Consumed by Play: The Politics of the Transformable Work of Art

Ágnes Berecz “Why is anyone interested in distributing a thing as widely as possible?” asked Joseph Beuys in 1970.1 Although undoubtedly rhetorical and naive, the question points well beyond the realm of art and suggests that the socioeconomic condi- tions governing the distribution of consumer goods in postwar Western Europe were no longer clearly distinguishable from the processes that characterized the dissemination of artworks. Inherently connected to modernization and to its ensuing consequences in the field of everyday life, the multiple and its history form one of the most intricate subplots in modern and contemporary art―it defies singular historical frameworks, traverses geographic territories, and calls into play diverse cultural practices and artistic media. Neither a medium nor a form or practice that can be clearly and unequivocally defined, the multiple is both a product and a symptom of the technological and eco- nomic shifts that occurred “in the years after electricity but before electronics” in Western Europe.2 Fig. 1 This essay considers Edition MAT’s transformation of postwar artistic practices―the shift from creating originals to the production of editioned and After MAT’s inaugural presentation, Spoerri issued two subsequent transformable objects―and explores how multiples defied existing modes of editions of affordable and made-to-order objects in collaboration with Karl selling and looking at artworks and attempted to fashion new consumers and Gerstner, the Basel-based artist and designer, and the Galerie Der Spiegel of spectators of contemporary art. An examination of the editioned and transform- Cologne in 1964 and 1965. In the 1964 collection the transformability and mobil- able object in the context of postwar consumer culture and technology reveals ity of animated works, a key feature of Edition MAT in 1959, was supplemented the formative role that Edition MAT played in the interdisciplinary expansion by objects and assemblages that incorporated found objects, as in the multiples of postwar art. As a collective, discursive practice, it introduced a new synthesis of Arman, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Jacques Villeglé, who, along with Spoerri, of art, technology, and design as part of an emergent transnational network of were associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a collective initiated by the critic Pierre cultural production and distribution. Restany in fall 1960 in Paris. The 1965 edition added yet another dimension to MAT’s already heterogeneous range by introducing works that utilized new CIRCULATIONmaterials and complex technological apparatuses, such as a boxed Rowlux Multiple Histories image by Roy Lichtenstein, geometric abstract metal objects by François Morellet, a mirrored construction by Julio Le Parc, and electromechanical works The postwar history of editioned objects began with Daniel Spoerri’s exhibition by Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi (fig. 1). of Edition MAT (multiplication d’art transformable) in November 1959 at Galerie By 1965, when Edition MAT’s third and final collection was published Edouard Loeb, which presented a multigenerational roster featuring both veter- in Cologne, the multiple had become an umbrella category that encompassed a ans such as Marcel Duchamp and emerging artists such as Jean Tinguely and broad array of serialized images and objects. A floating signifier of the postwar Zero group founder Heinz Mack. The works in Edition MAT were restless, trans- avant-gardes, the multiple thrived throughout the 1960s both in Europe and formable objects ranging from wall-mounted reliefs to freestanding boxes and the Americas and appeared within a diverse array of artistic movements and books that either moved and vibrated on their own or were meant to be handled practices, including kinetic art, Pop, and Fluxus. A collaborative initiative among and interacted with by their viewers. Edition MAT expanded on the historical artists who belonged to various European collectives―Nouveau Réalisme, lineage of the multiplied and transformable works that spanned from Duchamp’s Zero, Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), and Gruppo T―Edition MAT readymades and optical experiments, to Soviet Russian Productivism, to the featured a multigenerational and transnational network of artists whose nomadic industrial aesthetics of the Dessau Bauhaus,FOR linking notions of transformability, trajectories, intermedia approaches, and performative, participatory works fore- multiplication, and participation as mutually interdependent. grounded practices of global contemporary art.3

Fig. 1. Gabriele De Vecchi, Deformazione assonometria MAT (Axonometric deformation MAT), 1965. 56 57

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 56-57 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM Object World

A creative response to the mechanization of everyday life and, at the same time, a subordination, a surrender to technological society, Edition MAT eliminated the difference between artworks and mechanical toys or decorative things. Acting as engineers and technophiles and, at the same time, as bricoleurs and techno- phobes, the artists who participated in the three editions of MAT explored both high and low technology to address processes of industrial modernization and mass consumption. Some of Edition MAT’s multiples were fabricated objects that utilized typography, industrial design, and contemporary technological devices; others also incorporated and reordered existing everyday items by relying on the historical avant-garde strategy of the found object; and many of them attempted to animate their viewers by optical stimuli or by the solicitation of tactile interventions. The earliest multiples included in Spoerri’s 1959 Edition MAT were primarily either constructed objects (Yaacov Agam, Gerstner, Mack, Man Ray, and Victor Vasarely) or multipart mechanical devices relying on more complex methods of fabrication (Bo Ek, Frank J. Malina, and Tinguely). The editions of MAT included newly fabricated works such as Dieter Roth’s hand-cut books, Davide Boriani’s container of electric power–driven iron dust, Man Ray’s spiral- ing painted aluminum object made from a discarded paper lampshade, and Pol Bury’s motorized sculpture, as well as objects that adopted commercial items and everyday materials, such as Paul Talman’s movable painted Ping-Pong balls (fig. 2); Enrico Baj’s figurative assemblage of rope, textile, and metal pins; and Niki de Saint Phalle’s shooting picture with its plaster-covered pigment.

Fig. 2 The materials ranged from artistic to industrial―plaster, wood, aluminum, and acrylic―while the kinetic aspects employed motorized motion, optical vibration– based virtual kinesis, and the physical engagement of the viewer. Multiple Originals Despite the emphasis on technical aspects, some of the works included in MAT used not the means but the by-products of the postwar economy. The The rise of the multiple reflects and exemplifies the deeply controversial nature found and discarded objects in Arman’s Plexiglas-encased trash pieces, Christo’s of the relationship between art and design, the handmade original and the wrapped Look magazines, Spoerri’s decaying pieces of bread, and Tinguely’s industrial technologies of mass production. By undoing the ars and techné scrap-metal objects are not only works associated with “the poetic recycling” of dichotomy, an important feature of the modernist separation of different fields of reality―the main tenet of Nouveau Réalisme as defined by Restany―but are also practice, the multiple reconnected technics and aesthetics and undermined the examples of what Lawrence Alloway categorized as “junk culture.”6 The repur- autonomy of the artwork and the artist as its author. posed Nouveau Réaliste “junk” objects suggested a continuity with works that The multiples in Edition MAT were transformable commodities and mul- utilized the metaphoric capacity of the outmoded and the debris of everyday life tiplied works of art or, as Gerstner referred to them, “originals in series” or “series and thus also evoked the objects of and the dusty poetics of the fetishistic of originals.”4 By offering a novel understanding of originality without fully eradi- “dream kitsch” relics of as theorized by Walter Benjamin.7 cating the notion of the original, Gerstner’s concept suggests that in Edition MAT CIRCULATION If the mechanized constructions and design-conscious technical objects the original was confined no longer to a singular object but to its design. Since of MAT were examples of the rise of postwar technological society and its the work was variable, kinetic, or otherwise transformable, it was able to generate consumer goods, the works that utilized the detritus of the everyday emphasized multiple and always different originals without structural stability or permanence, the entropic drives of the consumer culture industry. While the technical objects containing, as Gerstner stated, “an intrinsic set of multiple possibilities.”5 Whether of Edition MAT, in line with the dominant practices of consumer society, valo- transformable by motion or meant to be handled and thus transformed by the rized technology and novelty, those that relied on the old and the used not only viewer, the multiple was open for permutation and change and thereby resisted resisted prevalent patterns of consumption but also defied, even sabotaged, the the idea of the work as a self-contained and identical entity. production of new work. Recycling both consumer goods and the avant-garde The refabrication of the object, the material remake of the work, only strategy of the found object and utilizing the debris of life in an often de-skilled further enhanced this inherent fluidity through the process of serialized mate- manner, the works of MAT’s Nouveau Réaliste participants―Arman, Tinguely, rial manifestations. “Originals in series” also relates to the multiple’s extended Saint Phalle, and Spoerri himself―broke down the chain of production and con- fabrication process, which guaranteed that the material features of the object sumption and, by appropriating junk, offered an archaeology of the present. can always be made anew. The serialized objects in Edition MAT thus reinvented Whether they were new or dusty, made of acrylic or pieces of stale bread, the work of art outside the taxonomy of fineFOR art and within the context of the new the objects of Edition MAT had a performative capacity to prompt participation. commodities and industrial aesthetic of the postwar economy. Some of them solicited spectators to push buttons, pull triggers, lift handles, and

Berecz Fig. 2. Paul Talman, Objekt (Object) or Kugelbild (Ball image), 1964. 58 59

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 58-59 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM touch wood; some subjected viewers to optical vibration, mirrored reflections of Edition MAT prompted encounters with works that proposed new rotating disks, and moiré effects; some simply called on people to observe the spectatorial regimes of fine art―they mobilized and activated their viewers by process of decay. By departing from the solitary contemplation that tradition- soliciting them to become doers, collaborators, and playmates of the artist. As ally characterizes the encounter between viewer and artwork, the participatory Eco stated, the poetics of the “work in movement”―of participation and ludic objects in MAT proposed a practice of corporeal and multisensory vision that engagement, the fundamental aspects of his understanding of the open work as opposed disembodied experiences of modern spectators. well as, by inference, of the majority of objects in Edition MAT―sets in motion a Like the assemblage, the multiple, according to the art historian William whole new “cycle of relations”: “It opens a new page in sociology and pedagogy, Seitz, was also a “reconquest” of “the realism that replaced.”8 The as well as a new chapter in the history of art. It poses new practical problems by open-ended invitation to engage with the object―to touch the work of art or organizing new communicative situations. In short, it installs a new relationship to cope with the retinal shock it provoked―countered the alienating effects of between the contemplation and the utilization of a work of art.”11 A systematic mechanized life and modern technology. The grid-shaped aluminum strips in transformation of both objects and subjects, materials and experiences, Edition Lichtrelief of 1959 (fig. 3)―a stela-like construction by Mack—and the layered MAT sought, as Gerstner suggested in 1955, "to make the observer an active wire-mesh grids in Morellet’s untitled multiple of 1965 both create light and participant in the work’s design, to make him more than merely contemplative.”12 shadow effects that disorder the clarity of their geometric structures, cloud the By turning looking and contemplation into a collaborative and participatory act, viewer’s vision, and play perceptual games on their beholders. Other works MAT echoed Duchamp’s oft-quoted statement―“It is the onlookers who make surprise their spectators with a variety of mechanized movement: Tinguely’s the pictures.”13 By incorporating the mechanized and the kinetic, the multiples Constante indéterminée (Indeterminate constant), a 1959 motorized sheet-metal aimed to overcome the regime of the image, which, as Fredric Jameson later sculpture, is set in motion with sudden shifts and sustained vibrations, while argued, was “the ultimate form of commodity reification in contemporary con- Bury’s wall-mounted and motorized perforated metal panel from 1959 features sumer society.”14 Making editioned and fabricated objects was an overt refusal slow, oscillating movement. In addition to artworks that generate optical and of image culture that also included the rejection of painting, a privileged medium perceptual effects or operate as mechanical and kinetic structures, all MAT of modernity and the most obviously institutionalized practice of Western art. Fig. 3 editions included objects that solicited the viewer’s touch, thus contravening their technological aspects. Talman’s painted black-and-white Ping-Pong balls can be turned inside a gridded framework to form different configurations of Market Conditions geometric patterns, while Dieter Roth’s Book AA offers an even more engaged form of participation by inviting the viewer to rearrange the pages of his boxed The editioned and manufactured object’s resistance to the image and the set of black and white sheets of card stock that, via their hand-cut slots, can be institution of painting was closely connected to its challenge of the market and recomposed in multiple variations. distribution system of contemporary art. Despite the multiple’s critically informed By triggering unusual optical sensations and encouraging direct approach to the business of art, the first exhibition of Spoerri’s unorthodox enter- physical contact with the artworks whose outcome was not predictable, let prise at Galerie Edouard Loeb was a moderate commercial success.15 Edition alone quantifiable, the multiple antagonized those conditions that Jacques Ellul, MAT’s initial presentation took place during the exceptionally prosperous phase writing in the early 1950s in France, articulated as an experience of dissocia- of the Paris art market, which was generated by what Raymonde Moulin famously tion: “Today the human being is dissociated from the essence of life; instead of called the decade of pictomanie, a triumph of abstract painting.16 Whether cold living time, he is split up and parceled out by it.”9 By transforming the perception or hot―that is, geometric or lyrical—abstraction sold well in Paris and created a of the artwork into an unusual sensation or an indeterminate set of actions, market euphoria; contemporary paintings became highly sought-after commodi- the participatory object simultaneously sabotaged the cult of productivity and ties, generating a climate that also favored other mediums, including the promo- alleviated the estrangement of social relations brought about by the postwar tion and sale of editioned and manufactured objects.17 As he wrote to Dieter Roth modernization process that, paradoxically enough, made Edition MAT possible. in the summer of 1959, Spoerri’s interest in introducing a new type of work and The participatory object thus appeared as a redemptive device, a technically an unconventional sales structure to the art market was motivated by frustration: informed apparatus seeking to remedy the evils of mechanization and providing CIRCULATION“The art business with its commercial ambitions bothers me, and I'm not the type temporary relief from the discontents of civilization. to sit around in a gallery all month until someone finally buys something for two thousand marks.”18 And indeed he did many things, but sitting around in a gallery was certainly not one of them. He assembled the edition; published its catalog, Multiple Mediums which contained blatantly commercial removable order slips; and organized a series of traveling exhibitions after the first in Paris—in ; London; Newcastle, The assemblages, kinetic apparatuses, interactive objects, and ludic devices of England; Stockholm; Krefeld, Germany; and Zurich—to market the multiple as a Edition MAT were joined by their collective refusal to engage with the image, the new type of work and to secure the finances for its continued production. two-dimensional artifact meant solely to be looked at―be it a painting, a print, MAT not only aimed to transform artistic labor and production pro- or a photograph. The multiple, the ultimate “open work,” as defined by Umberto cesses, it also shifted the work’s market and distribution system and redefined Eco in 1962, not only transformed how artworks could be conceived, made, and the artist’s role as a manager or entrepreneur. By launching MAT, Spoerri―who remade but also shifted the role of artists, dealers, and fabricators as well as the had already worked in dance, theater, concrete poetry, and in fine art, as well as distribution and presentation system of the artwork.10 These institutional changes in publishing as the editor of material (1958–60)―became an art manager, a were complemented by the capacity of the FORfabricated object to generate virtual curator, and a producer and promoter of art. A “wanderer between worlds” who or actual motion that also occasioned temporal and durational changes. was “at home everywhere and nowhere, both in term of place of residence and

Berecz Fig. 3. Heinz Mack, Lichtrelief (Light relief), 1959. 60 61

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 60-61 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM artistic discipline,” Spoerri, in his newfound role and agility at moving from place to place across Europe, as well as among different tasks and responsibilities, evokes the multifaceted and nomadic trajectory of Duchamp.19 His career also points to the postwar emergence of a managerial consciousness that combined art, business, and administration, as seen in the otherwise disparate activities of such figures as Restany and the Lithuanian-born American artist, graphic designer, and Fluxus founder George Maciunas. Spoerri, however, was not entirely comfortable in the role of cultural promoter, producer, and art administrator, and after the last exhibition of the first Edition MAT, in 1960 at the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich, he decided Henri Dauman by Photograph to suspend the project: “I'm going to stop working on Edition MAT for a while. I don't want to turn into a traveling salesman.”20 His reluctance to continue to play the market and, at the same time, undermine it turned out to be a timely decision. The market boom of postwar Paris that had made it possible for Edition MAT in 1959 to reach a limited success was nearing its end by 1962, in the wake of the Wall Street crash known as the Kennedy Slide.

Made in Cologne

Fig. 4 When in 1963 Karl Gerstner approached Spoerri and proposed a relaunch of MAT, it became clear that support for the edition and fabrication of multiplied After the second Cologne edition, Spoerri and Gerstner abandoned objects could not be found in France. By forming a strategic alliance with the the project, and Spoerri transferred MAT’s exclusive rights to Stünke for a mere Cologne gallerist Hein Stünke, the two artists could relieve themselves of 2,000 deutsche marks.26 The relatively large edition of the objects (one hun- the assiduous task of object production, and they transferred the collection’s dred) and the diversity of the participating artists and their works presented a promotion and administration to Stünke. As Spoerri’s letter to Sibylle Spalinger challenge for collectors and made MAT’s marketing and sales a rather difficult indicates―“this collection will become, like all others, very expensive and what enterprise. In spite of its troubled life, Edition MAT achieved some commercial I wanted will be lost"21―he was clearly aware of the inevitability of market forces, success, its exhibitions generated considerable media attention, and as the as was Gerstner. The latter, through his work in advertising, design, and typog- primary project and model enterprise to produce and market editioned artworks raphy, was deeply familiar with the economic conditions that governed the and objects, it shaped the rise of the multiple, which, by the end of the decade, production and circulation of both ideas and artifacts. became a fashionable new phenomenon. As Jeanne Vilardebo wrote in 1968 The involvement of Stünke and his Galerie Der Spiegel shifted the place in Connaissance des Arts, “during the past six months, the word ’multiple’ has of MAT’s production to Germany, a country that, despite the Wirtschaftswunder appeared on every page of this journal, on the invitations and posters of many of Konrad Adenauer’s social market economy, struggled with a sluggish art exhibitions, as well as on the radio and on television―in brief, it multiplies.”27 market that had also been weakened by the ascendancy of US artists and dealers.22 While Stünke followed the operational method of the first edition and, instead of prefabricating the objects, manufactured them according to demand, On the Move the 1964 and 1965 MAT collections departed from Spoerri’s initial project in several regards. The unified prices of the first edition―which, at 20,000 old The multiplication of the multiple as a new artistic category in the second half French francs, leveled the value of each object regardless of the status of its CIRCULATIONof the 1960s was facilitated not only by the novel production and business maker, material composition, and size―were replaced by individual prices that strategies that Edition MAT introduced but also by the physical and geographic reflected the market value of each of the participating artists.23 Similar to MAT’s mobility of Spoerri and Gerstner’s project. The multiple’s journey from Edouard first collection, the 1964 and 1965 Cologne editions featured an international Loeb’s Paris gallery, where it appeared as a new form of art that challenged the roster of artists and were shown at the Milan gallery of Arturo Schwarz, who, in conventional value system of the market, to German, Swiss, British, and US addition to working on Duchamp’s replicas, had an already established pro- galleries and museums, where it became an object to be looked at and acquired, fessional nexus with Spoerri. Later editions were also presented in Frankfurt, was a crucial instance of traveling art practices and theories. Zurich, and Paris, as well as in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art’s Art Edition MAT’s nomadism was also a reflection of the project’s engage- Lending Service gallery.24 The rise of in New York following Sidney ment with the notion of transformability. The multiple’s historical trajectory Janis’s New Realisms exhibition in December 1962, the introduction of French already demonstrated how fluid its practice was, but it seems that MAT itself practitioners to the New York scene, and the overt acknowledgment of the was a manifestation of different forms and senses of transformation. The artwork as a commodity―as reflected in the Bianchini Gallery’s exhibition The collection varied from edition to edition, incorporated a diverse roster of artists, American Supermarket in fall 1964 (fig. 4)―propelled the global production of and its exhibition venues changed from one city to another. MAT was a roving multiples, arguably also contributing to theFOR new market and display strategies enterprise marked by formal and conceptual mobility that also mirrored the that characterized MAT’s later editions.25 in-between, transitional existence of its main protagonists.

Fig. 4. The American Supermarket, installation view, Bianchini Gallery, New York, 1964. Reproduced in “You Think This Is a Berecz Supermarket?,” Life, November 20, 1964. 62 63

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 62-63 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM Touch and Play society whose consumers were subjected to positions that were, as Rebecca Pulju has argued, “at once empowering and infantilizing.”36 The mobility of Edition MAT as a collaborative project is clearly mirrored in The ludic nature of the editioned object, combined with its relatively its movable and interactive objects. By inviting the audience to play and low price, guaranteed that the work could reach viewers, users, and consumers interact with the manufactured objects, the artists of MAT appeared to answer beyond the limits of the art world. This popular appeal and accessibility also Henri Lefebvre’s question in the affirmative: “Could play be the starting point warranted an understanding of the editioned and participatory object as an from which we could envisage the metamorphosis of the everyday?”28 instrument of democratization. Akin to Restany, who praised Edition MAT for its Restany’s reading of MAT “as a social phenomenon” recognized and to some alleged sociopolitical engagement, Frank Popper―a curator, writer, and vocal extent also overstated the interactive multiple’s socially engaged nature and supporter of kinetic and participatory practices―also considered the multiplied, critical potential. interactive object as a model of political participation and agency.37 Like Restany, The practice of play promised to function as a device to resist the Popper, and Eco, Gerstner understood the multiple as a political act and manifes- command of mechanization and counteract functionalism, and by turning the tation. As he stated in 1964 in his text on kinetic art and editioned objects for the spectator into an emancipated homo ludens, it modeled ludic activity as creative Nouvelle Tendance exhibition in Paris, “Our art is everyday art, so much so that education. Many of the multiples in Edition MAT were designed to enchant some of us would wish to qualify it as socialist. It is any rate, social.”38 and educate their users and were geared toward disrupting the regulated and Some of them may have functioned as toys and gadgets, but MAT’s monotonous urban life famously described by Lefebvre as “the bureaucratic editioned and participatory objects did not always offer creative engagement, society of controlled consumption.”29 Roth’s Stempelkasten (Rubber stamp box, relaxation, or delight. Saint Phalle’s Shoot-it-yourself-picture―a satirical take 1968), for example, invited viewers to produce drawings with a preexisting set on the do-it-yourself culture of postwar consumerism and a commentary on the of rubber stamps supplied by the artist, thus proposing both a creative exer- French military aggression in Algeria―is exemplary in its transgressive merger cise and an amusement. I was telling Marianne (1965)―a board game without of collective fun and violence (fig. 5). Other works brought into play what Jesús established rules or sense, by the French artist and Fluxus associate Robert Rafael Soto called the “œil moteur,” unstable optical effects that resulted from Filliou―was an invitation to invent a game and fashion a social activity based on the experience of mobility. The visual noise and chromatic vibration triggered the imagination of its participants. by the object transformed perception into a chaotic and perplexing experience, By joining creative impulses with forms of entertainment to resist the into a form of sensorial aggression. As Morellet stated when speaking about technocratic regimes of contemporary society, with its programmed choices and the assault on the eye produced by works such as his Random Distribution of consumer preferences, the multiple offered its users a joyful release. The participa- 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory tory objects provided a distraction from and an awareness of the everyday experi- (1960), a painting featuring a tightly woven grid of red and blue squares that ence of economic, political, and social control without any measurable output, thus decenter the pictorial and optical field and blind their spectator with their also disrupting the demands of efficiency and productivity in everyday life. haphazardly ordered chromatic oscillation―“I like that kind of aggression.”39 If play, as Lefebvre suggested, can indeed initiate an imaginable trans- Morellet’s statement resonates with the phrase “bourreaux de la rétine,” which formation of the everyday, then referring to the multiples as toys, ornaments, and Jean Clay introduced in a text on Vasarely to account for the violence of optical as Max Kozloff wrote in 1965, “visual condiments,” is not necessarily a judgment sensations present in his and his followers’ works.40 against them.30 In Spoerri’s and Roth’s correspondence, multiplied objects are often referred to as a Spielsachenserie, a series of playthings.31 Playthings, however, can be also considered as toys or gadgets, as Denise René stated somewhat wearily in 1959 when approached by Spoerri to exhibit MAT’s first edition in her Paris gallery.32 René’s reluctance to support MAT suggests that gadgets were neither serious nor precious enough to be taken for works of art. In a similar vein, René Block, the Berlin publisher of Fluxus objects and of Beuys’s multiples, suggested that editioned objects "are more like CIRCULATION decoration pieces cut to order for the homo ludens in us, straddling the border of the gag item industry.”33 Others, like the literary critic and journalist Heinrich Vormweg, took the multiples of Edition MAT for “games for adults―poetic, paradoxical, enjoyable games . . . whose artifice tickles and delights.”34 The German philosopher Eugen Fink―who introduced the term Spielsachenserie in his 1957 book about the ontology of play―considered play “a strange oasis, an enchanted rest-spot” that, by suspending the temporal sequence of everyday existence, “affords a type of temporal present” and “interrupts the continuity and purposive structure of our lives.”35 Whether it was considered a vulgar commodity of consumer-oriented technology meant to distract or believed to be an emancipatory, creative tool, the multiple overcame generational divides and was intended for both children and adults. The serialized artworks of EditionFOR MAT were duplicitous toys, and as such they differed not a bit from other commodities of postwar European mass Fig. 5

Fig. 5. Edgar Nash, president of the Minneapolis Collectors Club, aiming at Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shoot-it-yourself-picture, Berecz Walker Art Center, March 1966. Photograph by Duane Braley, Minneapolis Star Tribune. 64 65

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 64-65 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM Private Gadgets Notes 20. Spoerri, quoted in Vatsella, Edition MAT, 73. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 62. 1. Jörg Schellmann and Bernd Klüser, “Questions to Joseph 21. Ibid., 48. 42. Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), Beuys, Part I, December 1970,” in Joseph Beuys, Catalogue 22. Hein Stünke’s entrepreneurial spirit and ambition trans. Helen Lane (New York: Grove, 1967). Playing, touching, and shooting are not activities well-suited for public spaces, Raisonné of Multiples and Prints, 1965–1985, ed. Jörg resulted in his launch of Kunstmarkt Köln, which he 43. Karl Gerstner, “Kunst, massen- und massgefertigt,” Schellmann (New York: Schellmann, 1985), unpaged. founded in 1967 with fellow gallerist Rudolf Zwirner. This Schweizer Spiegel 6 (1968), quoted in Vatsella, Edition 41 especially for museums designed for the “somber pleasure of retrospection.” 2. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization event, which later morphed into the Cologne Art Fair, aimed MAT, 125. No wonder that the objects of Edition MAT were often meant to exist in domes- and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: to remedy the stagnant German art market and compen- 44. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Crisis of Modern Society,” MIT Press, 1995), 2. sate for the dominance of New York artists and galleries. in Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, 1961–1979— tic places. Like Madame Arpel’s mechanized suburban household in Jacques 3. On the rise of the multiple within Fluxus and Nouveau 23. For a detailed account of the financial operations and Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Tati’s Mon oncle (1958; fig. 6) or the armchairs and curtains Jerôme and Sylvie Réalisme, see Liz Kotz, “Object, Action and Ephemera,” pricing of Edition MAT, see Vatsella, Edition MAT, 42–43, Autonomous Society, trans. and ed. David Ames Curtis in Concept Action Language: Pop-art, Fluxus, Nouveau 90–92. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 115. longed for in Georges Perec’s Things (1965), they needed to be displayed as Realism, Arte Povera in the Mumok Collection, Vienna, 24. As Julia Robinson suggests, Schwarz’s fabrication and 45. As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh described in relation to possessions, to be used and amused or consumed by.42 As Gerstner stated ed. Achim Hochdorfer and Wilfried Kuhn (Cologne: edition of the Duchamp replicas were quite possibly stim- Fluxus editions, “because of their insistence on a non- König, 2010), 39–49, and Julia Robinson, “Multiple ulated by Spoerri’s first issue of Edition MAT. Robinson, mediated experience of playful particularity these acts of in a 1968 journal article he wrote about multiplied images, “The work that is Manifestations: Nouveau Réalisme and Fluxus,” in The “Multiple Manifestations,” 9. The American presence of liberation became extremely privatized and the objects designed as a participatory object is intended for private ownership. As a public Small Utopia: Ars Multiplicata, ed. Germano Celant (Venice: Spoerri’s project was also secured by the New York gallery defined programmatically outside the parameters of the Fondazione Prada, 2012), 137–49. A collaboration between Multiples Inc., run by Marian Goodman, and by the exhibi- culture industry reintroduced reification by turning inescap- work of art displayed in a museum, it would have little value since it’s next to MAT and Fluxus is clearly evidenced in the 1965 MAT MOT tion Editions MAT 1964 and 1965, which opened in March ably into the private gadget.” Buchloh, “Cryptic Watts,” in impossible to manipulate a work in that context.”43 By designing and producing project, a subedition of Edition MAT, which included works 1966 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Robert Watts (New York: Castelli Gallery, 1990), 6–7. by such Fluxus participants as George Brecht, Robert 25. On MAT and the rise of editioned works among Pop 46. Karl Gerstner, “What Should Art Cost?,” in 3 to Infinity: objects that could not be fully utilized in public institutions and spaces, Edition Filliou, and Emmett Williams. artists in the United States, see Constance W. Glenn, The New Multiple Art (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery and MAT not only partook in what Cornelius Castoriadis called the “tremendous cri- 4. The notion of “originals in series,” attributed to Gerstner, Great American Pop Art Store: Multiples of the 1960s Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970), 9; see also page 223 in appeared in the catalog for Edition MAT’s 1964 collection. (Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1997), and Friedrich this volume. sis of socialization” of postwar society but even furthered and exalted the experi- On the notion and its various uses, see Katerina Vatsella, Tietjen, “The Multiple as Label,” in Kunst ohne Unikat, ed. 47. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 ences of privatization and the withdrawal to domesticity characteristic of this Edition MAT: Die Entstehung einer Kunstform; Daniel Peter Weibel (Cologne: König, 1998), http://www.xcult.org (Autumn 2001): 14. Spoerri, Karl Gerstner und das Multiple (Bremen: Hauschild, /texte/tietjen/multiple_e.html. 44 social crisis. Seen in this light, the ludic and participatory aspects of Edition 1998), 79, 85–87. 26. Vatsella, Edition MAT, 114. MAT did not counteract but in fact facilitated the transformation of the objects 5. Karl Gerstner, in Wies Smals, “MAT: Een gesprek met 27. “Depuis six mois, le mot ‘multiple’ se rencontre au Spoerri en Gerstner,” Museumjournaal 15, no. 1 (February détour de chaque page de journal, sur les cartons d’invita- from freely circulating market commodities and collectively produced artifacts 1970): 37; translated by Leah Marie Chizek; see also page tion et les affiches de nombre d'exposition, il s’entend à la into prized possessions and “private gadgets.”45 226 in this volume. radio, à la télévision—bref, il se multiple.” Jeanne Vilardebo, 6. Pierre Restany, 60/90: Trente ans de Nouveau Réalisme “Art puissance infinie,” Connaissance des Arts, no. 191 A radical experiment and a heterogeneous constellation, Edition MAT (Paris: La Différence, 1990), 76; Lawrence Alloway, “Junk (January 1968): 62 (translation mine). was formed by those uncertainties that governed the encounters of objects, art, Culture,” Architectural Design 31, no. 3 (March 1961): 122. 28. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations 7. Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” in Selected Writings, for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore and technology in postwar Europe at the end of the first decade of the economic vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, (London: Verso, 2002), 2:139. miracle. The MAT multiples, as Gerstner wrote, formed “a collection with the and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press and 29. Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (1970), trans. Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota greatest possible variety” that demonstrated “that the opposite of the opposite 8. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Press, 2003), 4. is also true.”46 Edition MAT was a dialectical operation that wanted to overcome Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 81. 30. Max Kozloff, “Three-Dimensional Prints and the Retreat 9. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1954), trans. from Originality,” Artforum 4, no. 4 (December 1965): 26. different degrees of separation in the making, presentation, and sale of works John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage, 1964), 329. 31. Vatsella, Edition MAT, 38. The notion of Spielsachen- of art in “an era both overwhelmed by the proliferation of things and singularly 10. , The Open Work (1962), trans. Anna serie is closely related to the idea of the work as a plaything, 47 Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). or Spielobjekte. See Frederik Schikowski, “Die Kunst attentive to them.” A critique of the existing regimes of consumption and, at 11. Ibid., 22–23. selbst in die Hand nehmen: Spielobjekte,” in Spielobjekte: the same time, an emulation of the illusionistic freedom of consumer choices, 12. Karl Gerstner, “Aperspective 3,” Spirale, no. 5 (August Die Kunst der Möglichkeiten (Basel: Museum Tinguely, 1955), quoted in Vatsella, Edition MAT, 80; all quotations 2014), 11–33. Edition MAT is a veritable demonstration tool and instructional device of the from Edition MAT are translated by Leah Marie Chizek. 32. Vatsella, Edition MAT, 45. convergences between participation and consumption, amusement and eman- 13. “Ce sont les regardeurs qui font les tableaux.” 33. René Block, “Bemerkungen zur Ausstellung,” Duchamp’s statement was recorded by Jean Schuster and in Multiples: Ein Versuch die Entwicklung des cipation, distraction and liberation that were brought into play by the events and published as “Marcel Duchamp, vite,” in Le surréalisme, Auflagenobjektes darzustellen, ed. René Block (Berlin: processes of postwar modernization. même, no. 2 (Spring 1957): 143–45. See also Marcel Neue Berliner Kunstverein, 1974), 23. Duchamp, Duchamp du signe: Écrits, ed. Michel Sanouillet 34. Heinrich Vormweg, from an account published in the and Elmer Peterson (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 247. German newspaper Die Welt, quoted in Vatsella, Edition 14. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass MAT, 92. Culture,” Social Text, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 132. 35. Eugen Fink, “The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an 15. As Spoerri proudly wrote at various dates in December Ontology of Play” (1957), trans. Ute Saine and Thomas 1959 to the Italian art critic and poet Carlo Belloli, Loeb had Saine, Yale French Studies 41 (1968): 22. sold more than fifty objects three weeks after the opening. 36. Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society CIRCULATIONThe sales broke no new ground in the market, however, in Postwar France (Cambridge: Cambridge University as works by established artists sold better than those Press, 2011), 28. by lesser-known ones. He explained to Dieter Roth in a 37. Frank Popper, Art: Action and Participation (London: letter in January 1960: “On the whole, your book did the Studio Vista, Cassell & Collier Macmillan, 1975). best. Duchamp sold a little more, but the gallery was also 38. Karl Gerstner, “What Is the Nouvelle Tendance?” (1964), inclined to sell him since it also sells Max Ernst and Arp, in A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and Duchamp belongs in their category. Of the others, you and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and did the best by a long shot, followed by Tinguely, Soto, and Bit International, 1961–1973, ed. Margit Rosen (Karlsruhe: Vasarely. The rest sold almost nothing. Of course, this could ZKM Center for Art and Media; Cambridge, MA: MIT change with upcoming exhibitions.” Quoted in Vatsella, Press, 2011), 163; Edition MAT, 47–48. originally published as “Qu’est que la Nouvelle Tendance?,” 16. Raymonde Moulin, Le marché de la peinture en France in Propositions visuelles du movement international (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 462. Nouvelle Tendance (Paris: Musée des Arts Decoratifs, 17. Gérard Monnier, L’art et ses institutions en France: De la Palais du Louvre, Pavillon de Marsan, 1964), unpaged. révolution à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 329–32. 39. François Morellet, “65, 38, 21, 4, 72 . . . : Colour Chart 18. Spoerri, quoted in Vatsella, Edition MAT, 36. III,” Tate Etc., no. 16 (Summer 2009), https://www.tate.org 19. Ulrike Schmitt, “An ‘Art Manager’ on the Road: Daniel .uk/context-comment/articles/65-38-21-4-72. Spoerri and His Edition MAT,” in The Artist as Curator: 40. Jean Clay, “Victor Vasarely,” in Visages de l’art moderne Collaborative Initiatives in the International Zero Movement (Lausanne: Rencontres, 1969), 209. FOR 1957–1967, ed. Tiziana Caianiello and Mattijs Visser (Ghent: 41. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the AsaMER; Düsseldorf: ZERO Foundation, 2015), 193. Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary

Fig. 6

Berecz Fig. 6. Still from Mon oncle (dir. Jacques Tati, 1958). 66 67

EdMAT_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 66-67 NOT 11/22/19 1:46 PM