Documentation is Aesthetic

I was in grad school in the early 90s when distrust of beauty was at its peak. Art linked to skill or hand or pleasure was derided as superficial and manipulative. Documents of performance plinked out on a manual typewriter and mimeographed on a leaky barrel became the naked truth in art.  A couple of decades past those early models, I decided to toy with the tools of documentation to see what they might yield. The first appeal of this was that a Kinko’s Cannon copier was actually a $30,000 camera I could use for a dime. The second appeal was sneaking into the 24-hour copy shop with dead fish to drop on the platen and do my worst.

Xerox-printed images of three-dimensional objects on mylar offered an uncanny lifelike quality while accentuating their lifelessness.

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