ABOVE: Filmmaker Gerry Schum looks around for the rest of his crew.

Postscript

This is the third of a 3-part series on Rethinking the Artist’s Model. Click here and here to view parts 1 and 2, or scroll below if you are viewing multiple posts.

This past summer the Artists Space in New York held an exhibition on the sculptor Charlotte Posenenske, an event which introduced us to this interesting figure and inspired us to write a post about her. Our good fortune in learning about Posenenske was doubled when we attended a film series one evening during the show in which several documentaries relating to the exhibition theme were aired. To our shock and awe, one of the films, Gerry Schum’s “Consumer Art / Art Consumption” absolutely bowled us over because we felt like we were experiencing a twenty-nine minute long déjà vu. For nearly every single theme that underlies what we’re trying do at A.R.T. was in some way represented by the people and art featured in the film.

Now, we thought we were pretty contemporary in our efforts to link state-of-the-art digital fabrication technology with artistic production and distribution. But the funny thing is this: Schum’s film – which we might just as well have made ourselves if we owned a camcorder and could do voiceovers – was done in 1968.

The film surveys a brief moment in modern art history when a group of art dealers, thinker types and artists came together in the late 1950s and 60s in an effort to democratize the art market. The movement – business venture might be a better term – was spearheaded by the Swiss artist and writer Daniel Spoerri, and later joined by Karl Gerstner, who dubbed their enterprise édition MAT. The acronym stands for Multiplication d’Art Transformable, or Transformable Art Multiples, a phrase which sends shivers of sheer delight up our collective spine – hey, that’s what we’re doing with modular art! Transformable insofar as the modules can be arranged and re-arranged at will; multiples insofar as the modules and their assemblies are infinitely replicable; and art insofar as…well, insofar as it’s art.

While not strictly modular, nearly all of the art issued for sale by édition MAT involved some degree of interactivity between observer and the art. It was co-creativity before there was any such term. Moreover, like our modular art, it was intended to be fabricated by industrial means so that the art would be affordable and continuously produced in sufficient supply without overloading the artist who conceived the work. (Among the artists participating in the venture were Agam, Soto, Tinguely, Vasarely and Duchamp.) Finally, just as we have advocated in the preceding parts of this essay, Spoerri and Gerstner envisioned the art being sold on a retail basis rather than on a speculative one as it would normally have been in a gallery context.

One is tempted to remark that there is truly nothing new under the artistic sun, but of course, there are a few significant differences between édition MAT and A.R.T. Most obvious is the manufacturing technology available in the two periods. In its purest sense the term ‘industrialism’ in the 1960s still referred to the Henry Ford variety, meaning that things were made according to the principles of mass production and with power-driven analog mechanics. Yet in the film there is something of a disconnect between what édition MAT theorized for its means of production and what actually took place in scenes showing its art being made. Instead of large factories with soaring smokestacks rolling out dozens of works of art every few minutes, one mostly caught glimpses of a couple of workers in smocks putting together one or two pieces at a time inside a loft-like setting. If this was industrialism, it was on a very small and artisanal scale, making it more akin to pre-industrial handcraft than to the output of the modern factory.

The problem of being able to manufacture things industrially in comparatively small runs has been solved with the recent rise of digital fabrication techniques, which allows for as few as a single unit to be produced without severe economic cost to the seller. It has also done away with the need to stockpile large amounts of inventory, another substantial barrier to entry and cost control that constrained what édition MAT could do. And unlike the global marketplace in which we can distribute our work, édition MAT had to rely largely on the existing bricks-and-mortar gallery system to adapt itself to a retail business model.

Fascinating film, a remarkable period, and the promise of a democratized art market that we will continue to pursue.