Helen Chadwick (a feminist artist using her own body as subject matter in the 1980s) have employed photocopiers for very different purposes.
Other artists who have made significant use of the machines include: Carol Key, Sarah Willis, Joseph D. Harris, Tyler Moore, the Copyart Collective of Camden, as well as:
in continental Europe
in the UK
in Brazil
in Canada
in the US
In the mid-1970s Pati Hill did art experiments with an IBM copier. [17] [18] Hill's resulting xerox artwork was exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among other venues in Europe and the US. [19]
San Francisco had an active Xerox arts scene that started in 1976 at the LaMamelle gallery with the All Xerox exhibit and in 1980 the International Copy Art Exhibition, [20] curated and organized by Ginny Lloyd, was also held at LaMamelle gallery. [21] The exhibition traveled to San Jose, California, and Japan. Lloyd also made the first copy art billboard (the first of three) with a grant from Eyes and Ears Foundation.
A gallery named Studio 718 moved into the Beat poet area of San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. It shared space in part with Postcard Palace, where several copy artists sold postcard editions; the space also housed a Xerox 6500. At around the same time color copy calendars produced in multiple editions made by Barbara Cushman sold at her store and gallery, A Fine Hand.
In the 1980, Marilyn McCray curated the Electroworks Exhibit held at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House. [22] On view at the Cooper Hewitt were more than 250 examples of prints, limited-edition books, graphics, animation, textiles, and 3-D pieces produced by artists and designers.
Galeria Motivation of Montreal, Canada, held an exhibit of copy art in 1981. [23] PostMachina, an exhibit in Bologna, Italy, held in 1984, featured copy art works. [24]
In May 1987, artist and curator George Muhleck wrote in Stuttgart about the international exhibition "Medium: Photocopie" that it inquired into "new artistic ways of handling photocopy." [25] The book which accompanied the exhibition was sponsored mainly by the Goethe Institut of Montreal, with additional support from the Ministere des Affaires Culturelles du Quebec.
The complete collection I.S.C.A. Quarterlies is housed at the Jaffe Book Arts Collection of the Special Collections of the Wimberly Library at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida. [2] The collection began in 1989 with several volumes donated by the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book, in Fort Lauderdale, FL. The Jaffe hosted an exhibition in 2010 of copy art by Ginny Lloyd, showcasing her works and copy art collection. [26] She lectures and teaches workshops at the Jaffe on copy art history and techniques. She previously taught the workshop in 1981 at Academie Aki, Other Books and So Archive, and Jan Van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands; Image Resource Center in Cleveland [27] and University of California - Berkeley.
In 2017–2018, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York presented Experiments in Electrostatics: Photocopy Art from the Whitney’s Collection, 1966–1986, organized by curatorial fellow Michelle Donnelly. [28]
Copiers add to the arts, as can be seen by surrealist Jan Hathaway's combining color xerography with other media, Carol Heifetz Neiman's layering prismacolor pencil through successive runs of a color photocopy process (1988-1990), or R.L. Gibson's use of large scale xerography such as in Psychomachia (2010).
In 1991, independent filmmaker Chel White completed a 4-minute animated film titled "Choreography for Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha)". All of the film's images were created solely by using the unique photographic capabilities of a Sharp mono-colour photocopier to generate sequential pictures of hands, faces, and other body parts. Layered colors were created by shooting the animation through photographic gels. The film achieves a dream-like aesthetic with elements of the sensual and the absurd. [29] The Berlin International Film Festival describes it as "a swinging essay about physiognomy in the age of photo-mechanical reproduction. [30] The Austin Film Society dubs it, "Doubtlessly the best copy machine art with delightfully rhythmic sequences of images, all to a cha-cha-cha beat." [31] The film screened in a special program at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, [32] and was awarded Best Animated Short Film at the 1992 Ann Arbor Film Festival. [33]
Manufacturers of the machines are an obvious source of funding for artistic experimentation with copiers and such companies as Rank, Xerox, Canon and Selex have been willing to lend machines, sponsor shows and pay for artists-in-residence programs. [34]
Xerox Holdings Corporation is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, though it is incorporated in New York with its largest population of employees based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.
An artistamp or artist's stamp is a postage stamp-like art form used to depict or commemorate any subject its creator chooses. Artistamps are a form of Cinderella stamps in that they are not valid for postage, but they differ from forgeries or bogus Illegal stamps in that typically the creator has no intent to defraud postal authorities or stamp collectors.
Mail art, also known as postal art and correspondence art, is an artistic movement centered on sending small-scale works through the postal service. It developed out of what eventually became Ray Johnson's New York Correspondence School and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s. It has since developed into a global, ongoing movement.
Chester Floyd Carlson was an American physicist, inventor, and patent attorney born in Seattle, Washington.
Xerography is a dry photocopying technique. Originally called electrophotography, it was renamed xerography—from the Greek roots ξηρόςxeros, meaning "dry" and -γραφία-graphia, meaning "writing"—to emphasize that unlike reproduction techniques then in use such as cyanotype, the process of xerography used no liquid chemicals.
The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early projection photocopier created in the decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was originally a trademark of the company, became genericized, and was often used to refer to similar machines produced by the RetinalGraph Company or to any copy made by any such machine.
Scanography, more commonly referred to as scanner photography, is the process of capturing digitized images of objects for the purpose of creating printable art using a flatbed "photo" scanner with a CCD array capturing device. Fine art scanography differs from traditional document scanning by using atypical objects, often three-dimensional, as well as from photography, due to the nature of the scanner's operation.
A photocopier is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process that uses electrostatic charges on a light-sensitive photoreceptor to first attract and then transfer toner particles onto paper in the form of an image. The toner is then fused onto the paper using heat, pressure, or a combination of both. Copiers can also use other technologies, such as inkjet, but xerography is standard for office copying.
Robert W. Gundlach was an American physicist. He is most noted for his prolific contributions to the field of xerography, specifically the development of the modern photocopier. Gundlach helped transform the Haloid Company, a small photographic firm, into the thriving Xerox Corporation. Over the course of his 42-year career with the company, he contributed over 155 patents, making photocopying technology more affordable and practical. In 1966 Gundlach was named Xerox's first Research Fellow, the highest non-managerial that could be achieved by a Xerox scientist. After his retirement in 1995, he was granted several patents associated with his hobbies, including a snow-making system and a special backpack.
Sarah Jeanette Jackson, was an American-Canadian artist. Jackson first became known for her sculptures and drawings, and then for her photocopy and digital art. She was an early user of the photocopier to make art, and used this practice to embrace mail art.
Louise Odes Neaderland was an American photographer, printmaker, book artist and founder of the International Society of Copier Artists (I.S.C.A.) and the I.S.C.A. Quarterly, a collaborative mail, book art, and copy art publication. She was the organizer of ISCAGRAPHICS, a traveling exhibition of xerographic art.
Choreography for Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha) is a four-minute experimental animation film by independent filmmaker Chel White.
Pati Hill was an American writer and photocopy artist known for her observational style of prose and her work with the IBM photocopier. While she was not the first artist to experiment with the copier, her work is distinguished by its focus on objects, her emphasis on the accessibility of the medium, and her efforts to unite image and text so that they may "fuse to become something other than either."
Ginny Lloyd is an American artist, noted for her work with mail art, photocopy art, performance art and photography. She organized the Copy Art Exhibition in San Francisco in 1980 with programming devoted to promoting xerography. Her work was included in the exhibition, From Bonnard to Baselitz: A Decade of Acquisitions by the Prints Collection 1978–1988 and listed annually since 1992 in Benezit Dictionary of Artists.
Generative Systems was a program founded by Sonia Landy Sheridan at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1969 to help integrate art with new technologies.
Klaus Urbons is a German photographer and xerography printmaker. He is a pioneer and leading figure of copy art in Germany and not only. He founded the Museum für Fotokopie, and is the author and translator of books on the history of Copy Art and photocopiers, as well as a curator and a collector.
Lesley Schiff is an American artist. She is known for her practice of using color laser printers to create images. Her art covers subjects from worldly affairs to nature and the mystical. Many of her works are included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and Buckingham Palace.
Esther "Esta" Nesbitt, born as Esther Feuerman (1918–1975), was an American illustrator, xerox artist, filmmaker, and educator. Between the 1940s until the 1960s, Nesbitt actively led a career as a fashion illustrator for leading magazines and newspapers including Harpers Bazaar, Mademoiselle, and the New York Times Magazine. In the 1960s she began experimenting with fine art, in multidisciplines and with xerox art.
IBM Office Products Division (OPD) manufactured and sold copier equipment and supplies from 1970 till IBM withdrew from the copier market in 1988. IBM's decision to compete in this market resulted in the first commercial use of an organic photoconductor now widely used in most photocopiers. It is often held up as an example of a corporate u-turn, where a company rejects a technology and then adopts it. It showed that despite the size of IBM's sales and engineering organisations, this did not guarantee success in every market it chose to compete in. The development effort that resulted in the IBM Copier helped in the development of IBMs first laser printer, the IBM 3800.`
Laurie-Rae Chamberlain, whose name is sometimes styled as Laurie Rae Chamberlain, is a color Xerox artist and graphic designer from Great Britain best known for his work on music album, magazine, and book covers. He was active in the British art and fashion world during the mid-1970s and 1980s before falling out of public life.