Self-Portraits and Photocopies: Anita Steckel’s Feminist Collage

Published in 1978, Copy Art: The First Complete Guide to the Copy Machine opens with the bold statement: “Welcome to the age of Copy Art. Now anyone has the potential to be an artist or designer at the push of a button.”1 Included among the book’s many examples is an illustration of Anita Steckel’s (1930–2012) photocopy work Creation Revisited (1977; fig. 1). In this aggregate image, a nude Steckel soars across Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, riding on the back of a giant bird. “Revisiting” the biblical creation story that omits the female body, Steckel simultaneously addresses that absence and puts herself in dialogue with art history. Exploring the tension between Steckel’s desire for recognition as an artist and her irreverent approach to art making encapsulated by this work, I argue for a feminist interpretation of both her techniques and choices of media, which together posed subversive challenges to the stereotypes of artistic identity with which she contended. Despite the enthusiasm of Copy Art’s authors, Steckel’s appropriation points to the fact that easy-to-use technology alone was not enough to make anyone an “artist.”