1992

I don't distinctly recall the artwork that belongs to 1992. I include the work that I have in the good faith that it was completed just before being exhibited in a show at Temple Studio in Prahran that year.

The year itself would have been something like a flat plain littered with small events. It was the first year of full-time work in a busy photocopy shop. For the first six months of this job I was so attentive and fascinated by the sight and manner of the shops customers that at any given moment I could recall with clarity everyone I had served in the past five days.

Gradually this attentive faculty was diminished until by the end of the year I could walk to work muttering like a maniac against the conviction that my life was dissolving without hope into a solution of warm shit.

According to a diary, the year can be abbreviated as follows:

• I stopped smoking early in the new year
• a stranger bought a drafting stand from me for $145
• I had dinner with my mother in February
• I undertook to swim every day
• The fact that Geoff Lowe was living at 49 George Street in Fitzroy was noted
• I was due to fly somewhere in an aeroplane at 5.35 on a Friday afternoon
• I booked a trailer for some reason
• I collected a pair of trousers from the tailor. The job cost $26
• On Tuesday the 9th of June, I gave someone $450
• I took leave in August and caught a bus to MacGregors Creek where I spent four days
• In early September I paid to have my hair cut
• An old friend arrived in Melbourne in October and stayed for 9 days
• There was a party somewhere in December

I was receiving $332.05 every week during the course of this year. In November, my bank balance had reached an astounding $2003.92.

As far as I can recall, I sold one artwork in this year and had two pieces stolen from separate exhibitions.

The A3 copies exhibited here belong to a series produced by taking a copy with an open lid and no original, from each of 27 different copiers in shops throughout the Melbourne CBD. At that time it gave me great pleasure to return to a photocopy shop as a customer with such a stupid, eccentric request. The undertaking was quite serious however and for that reason and because I think the work still has some value I reproduce the following description.

Untitled (Black)

The copier, at its most basic, is an optical scanner connected to a printing engine. This scanner, under standard conditions, sees nothing outside the A3 parameters of the copy board glass or beyond a focal range of 5-10mm from its surface.

For this work, one A3 photocopy was taken from each of twenty-seven different photocopy machines. In each instance, the lid was left open and the copier scanned the empty space above the glass. Having no object within range to reflect the light of the scanning lamp back into the lens of the camera, the copier should ideally print a dense, uniform layer of black toner. A new or recently serviced machine may accomplish something close to this. For the average copier however, a requirement of this sort exceeds certain limits and so the subject of the work is the range of irregularities that occur as a consequence of the photocopier being unable to perfectly represent the view, through its A3 'window', of the space outside. It is within this myopic and imperfect ground that all the signs and marks of electro-mechanical anomaly that riddles the machines operation become constituted as prints. I think this is the closest one gets to taking a photocopy of the interior of a photocopy machine.

Untitled (Black) was made in response to a thematic exhibition titled 'A3' at the Temple Studio in Melbourne 1992 and is printed on 110gsm character offset paper.

Andrew Hurle