I think I’ve always liked that Wolfgang Tillmans remembers his photocopying roots more than any particular photocopy image I’ve seen. But there was an interesting, early photocopy work in his Pompidou exhibition: a guy’s head printed on multiple, tiled sheets. Making it seemed more concerted than the typical photocopied work might otherwise seem. But it also stuck because Tillmans included the source photo elsewhere in the show, in a spread from a 2015 Arena HOMME+ magazine feature.
But it turns out the most unexpected photocopy content was elsewhere: in the old BPI’s copy room. Tillmans kept it intact and functioning, stocking it with things for viewers to copy. That meant laminated texts and newspapers, mostly, but no Tillmans imagery.
So I assumed the charge was to make our own Tillmanses, not copy his. I started by holding my laminated poster slightly off the glass, and leaving the lid open. As I made adjustments for a second pass, an attendant came to tell me this would use too much toner, and I needed to put the sheet flat on the glass.
And I needed to close the lid. Those were the rules. The rules were posted right there on the wall, I noted, and said nothing about either thing. He replied, well I’m here saying it, and I couldn’t disagree with that. At that moment, he broke off when he noticed a group of people starting to copy their faces. In the interim someone had started using my copier, so I yeeted myself out of the anarchy I’d contributed to. Had this been a copy room in a 6,000 sqm. Sigmar Polke exhibition, I thought, things would definitely have been set up differently.
I only realized as I was leaving that there were large, Pompidou envelopes, and a stamp. But in my hasty yeeting, I ended up stamping only my envelope, not my resulting prints. So I guess this post will have to serve as documentation for the works.
The first image, which only managed to capture my thumb, was the most visually dense of the laminated posters, which were mostly slogans. It was a French quote, unsourced but presumably Tillmans, about how Bronski Beat recorded “Smalltown Boy” 16 years after Jimi Hendrix covered “All Along the Watchtower” in 1968, and in 1998, Cher recorded “Do You Believe” 14 years after “Smalltown Boy.” I cannot find the original quote.
The three posters then acquired their important facture by spending two weeks at the bottom of a duffel bag.
Previously, related: Daphne, as photocopied by Sigmar Polke