Commentaries on Bob Cobbing - The Argotist Online

The Destruction in Art volume recently published by Writers Forum will give some indication of
this, where some of the manipulations are quite visible in their effects.
The stencil could be reversed, so that the typing ran backwards. The wet stencil could be removed
and used to monotype a sheet of paper, so that the reversal was combined with a mode of
negativity, black on white. The stencils were not made to last; and, while that was a problem for the
person trying to print a consistently readable booklet, it was suggestive of further manipulations to
the visual poet.
He used these changing techniques to various extents from the mid-60s to the mid-80s.
As one who copied many of his techniques, to see which were useful to me, I can tell you
authoritatively how much control there is available in using a wet stencil to monotype a sheet of
paper. He certainly painted with them; and, if he got more than he wanted or what he wanted
spread across several sheets, then he collaged them and made an electro-stencil of the result.
The electro-stencil machine introduced its own variations; and after a while he got to know those
variations and anticipated them, though the machine was always able to surprise him.
Thus, a great deal of what Bob did was to use found material even if he had to put it there to find
it.
What the mimeo does and the copier doesn’t, to my knowledge, is to have the image run as if it
were paint. The ink oozes and blurs. In looking at the later Writers Forum pamphlets by Cobbing,
those produced on his photocopier, it is as well to check the first date, because often you are
looking at a photocopy of a mimeo print and the effects are not necessarily photocopy produced,
only copied. The switch to photocopying came in the mid-80s.
This is where mIEKAL aND’s comment on “xerolage” as ‘The mimeo of the 80s’ comes in. While
artists used Xerox technology increasingly, that change came about through changes that are more
socio-economic than aesthetic.
I disposed of my ink duplicator because it was messy and because I moved into a smaller space.
Bob, I believe, dropped his in a house move; and by then it was getting more difficult to get
supplies and maintenance. (Recently a colleague emailed me in some excitement saying that he
had acquired a mimeo machine and wanted to investigate it. The difficulty was he had no idea
where to get supplies.)
Cobbing had a computer quite early and did make some use of it. There are some images made
with dot matrix printers; but it seems to me that he never went very deeply into it and never got
to the point of confident abuse (from the manufacturers’ point of view) as he did with his
photocopier and duplicators. [1]
His wife, Jennifer Pike, however, had made some very fine visual work with computer printers.
Whether she would regard it as being of the same genres as Cobbing’s work is another matter, but
they did make collaborative work.