Xerox Memory: Lindy Lee’s Photocopies

Abstract

In one of the earliest critical texts on Lindy Lee, Rex Butler allegorised the Brisbane-born artist’s use of photocopies through Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Borges’s story-cum-thought-experiment is as follows: the protagonist, Pierre Menard, pledges to write the seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote—not to adapt it, nor to mechanically copy it, but to arrive at the novel independently and fully, three centuries later. On paper, Menard is a deranged plagiarist, yet through his ‘deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution’, he produces a genuinely novel framing of the text. There is something of Menard in Lee’s fuzzy carbon copies. By borrowing from a bank of artistic ‘masters’, she untethers the historical image from its author and bestows it with new signification. But there is another story by Borges, equally pertinent to Lee’s work. ‘Funes the Memorious’ tells the tale of the extraordinary man Ireneo Funes who, after a riding injury, could remember every moment of his past in excruciating detail. Memory paralysed him. Not only did he remember every object he encountered but the quality of that object from all angles, at all times of day. He remembered his own face so accurately that he was startled by the microscopic evidence of ageing reflected in the mirror each morning. He learnt English, French, Portuguese, and Latin within days but, finding them all unsatisfactory in describing his plethora of experiences, he created his own mad language in which every memory was catalogued with an arbitrary number or word. Funes’s absolute recall of the world meant that he could not understand it. No patterns emerged in the ‘garbage heap’ of his mind, so that childhood memories were tangled with events just past, as each moment hauled him into an unfamiliar mass of sensation. In the story of Funes we find a strange but irrefutable lesson: that to make sense of the past, we must, at some level, forget it. In the late 1980s, Lee began a long series of appropriative works using the Xerox photocopier, which was to become her signature medium during the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time Lee also applied black wax onto brightly painted canvases: carving out the outlines of historical artworks from the dark, viscous substance. Cousins of the Xerox works and equally arresting, these two-tonal canvases are, sadly, outside the scope of this essay. In subsequent decades, the artist