Author Description

This title was first published in 2001: Utilizing the new processes and materials of industry, the artist's multiple offered to the 20th century an art form that, like the products of consumer society, was repeatable and denied the uniqueness of the traditional art object. It was as if industrial capitalism no longer had to hide behind the schema of classical iconography, and where art was its disguising superstructure; it could nakedly flaunt itself as its own superstructure - where it was its own art. This book attempts to trace: the origins of the artist's multiple in the jeu d'esprit of the artist's studio; the readymade; the idea of fabrication that lay behind constructivism; the concern with the every-day, evident in both Pop Art and, less obviously, in Minimalism; and the fascination with packaging and distribution of Fluxus. The extended series of multiples made by Beuys is pivotal not only in its duration and extent but also because Beuys cut across the borders of print, photography, film, sculpture, painting and the readymade, and liberated it as a medium. Hence it need not be confined to either portable kinetic art or the simulacra of 60s American consumer products. Without this, the contemporary multiples of Jason Coburn, Martin Creed or Bob and Roberta Smith might not have been possible.