CITY PAPER PROFILE
March 24, 2006
"Text Messaging: With a photocopier and a pencil, Molly Springfield draws meaning from the printed page" by Huan Hsu
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates and a young man who might be his lover stroll through the Athenian countryside and engage in a discussion about, among other things, writing and art. Socrates describes written words as the unfortunate analogue of paintings, confinements of meaning and truth unable to answer, explain, or defend themselves. He suggests that, like pictures, books only invite misinterpretation. Text, he tells Phaedrus, is inherently inadequate.
What, then, would Socrates think of Molly Springfield? The 29-year-old Adams Morgan resident makes pictures of books, adding a layer of misinterpretation that Socrates didn’t know about: Each of her graphite-on-paper drawings is a depiction of a photocopy. There’s a passage from Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and a page from the table of contents to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. There’s an image of the opening page of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma and another of the cover of Dorothy M. Norris’ A Primer of Cataloguing.
Perhaps the cheekiest piece, They Go On Telling You Just the Same Thing Forever, is a drawing of a photocopy of a translation of Plato’s transcription of the very section of Phaedrus in which Socrates’ discourse on writing and painting appears. That’s at least four levels of obfuscation—enough, surely, to give even the most nimble-minded Sophist pause.
“I’m glad that there are different ways to approach the work,” Springfield says. “If there was just one answer, it would be much harder for me to make sure that everyone got that one answer, and it would be probably less interesting for me to make that work.”
Making the work is both intricate and painstaking. Each drawing takes Springfield about two weeks to complete. She reproduces each page by hand, precisely rendering every smudge, scratch, and photocopier-introduced distortion. She’s developed a repetitive stress injury in her right hand, and when she works, she usually wears a brace. “It’s what drives me to do these crazy, labor-intensive drawings,” she says. “That somehow through the labor I’m going to arrive at something.”
Springfield hasn’t always worked as a human photocopier. In fact, her first creative urge was to write the original text. Growing up in Tallahassee, Fla., she worked on her high school’s literary journal and penned the usual angst-ridden teenage poems. She soon realized, however, that she got not only more enjoyment out of making visual art but was also better at it. “I have this vague idea that maybe I’m working with text because deep inside I’m a frustrated writer and wish that I could write a novel or poetry or something,” she says. “But I know if I did, it would just be really bad.”
The only child of a government administrator and a teacher, Springfield says she probably gets her artistic ability from her mother, who still buys a sketchbook every now and then and fills it with drawings. As a little girl, Springfield was always asking her mom to draw paper dolls, which she would cut out and play with, walking them across a miniature high wire. Eventually, Springfield became quite skilled at drawing people herself, and at North Carolina’s Queens University of Charlotte, she concentrated mostly on figures. One of her first projects involved creating dozens of 4-inch-by-5-inch figure studies. “I’m trying to put a poetic edge on it here, but she does have an almost obsessive nature about detail,” laughs Jayne Johnson, Springfield’s painting professor at Queens.
During Springfield’s sophomore year, Johnson tasked her with drawing a piece of her mail. A few years later, when Springfield was attending Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art for a year of portfolio-polishing before applying to graduate programs, she turned again to personal correspondence as a subject, painting the letters and postcards that her friends had sent her. By 2002, her renderings of her personal correspondence had sufficiently impressed the admissions committee at the University of California, Berkeley’s MFA program for her to gain a spot in the incoming class.
Springfield’s first semester was a rude awakening. What’s the point of reproducing something in a painting when you can take a photograph of it or put the actual object on display? her classmates and teachers asked. Shouldn’t you have moved on from realism already?
(continued)
"Text Messaging: With a photocopier and a pencil, Molly Springfield draws meaning from the printed page" by Huan Hsu
In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates and a young man who might be his lover stroll through the Athenian countryside and engage in a discussion about, among other things, writing and art. Socrates describes written words as the unfortunate analogue of paintings, confinements of meaning and truth unable to answer, explain, or defend themselves. He suggests that, like pictures, books only invite misinterpretation. Text, he tells Phaedrus, is inherently inadequate.
What, then, would Socrates think of Molly Springfield? The 29-year-old Adams Morgan resident makes pictures of books, adding a layer of misinterpretation that Socrates didn’t know about: Each of her graphite-on-paper drawings is a depiction of a photocopy. There’s a passage from Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych and a page from the table of contents to Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. There’s an image of the opening page of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma and another of the cover of Dorothy M. Norris’ A Primer of Cataloguing.
Perhaps the cheekiest piece, They Go On Telling You Just the Same Thing Forever, is a drawing of a photocopy of a translation of Plato’s transcription of the very section of Phaedrus in which Socrates’ discourse on writing and painting appears. That’s at least four levels of obfuscation—enough, surely, to give even the most nimble-minded Sophist pause.
“I’m glad that there are different ways to approach the work,” Springfield says. “If there was just one answer, it would be much harder for me to make sure that everyone got that one answer, and it would be probably less interesting for me to make that work.”
Making the work is both intricate and painstaking. Each drawing takes Springfield about two weeks to complete. She reproduces each page by hand, precisely rendering every smudge, scratch, and photocopier-introduced distortion. She’s developed a repetitive stress injury in her right hand, and when she works, she usually wears a brace. “It’s what drives me to do these crazy, labor-intensive drawings,” she says. “That somehow through the labor I’m going to arrive at something.”
Springfield hasn’t always worked as a human photocopier. In fact, her first creative urge was to write the original text. Growing up in Tallahassee, Fla., she worked on her high school’s literary journal and penned the usual angst-ridden teenage poems. She soon realized, however, that she got not only more enjoyment out of making visual art but was also better at it. “I have this vague idea that maybe I’m working with text because deep inside I’m a frustrated writer and wish that I could write a novel or poetry or something,” she says. “But I know if I did, it would just be really bad.”
The only child of a government administrator and a teacher, Springfield says she probably gets her artistic ability from her mother, who still buys a sketchbook every now and then and fills it with drawings. As a little girl, Springfield was always asking her mom to draw paper dolls, which she would cut out and play with, walking them across a miniature high wire. Eventually, Springfield became quite skilled at drawing people herself, and at North Carolina’s Queens University of Charlotte, she concentrated mostly on figures. One of her first projects involved creating dozens of 4-inch-by-5-inch figure studies. “I’m trying to put a poetic edge on it here, but she does have an almost obsessive nature about detail,” laughs Jayne Johnson, Springfield’s painting professor at Queens.
During Springfield’s sophomore year, Johnson tasked her with drawing a piece of her mail. A few years later, when Springfield was attending Baltimore’s Maryland Institute College of Art for a year of portfolio-polishing before applying to graduate programs, she turned again to personal correspondence as a subject, painting the letters and postcards that her friends had sent her. By 2002, her renderings of her personal correspondence had sufficiently impressed the admissions committee at the University of California, Berkeley’s MFA program for her to gain a spot in the incoming class.
Springfield’s first semester was a rude awakening. What’s the point of reproducing something in a painting when you can take a photograph of it or put the actual object on display? her classmates and teachers asked. Shouldn’t you have moved on from realism already?
(continued)
