The Copy Art

 

The artist creates a work with the photocopier, just like a photographer would use a camera, a filmmaker using camera, or painter using brushes.

Copy Art? It is the antithesis of photocopying. Roughly speaking, it is the misuse of a photocopier by artists to generate a unique work of art. Yes, it’s unique!

Fast, cheap, accessible, instantaneous, democratic, more or less random, the photocopy of art (Copy Art) caused a revolution that gave birth to a new artistic movement. Adored by the FLUXUS network since 1963, he infiltrated the Avant Garde, exploding with a protesting creativity, joyful and immensely talented in the 80s-90s and bounced back into the digital world.

A brief historical flashback: the American Chester Carlson made his first "electrophotography" in 1938 and filed his patent in 1942. The first photocopier was industrialized in 1958.

 

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Museum fund

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Concrete and historical opportunity, the museum fund exists thanks to an exceptional collection collected by Jean-Claude Baudot (1). In 1978, thanks to the advice of Christian Rigal, undisputed theorist of this artistic expression, Jean-Claude began to acquire a selection of major and representative works by more than 400 artists in the world.

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To date the collection has 1600 works, from the 60s to the early 90s.
 

He exhibited a part of it in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, as part of the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the invention of the photocopier. This commemoration, which he initiated and developed, brought together more than 20 events in 7 countries.

Proof that Copy Art is in great shape!
 

Made into a major documentary, Jean-Claude Baudot managed to find in 1986, the original first copier invented by James Watt in February 1780 (patent n ° 1244).

For the first time in the world, he made it available to one hundred artists to create a work of art in front of the press and personalities from the world of art and culture. This exceptional performance was held on November 6, 2018 in Paris at the Musée des Arts Forains.

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Educational, medical and social applications:

 

Copy Art is perfectly adapted to elaborate a participative and creative museography. In the museum space, the practical use of photocopiers, assembly workshops and adaptations of typewriters, workshops of expressive achievements, accessible to the general public, the school public, disadvantaged groups, disabled audiences , allows the development of the imagination, the therapeutic developments and engages the social interaction. A museum open to experimentation constantly enriching its background and develops a international influence.

The creation of an open museum specific to Copy Art or Copy Art department integrated in a Museum of Contemporary Art or Contemporary Cultures, could initiate the perspective of a museum of creative education.

Michel Dray

 

(1) Jean-Claude Baudot

Collector, museologist, founder of the Las Vegas Museum, with BNP Paribas, in the district of the Clock in Paris (1982-1984), the Municipal Museum of Santa Claus in Canet-en-Roussillon (1986), the future Museum of the Slot Machine in Berlin, by Gauselmann (2014).