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1. Kenny Hunter (1962-)
What is history?
London ; Multiple Store, 1998
27 x 14 x 14 cm.
Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies
Lent by the Multiple Store
Hunter uses the format of the portrait bust, traditionally of the great and good to portray the terrorist leader, Osama bin Laden, and the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, both defining characters (in very different ways) of Bill Clinton’s presidencies: what is a suitable subject for a portrait bust in the age of media personalities? The disjuncture is intensified by making them into a pair of book-ends.
What Is History?’ is my response to the collapse of the grand narratives and absolute belief systems represented by the traditional historical bust. I chose to re-animate the genre to confirm current consumption and conceptions of historical fact and truth.
2. Peter Liversidge (1973-)
Door stop
London: Liversidge, 2000
3 x 4 x 5 cm.
360° bronze cast.
Edition of 60 numbered copies. No 1.
Private collection
Bronze was traditionally the medium for heroic statuary and it has normally been avoided in the production of artists’ multiples, because it is perceived as too suggestive of ‘sculpture’. Here Liversidge uses it for a mundane, quotidian object – the door stop or wedge. Because of its ‘value’, however, you would be unlikely to want to use it for its stated function, and it lacks the flexibility of its hard-rubber cousin.
3. Neil Cummings (1958-)
Sculpture
London: Cabinet Gallery, 1992.
1 case ; 44 cm.
Edition of 20 copies
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
This was published after Cummings’ exhibition at the Cabinet Gallery, London, November – December 1991, using materials from the exhibition e.g. wood veneer and copies of Loot magazine, in which Cummings had placed advertisements describing the objects shown in the exhibition.
4. Neil Cummings (1958-) and Marisaya Lewandowska (1955-)
Lost property
London: Chance Books, 1996
[99] p. ; 17 cm.
Cummings and Lewandowska photograph lost items in the London Transport Edgware Road Lost Road Lost Property Office. Do these objects all belong to one person? What are the events that relate to each object?
5. Bernd Becher (1931-2007) Hilla Becher (1934-)
Anonyme Skulpturen
Düsseldorf: Art-Press-Verlag, 1970
[216] p. ; 29 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
The Bechers’ typological studies of water towers, blast furnaces and mine-heads etc. create, as if through the persistence of imagery on the retina when viewing a flip-book, the form of the ideal, paradigmatic, ur-water tower etc.
6. Sol LeWitt (1929-2007)
Autobiography
New York: Multiples, 1980.
[125] p. ; 27 cm. Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
LeWitt uses the grid format to document all the objects – pipes, pots and pans, records and books – in his apartment, thus creating a material autobiography.
7. Christian Boltanski (1944-)
Catalogue: essais de reconstitution d’objets ayant appartenu à Christian Boltanski entre 1948 et 1954
Paris: Galerie Sonnabend, 1971
[5] p. ; 22 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library Boltanski’s belongings (real or imaginary) create an autobiographical account, just by accumulation of detail.
8. Leanne Shapton
Important artifacts and personal property from the collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including books, street fashion, and jewelry
New York: Sara Crichton Books, 2009
129 p. ; 24 cm.
Private collection
Shapton creates an auction catalogue of the sale of the property of a separating couple, Lenore and Harold, and tells the story of their four-year relation through the objects they owned.
The metonymy here operates as a juxtaposition between a format – the auction catalogue, usually associated with the rich and famous - with the quotidian belongings of a separating couple, including his and hers sunglasses, toast racks and dog salt and pepper shakers.
9. Jane Simpson (1965-)
Ice cream cone
London : Simpson, 1996
14 x 9 x 5 cm.
Resin twin ice-cream cone.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
A wobbly resin twin ice-cream cone would not serve the functional purpose of holding ice-cream for consumption. The contiguity of an unsuitable medium with its functional objective sets off a subversive and neo-dada chain of thought.
10. John Baldessari (1931-)
Fable: a sentence of thirteen parts (with twelve alternative verbs) ending in fable
Hamburg: Anataol AV und Filmproduktion, 1977
[4] folded leaves ; 9 x 13 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Four concertina leaves of black and white film stills with single words in yellow are attached at the centre to form a cross. Baldessari plays with the narratives created by the superimposition of word on image and film-still juxtaposed with film-still.
11. Dieter Roth (1930-1998)
246 little clouds
New York: Something Else Press, 1968.
[136] p. ; 24 cm. Edition of 1890 copies
Roth made a unique book with taped-in notes, perhaps the simplest form of juxtaposition. This was photographed for reproduction by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. The light source was altered by degrees as if to mimic the movement of the sun from East to West, so the notes cast shadows (like a cloud does). Higgins seems to have mistaken the instructions and there is over-exposure, exacerbated by the use of dark grey paper.
12. Aleksandra Mir (1967-)
HELLO Ringier
Zurich : Ringier AG, 2003
59 p. ; 28 cm.
Ringier Corporation, a European newspaper publisher, commissioned Mir to make a piece for their 2002 Annual Report, so this is firstly a juxtaposition of art with the annual report format.
Mir starts off with a cover photograph of Hans Ringier with, on his knee, his daughter, Annette, on the front cover and the last photograph in the report is of Eva and Hans Ringier on the piste. In between a ribbon of black-and-white and coloured photographs segues as the right figure is always the left figure in the following photograph. The narrative generated is a faltering one with ‘stooge’ photographs of snowmen and cows (and the artist) helping to maintain continuity.
13. Fiona Banner (1966-)
The Nam
London: Frith Street Books, 1997.
[500] leaves ; 29 cm.
Edition of 1000 copies
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Jakobson closely identified film – instancing the work of D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Eisenstein – with ‘an unprecedented variety of synecdochic close-ups and metonymic setups’. And of course the sound-track abutting the film generates additional narrative. In The Nam Banner has created a seamless, shot-by-shot, continuous present tense parallel description of six Vietnam War ‘buddy’ movies – ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘The Deer Hunter’, ‘Hamburger Hill’, ‘Platoon’, ‘Full Metal Jacket’ and ‘Born on the Fourth of July’. This is montage re-montaged.
14. John Baldessari (1931-)
Brutus killed Caesar
Akron: Emily H. Davis Art Gallery, 1976
[32] leaves ; 10 x 28 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
The influence of montage on Baldessari can be seen in this 1976 artist’s book. By the juxtaposition of image with image (or image with text, or text with text) narratives are automatically generated. The figure on the left stabs the figure on the right. If the knife image was first, the narrative then becomes: somebody kills the two men etc.
15. Douglas Huebler (1924-)
Variable piece 4: Secrets
New York: Printed Matter, [1973]
[103] p. ; 21 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Around 1800 secrets were collected on forms from visitors to the ‘Software’ exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York 16 September – 8 November 1970 and transcribed into this book – ‘the final form of the piece’. The repetition of ‘I’, ‘me’ etc. suggests that these secrets could belong to one person, and thus reminiscent of Walter Abish’s ‘What Else’, a pseudo-autobiography, made up from fragments of other people’s journals, diaries, letters and self-portraits..
16. Daniel Spoerri (1930-)
An Anecdoted topography of chance (re-anecdoted version)
New York : Something Else press, 1966.
xviii, 214 p. ; 22 cm. Edition of 2020 copies.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
17. Daniel Spoerri (1930-)
An Anecdoted topography of chance (re-anecdoted version)
London: Atlas Press, 1995
239 p. ; 23 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Spoerri, working with Emmett Williams and Topor, describes the objects on his table in 1966 but also in 1995, describing changes in their location or condition, including accumulations of dust over time.
18. Victor Burgin (1941-)
Family
New York: Lapp Princess Press: in association with Printed Matter, 1977.
[12] p. ; 16 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Burgin uses the format of a children’s spiral bound alphabet book to explore the idea of family as institution. Sociological texts are juxtaposed with images of everyday American life. Words under each image set up another jarring narrative.
19. Simon Patterson (1967-)
Rex Reason
London: Book Works, 1994
107 p. ; 14 cm.
Edition of 2,000 copies (Format series)
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Mendeleev’s Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements ordered the elements according to their atomic weight. He left gaps when it seemed there was an element missing and he predicted their properties.
Patterson’s use of contiguity is somewhat different. On the letters standing for some of 107 elements (there are now 118), Patterson maps the names of (inter alia) Hollywood film stars – Rex Reason, the protagonist of the Science Fiction classic ‘This Island Earth’ (1955), is Re or Rhenium (75) and Audrey Hepburn is Au or Gold (79).
20. Yoko Terauchi (1988-)
Ebb & flow
London: Coracle Press, 1988.
[8, 8 ] pp. ; 34 cm.
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
In this endearingly simplest of book formats, Terauchi conflates leperello and page: the tear across the whole book allows the red to incarnadine the blue, a wave following each turning. Just the juxtaposition of two colours can generate a narrative.
21. Anselm Kiefer (1945-)
Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland
Groningen: Groninger Museum, 1980
[82] p. ; 31 cm.
Edition of 500 copies
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874) wrote the lyrics of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ in 1841 whilst on the then British island of Heligoland. Kiefer reduces German martial pretensions to a plastic model battleship in a tin bath of melting ice.
22. Layla Curtis (1975-)
World political
London: Rhodes + Mann, 2001.
Screenprint ; 56 x 93 cm.
Edition of 80 numbered copies. No 11.
Private collection
We are so accustomed to the names and places on a world political map, but what happens when the familiar shapes are moved around?
23. Sarah Staton (1961-)
Phone card 93
London : Staton, 1993
Property Office.
11 x 8 cm.
Printed paper pulp, from ‘Supastore 93-98’
Unlimited edition
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Staton’s multiples through their material and the way they have been made produce a parallel universe of objects that are recognizable but unfunctional. They are visually recognizable but only minimally overlap with the ‘real’ world.
24. Joseph Beuys (1921-1986)
Filzpostkarte
Heidelberg : Edition Staeck, 1985.
11 x 15 x 1 cm.
Unlimited edition plus 100 signed and numbered
Chelsea College of Art & Design Library
Beuys made over 520 multiples, a series held together by the artist’s signature, rubber stamp or the reddish-brown Braunkreuz (brown cross), a repertoire of material – fat, felt, paint, glass and wood, and an interest in multiplication. The felt postcard cannot be addressed, stamped, franked or written on. The international format of communication through the post is contradicted by its medium.
25. Ben Vautier or ‘Ben’ (1935-)
[No art bag] Art Total
New York: Fluxus, 1969.
34 x 44 cm.
Private collection
Ben in his Fluxus period explored the ‘multiple by label’ idea, where anyone could add the label (‘this is art’) to any object, endowing upon it the status of a work of art – making art by contiguity and illocutionary force. In this case, it works in reverse: ‘KEINE KUNST, PAS D’ART, NO ART’ declares any work it contains not to be art.
Addendum:
Stephen Bury Strange 2010
Sex Pistols Anarchy In the UK 1977.
