May 28th, 2024

Photograph by Who Designed This Garbage; Design by M/M Paris

It began somewhere. Maybe at a gray cubicle in Anytown, USA, where an office worker dulled out of their mind got an ingenious, juvenile idea. They walked to the copy room after hours, dropped their pants, and sat their bare ass onto the warm glass plate of their office’s Xerox machine. They pressed the scan button and watched, delighted, as the printer spat out a copy of their bum. It was a joke that would be filed into the canon of workplace jokes, to be replicated so many times that it would become a cliche. But at this moment, it was the best joke involving a Xerox machine ever to be thought up.

By the mid-70s, offices across America were humming with Xerox’s "519 Series" fax machines. Suddenly, the amount of information in circulation exploded, bosses couldn’t keep up with all the work on their desks. The machines offered corporations speed and ease, but they offered workers something even more radical: the ability to copy all kinds of personal things; love letters, recipes, newspaper clippings, etc, on their employer’s dime. Like other illicit activities such as stealing office supplies, or making long distance calls at work, it was a small, but meaningful opportunity for workers to grab back some of those dull hours between 9am and 5pm.

In the time it took to hit "copy," an art movement was born. The "faxlore" (or sometimes called Xeroxlore) genre was surprisingly vast. Anything created, manipulated, or reproduced by a photocopier could be considered fax art. Most common were poetry, collage, and cartoons, which were more often than not, critical of the workplace. It was art made to be pinned to your cubicle wall, adding a little levity to the grind.

Like memes, the immediacy and niche audience of this new form of communication allowed office misanthropes to express their shared experiences. And because fax art was almost always anonymous, it gave the creator the freedom to produce without fear of retribution from upper management. Unlike the time clock or conference room, there was a sense that the Xerox machine belongs to the workers, not the bosses.

The fax machine also brought the advent of spam…a lot of it. The ability to copy and transmit documents to any fax machine with a valid landline revitalized chain letters. Hoaxes, urban legends, get rich quick schemes, and magic rituals could be passed on to any number of recipients in seconds. STOP. THIS IS NO JOKE or MAKE MONEY FAST, they might begin, before instructing readers to send get well cards to a nonexistent seven-year-old cancer patient, bake a cookie recipe, or pass the letter along to twenty friends before the end of the day or be cursed with twenty years of bad luck. Whether one believed or not, it was easy enough to comply, and with each new send, the chain letter’s already faint lettering became harder and harder to read.

Meanwhile, artists outside the office began using the machines to make their own books, edit photos, assemble collages, and share their work with a vastly broader audience, which made the technology seemingly more democratic in its accessibility. Gaining a wide audience for one’s work no longer relied on gatekeepers like galleries and publishing houses. Artists like David Wojnarowicz, Kathleen Hanna, David Hockney, and Helen Chadwick, among many others, made some of their earliest work at the copy machine.

Anonymous art compiled by Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter

Faxlore provides us an archive of art that reflected the grievances of capitalism, recorded current cultural anxieties, and expressed how new technology was impacting communication and production. In 1975, folklorists Alan Dundes and Carl Pagter published Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire, an anthology of American xeroxlore they’d collected since the 1960s. This was perhaps the first effort to collect and study fax art as something more than junk. In doing so, Dundas and Pagter challenged the tenets of "folklore," which had exclusively referred to oral storytelling, and argued that the Xerox machine allowed text and image-based folklore to be shared in a contemporary way. At the same time, they urged folklorists and academics not to limit their understanding of folklore and cultural study to the past, but to consider cultural shifts, vernacular, and micro art movements that are occurring in banal places.

A YouTube channel called "Xerox Nostalgia" highlights the appearance of different models of Xerox machines in media, like the episode of "The Wonder Years" that shows a Xerox 660 copier, when the classic 914 is installed at Sterling in Mad Men, much to Joan Holloway’s chagrin, or the Xerox 4000’s role in American Horror Story S11E02.

It's a surprising affection that draws us back to the Xerox machine. Like all technology, it was always more than a piece of equipment. Just as the campfire once gave us a venue to gather, to share information, to record our stories, the copy room was a place of togetherness, where workers exchanged pleasantries, gossip, or grievances while waiting their turn to make their copies. It could also offer you a rare moment of privacy; as you stand over the warm machine and give in to that urge to place your hand on the plate glass and document yourself. ️

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