A friend of mine told me about this book awhile ago. It was a project spanning between Canada (Quebec and Ontario) and Germany that’s purpose was to create photocopy art. Below are some of the more interesting images in it. It didn’t go into much detail at all as to how these images were actually created and in turn spoke more about the actual purpose this work stood for among other genres of art.  But no matter.

I’m working on Menstrate issue two, and though I didn’t find much in the vein of ideas it was still good.

Here are a few quotes from the book. This book is from the early-eighties if I remember correctly. I like how they figured that in the near future this art form would become obsolete due to the amount of paper being wasted and in turn the shortage of trees.

QUOTES.

The photocopier permits self-impression, the production of art books that short circuit review boards and other dilatory and often disappointing procedures. It adds to the problem of copyright and “counterfeiting” that of competition which could become a boykott.

This particular case gives one pause. It is with printing, here, that the border is revealed to be hazy, porous and beckoning. As Marshall McLuhan said: “…Caxton and Gutenberg enabled all men to become readers, Xerox has enabled all men to become publishers.” (Notice in passing that we photocopy for deferred reading, in order not to have to read immediately documents that we will not read at all in more then half the cases. As if assimilation were transferable from the brain to machine. What would this mean about the electronic brain and its “memory?”)

It is more advisable not to seek a philosophical answer here.

The waste and glut of paper is such (in 1979 Xerox estimated an average of 4 000 documents per employee, almost an entire file cabinet and increasing steadily) that an end is in sight through sheer lack of paper. Paper, if there are any trees left, (it’s already hard to find tissue paper) will be liberated for artistic production.

They all have collection in common; stockpiling, inventory, a repertoire of fragments from various sources. This mania of Bidner’s evidenced by his “hyper-hoarding” of documents has taken on Kafkaesque proportions: a 2 000 sq. foot warehouse in London Ontario cannot accommodate the tonnage piled to the rafters, and overflowing into studios at Stratford and Toronto, even into a friend’s basement….

I forgot to scan this last image.  So I went back to the library and photocopied it from this book on photocopying.  It seemed appropriate.  It’s too good.  Photo-Copy Rock and Roll.  By Jurgen, of course.