A copy is a copy is a copy

I took myself to the library the other day carrying a bag of things plucked from my living room. Lindy Lee, an Australian artist with Chinese heritage, developed a practice of photocopying throughout her artmaking of the late 80s to the early 2000s that I hoped to emulate. Specifically, I wanted to find out if I might discover something about Lee’s works by copying her artistic process. At home I’d stood and stared — reading the objects for some feeling of significance —an interview I’d read said Lee would only choose to photocopy a work that she felt a strong connection with.¹ In the end, I decided on:

• A pair of old passport photos of Mum kept in a see-through magnetic photo frame. One of the photos is from before she came to Australia, the other after she arrived. I picked these up while thinking about Lee’s long history of incorporating photos of her family into her work, like in Birth and death 2003, where she presented inkjet copies of pictures of her family in Chinese accordion books, crowded and unfolding over the floor.
• A framed page from Ryan Gander and Jonathan P. Watts’ The Annotated Reader 2019, an artbook-turned-installation shown during the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2022 Art Book Fair. Numerous photocopies of each page of the reader were made and hung in stacks on the wall for visitors to take home. I had chosen a page from Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths (1962), annotated by the British artist Adam Chodzko.
• A catalogue of some Pre-Raphaelite paintings, with an image of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation) 1849–50 bookmarked — because it’s my favourite.

My preparatory reading for this experiment was a paper titled Xerox Memory: Lindy Lee’s Photocopies² in which the scholar Sophie Rose details the process Lee used to make her photocopy works. Rose describes how Lee typically took the work of a European master from an art catalogue and cropped out everything but the heads, removing their expressions and facial features from the wider story of the painting. After this act of decapitation, the copy was run through the photocopier, copied over again with the same image to accumulate layers of carbon and discrepancies between copies.

I spent the first few copies enlarging the image, trying to focus on faces like Lee had. Before I began, Mary’s body in Rossetti’s painting recoiled from Gabriel as he offered her the lily, as she squashed herself into the edge of the work. Without her characteristic cowering form, her face appears emptied out, as though in preparation for the role of vessel for the son of God. For each copy I make another copy, so that the copy’s own image can be copied onto itself, until the image becomes obscure enough. When is enough? Lee likes to lead with intuition, so I follow my gut.

In Xerox Memory, Rose considers other readings of Lee’s photocopies. One analysis by art historian Dr. Rex Butler, considers Lee’s photocopies in reference to ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’, a short story from Borges’s Labyrinths. In this short story, the narrator reviews fictional author Pierre Menard’s body of work. The greatest, he says, is Menard’s word-for-word rendering of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Despite being a copy, the narrator insists that Menard’s version is superior. Something has changed. Like Menard, Lee disrupts the context of the original work of art and transposes it within a new one, imbuing the image with new meaning.

Lee’s copies, according to Butler, remind us that the painting she’s photocopied is already a copy of a reproduction of the painting, from a library book. Additionally, Lee reminds us that our understanding of the Old Masters has occurred through the sum of their reproductions in art books, catalogues, posters and magazines. I think about Butler’s reading when copying two of my images, both from reproductions. One is already a photocopy-as-artwork, which itself features within it another copy — a reproduction of Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden c 1425. A copy is a copy is a copy.

I also think about this when looking at the photocopy of my mother’s passport photo which now looks bust-like. Mum comments — glancing over my shoulder at the photocopy — that she looks a bit like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa 1503. I see it, too, in her fine brows and rounded features and subtle smile. I’ve become so used to experiencing the Mona Lisa, Greco-Roman busts and other popular images of art as enlarged full-page prints or as high-resolution images on the internet, that even with my mother’s emphasised difference — her Asian features captured in a passport photo, the identity papers of an immigrant — her photocopy begins to attain the status of a canonical work of art with its magnified size and detail. Lee has often said that her photocopy works made her reckon with her Chinese-Australian identity — by producing what she called a ‘bad copy’³ of the Old Masters, she was identifying with a faulty image of whiteness because she, herself, felt faulty; unable to feel belonging as a Chinese person or an Australian person. Being half-Chinese myself and not immune to my own crises of identity and inauthenticity, I wonder if my photocopies, too, are ‘bad copies’ in some way.

Rose offers her own interpretation of these photocopies, drawing on a different story from Labyrinths called ‘Funes the Memorious’. The tale recounts the troubles of Funes, who survives an accident that leaves him with a perfect memory, able to recall the minutest details but so acutely precise that he is burdened with the inability to generalise. He can remember each individual leaf on a tree and each leaf’s unique colour, shape and texture, but he can no longer understand the ways in which the leaves are continuous with the rest of the plant, that they make up part of the whole. In seeing memories this way — as distinct, separate fragments — Funes also loses the ability to sort the memories of the past and present sequentially. His memory blends into one simultaneous sensation.

Rose recognises something of Funes’ preoccupation with memory and time in Lee’s work, where each layer of ink marks a particular moment in her process. A darker, more obscured image tells us that more time was taken to produce it. It occurs to me that the use of a carbon photocopier evokes the practice of carbon dating, used to identify the age of organic material. Unlike my experiments, where a single image is created, Lee made numerous photocopies and arranged them together, often in a grid. Rose argues that in this repetition, the precise moments of Lee’s process are revealed through the images’ undulating gradients. In these works, such as Untitled (After Titian) 1990, we can see the ‘waxing and waning of recollection’⁴, with memories coming to light with the brightest photocopy, and then fading back into the darkness with the most obscured copy — memories retreating into the depths of the mind.

It feels almost miraculous when I discover that the page from Labyrinths that I had chosen to photocopy was from ‘Funes the Memorious’. After churning it through the copier, the story becomes reduced from narrative to just words: layers on layers of discontinuous fragments short-lived and poorly recalled.

Throughout my experiment, I was preoccupied with the idea of repetition in another, more physical way. During the process, the machine was alive: buzzing, purring and whirring as lights flashed. As I stood at the printer, producing copy after copy, I felt like a zombie. I was jabbing at the settings screen, clicking the start button and swiftly moving paper onto and away from the glass. And then the output was just these ghostly images, the overlapping pointillism of the copier’s pattern producing a moiré effect, shivering with noise and endlessly shifting.

I don’t know if I’m interpreting Lee’s work or my own bad copies. The lines have been blurred. I look at my photocopies and I don’t see my hand; I see the copier’s. My own mother has been anonymised, obscuring my past and present beyond recognition. As I repeat each motion, I feel focus as thoughts slip away. I’m no longer a body and mind, but an extension of the copier, its mechanical arms. Did these repetitive, meditative acts lead Lee to oblivion, or transcendence? I look at the inky black of her copies and mine, and I see shadows, echoes of existence, the void itself.

This story is part of the 2024 Young Writers Digital Residency.

Claire-Osborn Li was a Guest Editor of Hyphen, Artlink’s Warltati / Summer issue 44:3, 2024. Read the Guest Editor’s editorial or visit Artlink.