Copy Machine Manifestos in Vancouver

Copy Machine Manifestos
Vancouver Art Gallery

May 12 – September 22, 2024

“The Recent History and Destruction of Lebanon,” 1983, from “The Lebanon Series,” will be on view starting May 12 at the Vancouver Art Gallery in “Copy Machine Manifestos,” curated by Branden Joseph and Drew Sawyer. In the photocopied artist’s book, Schneemann collages newspaper articles, book excerpts, and images of the bombing of Tyre and Beirut. The juxtapositions–of demographics and climate statistics, aerial views of leveled cities, firsthand accounts of chemical warfare–are gut-wrenching.

The work was intended to be read alongside “War Mop,” in which a mechanized mop repeatedly and rhythmically thumps on top of a monitor showing Schneemann’s video “Souvenir’s of Lebanon.” As Ruby Powers has written: “The mop’s tired attempts to clean up the mess of the US occupation in Lebanon become lost to the limitation of existing in different dimensions of time and space. The impossibility of this task, of finding a means of amendments for the lost civilian lives and unspeakable violence is made all the more difficult by the tool being used to do it. The mop is ineffectual, and its domestic presence is a clear indication of who is left to deal with the effects of war.”