mollyspringfield

[mollyspringfield]

March 25, 1911 / March 25, 2017

Back in 2009 and 2011, I participated in FAX at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore and the Carpenter Center at Harvard University. Artists were asked to fax their work to the traveling exhibition, which could come in at any point during the show’s run. The starting point for my contribution (one of the pages I faxed is illustrated above) was the history of the fax machine, a precursor of which was something called the telautograph, invented by Elisha Gray in 1888. Here’s Gray describing what he called the “Art of Telegraphy”:

By my invention you can sit down in your office in Chicago, take a pencil in your hand, write a message to me, and as your pencil moves, a pencil here in my laboratory moves simultaneously, and form the same letters and work. 

Researching the history of telegraphy led me to various accounts of the device’s role in the tragic events of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building in lower Manhattan. On March 25, 1911, a fire originating on the eighth floor resulted in the death of 146 workers—mostly immigrant women ages 14 to 43.

When the fire broke out, Dinah Lipschitz, a bookkeeper on the eighth floor, rushed to sound the alarm to the company’s switchboard two floors up. Rather than picking up the telephone next to her, Lipschitz turned to the newly acquired office telautograph, wrote “FIRE!” and pressed a button to alert the switchboard to an incoming message.

Mary Alter was on duty at the company’s main switchboard. She heard the buzz and turned to the corresponding telautograph to wait for a message, but the pen never moved. Lipschitz made a second attempt a few precious minutes later using the telephone. Alter answered, but in her rush to alert management on the tenth floor, she neglected to connect Lipschitz to the ninth floor—telephone calls between floors could only be connected via the main switchboard. 

In 2009, I was thinking a lot about the failed promises of technology—how we sometimes overlook what gets lost when new technologies take hold—so I was particularly struck by Lipschitz putting her trust in the newer, less tested telautograph over the known reliability of the telephone.

But an artwork’s meaning can change over time, even for the person who makes it. Today, the point I draw from the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is the crucial role that health and safety regulations play in our daily lives. The tragedy gave new urgency to the country’s nascent labor movement and inspired activists like Frances Perkins to campaign for and implement workplace safety reforms.

We take for granted that the buildings we work, learn, or live in are constructed and maintained with basic health and safety standards. That should a fire break out, a reliable alarm will sound, and we can make our way to an unblocked escape route. The Asch Building’s locked doors, narrow exits, and its single, unsound fire escape are unthinkable today.

I don’t think the Asch Building owners or the Triangle Shirtwaist Company executives wished their tenants and employees bodily harm, but they didn’t provide reasonable safety standards because they didn’t have to. Regulations keep us accountable as well as safe.

When I originally faxed my research documents to FAX, I didn’t consider it political art. But we’re facing a new era of deregulation and living in a time in which the basic norms of human decency and empathy seem as ephemeral as Dinah Lipschitz’s scrawled “FIRE!” alarm.

[mollyspringfield]

Copy a Copy a Copy

A while back, my Aunt Didi sent me the photocopies she made in response to my Art Assignment. She said she didn’t need to post them online��she just wanted to let me know she had watched and enjoyed the episode–but I’ve been meaning to post them for her anyway. And now that I’m temporarily out of commission I’m finally getting around to it.

I can’t read Hebrew, so I see her second and third photocopies as abstractions. Or as something akin to the product of graphism, which Simon Morely defines in Writing on the Wall as “modes of motivated inscription not so bound to the tasks of visualizing speech or forming legible characters, but instead directed towards conveying the restless energy of the body via some normally handheld tool.” 

A lot of the responses people have posted to Copy a Copy a Copy speak to these ideas and I’ve loved seeing the different approaches people have taken. So, many thanks to Aunt Didi and everyone else out in the world who have contributed to the assignment so far.

[mollyspringfield]

New assignment!

This week we meet D.C. based artist @mollyspringfield​. Molly’s graphite drawings transform texts into images, and her assignment for you asks you to consider how repeating a process can turn a copy into an original. Here are your instructions:

1. Select a page from a book and make a photocopy of it 2. Make a photocopy of the photocopy and make changes, if you like, by enlarging, reducing, etc. 3. Repeat step #2 until the original has been transformed into a new image 4. Upload the final copy using #theartassignment (Extra credit if you make a work in a new medium) 5. Fame and flory (Your work might be in a future episode)

[mollyspringfield]

Installation view of two of my drawings currently in "I am a Lie and I am Gold" at Yossi Milo Gallery in NYC. The show is up through January 23rd and also includes great work by Frank Selby, Cynthia Lin, Arnold Helbling, Anna Plesset among others.

[mollyspringfield]

Just finished: "Under the Sign of Saturn," graphite on paper, 22 x 35 inches. The text is a Susan Sontag essay about Walter Benjamin, "Under the Sign of Saturn." It opens with some great ekphrastic passages describing photographs of Benjamin, but without reproducing the actual photographs.

[mollyspringfield]

To participate, please take the following steps

The first submission I got for The Marginalia Archive back in July of 2007 was from Janet Maher of Baltimore. At the time, I wasn’t really sure what this project would end up being. Today, the archive has 150+ contributions, and I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who took the time over the years to send in their marginalia.

I’ll be installing the archive and related drawings at Flashpoint Gallery next week. The exhibition will be up May 1-30 and l welcome and encourage contributions to the archive. If you won’t be in DC, but still want to participate you can send scans to marginaliaarchive@gmail.com. A copy of the form is here. If you are or will be in DC, you can contribute any time during the run of the show.

[mollyspringfield]

Last week I participated in Interrupt 3, a series of exhibitions, presentations, and discussions at Brown University highlighting “text and/or/as image, art and/or/as language, with a particular investment in digitally mediated language art.”

I gave a reading during a discussion session on artists’ libraries. Here’s the text:

July 9, 2007

Dear Bill,

I’m writing to invite you to participate in a project exploring the relationships readers have with texts.

With any text, there is a dialogue between text and reader and in turn, reader and author. That dialogue sometimes manifests itself through the reader’s handwritten annotation of the text. So I’m asking participants to send me photocopies of annotated texts, which I’m collecting and repurposing into a functioning archive. I may use submissions as source material for drawings.

To participate, please take the following steps:

Select a passage in a printed text on which you have made handwritten annotations. The text should have some kind of personal significance to you.

Make photocopies or scans of the pages you find the most interesting and mail or email them to me at the above address. A simple black and white copy will do.

Fill out the enclosed form, providing basic information about you and your chosen text, and return it with your copies.

I really appreciate your taking the time to read this letter. If you choose to participate, I will be sure to send you details concerning any exhibitions of the project.

Sincerely, Molly

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> July 19, 2007 > Subject: good idea

Dear Molly,

Got your notice. Good idea. How soon do you need it? Some aspect not completely clear: like, I have extensive annotations on a poem by Frank O’Hara but in order to do them I had to copy out the poem by hand and the format is 8 1/2” X 14” horizontal . . . so does that not count?

Anyway, I will do it as long as you don’t need it “tomorrow.”

Best, Bill

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> July 20, 2007 > Re: good idea

Hi Bill,

There's not a huge rush. Whenever you can get around to it is fine.  An 8 1/2 x 14 copy is fine, too.  People are sending me all kinds of different formats.

Best, Molly

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The poem “Sleeping on the Wing” I first saw in O’Hara’s 1957 book Meditations in an Emergency, which I got in Spring 1959. Over the years, this particular one grew on me, and eventually I began to see more and more in it—hence, the cursory annotations you see here, which lead to a full-scale annotative assault. Well, not exactly “led,” because the annotations here are cumulative; some occurred even after I wrote out the poem on successive sheets and made more notes for almost every word.

Bill Berkson July 21, 2007

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> August 25, 2012 > Subject: your marginalia

Hi Bill,

I recently finished a drawing based on the marginalia you contributed to my project. I thought you'd like to see it, so I'm attaching a .jpeg. It will be in an upcoming show at the University of Buffalo and at Steven Wolf in January.

It’s called Sleeping on the Wing, it's graphite on paper, and each panel is 44 x 34 inches.

Best, Molly

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> August 25, 2012 > Re: your marginalia

Dear Molly,

Wonderful. You even make my (terrible) handwriting look good.

Will you come for the show in January?

In any case, hope all is well with you & that we get to see one another soon.

Best, Bill

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> March 9, 2015 > Re: book

Dear Bill,

You’re very welcome. Maybe one day you can add that stalled Translation book to the shelf. :)

Also, I meant to tell you that my drawing of your Frank O’Hara marginalia is in a show opening this week at your not-quite-alma mater, Brown.

The show is in conjunction with a conference about the intersection of art, language, and digital media where I’m doing a short presentation.

I plan on reading a sampling of our marginalia archive-related correspondence. And, if I don’t chicken out, a poem I “wrote” appropriating language from “Sleeping on the Wing” and your marginalia. I’ll keep you posted.

Warmly, Molly

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> March 9, 2015 > Re: book

Dear Molly,

I’d love to see the poem you wrote based on “Sleeping on the Wing.” Please send it. Say hi to Faunce House or wherever your event will be.

As ever, Bill

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> March 9, 2015 > Re: book

Hi Bill,

The poem as it stands is copied below. I'll let you know how things go.

Best, Molly

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Sleep to avoid tragedy. Fly, soar away, see through to the next thought.

But there is fear. Can you believe—never—that here is where the gods are?

After great pain, a swoop. Almost every word— wing, arm, eyes, you in the plural.

[mollyspringfield]

Galerie Thomas Zander produced a limited edition leporello for This document and I couldn't be happier with it. It also includes an excellent essay by Lauren Schell Dickens.

[mollyspringfield]

Opening @furthermorellc this Saturday!

[mollyspringfield]

A5 sized drawings for special edition of upcoming catalogue.

[mollyspringfield]

I thought this drawing was finished, then I decided to add two more panels.

[mollyspringfield]

[mollyspringfield]

Commander Lowell, graphite on paper, 42 x 96 inches, 2014.

[mollyspringfield]

[mollyspringfield]

[mollyspringfield]

THE THING THE BOOK is out now! Buy it, read it, use it to prop open a window! 

[mollyspringfield]

Art=Text=Art is now at it's fourth and final venue. Check it out if you're in or will be in Buffalo. #artequalstext