Daniel Spoerri's Logic of the Multiple and the Continuum of Active Matter

This chapter reconsiders Daniel Spoerri’s logic of the multiple through a multidisciplinary lens of critical material theory, process philosophy and contemporary discourses of conservation. Focusing primarily on the first manifestation of Spoerri’s Edition MAT (Multiplication d’Art Transformables) in 1959, as well as other creative outputs characteristic of his early oeuvre, such as the Tableau Pièges (1960–), Josephine Ellis argues that beneath Spoerri’s efforts to build an infrastructure around the production and dissemination of multiples lies a deeper theoretical engagement with multiplication: one that prompts a broader interrogation of the relationship between materiality and multiplicity. In the early days of MAT, Spoerri insisted that only artworks conceived through transformation—expressed in various moving and moveable forms such as mechanical movement, optical illusion or tactile interaction—were eligible for multiplication, each necessarily involving the viewer as an active participant in the artwork’s continual becoming. Extending Spoerri’s understanding of movement to include processes of material change such as decay and degradation, Ellis suggests that multiplicity is a fundamental characteristic of all artworks, unfolding at the level of active matter. Regardless of form or substance, all materially constituted artworks exist along a continuum of this vital activity. Drawing on thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon, the analysis ultimately speculates a new theory of the material for conservation, and redefines the concept of activation, not as the animation of inert objects from without, but as the facilitation of the vibrant potential always already latent in the matter at hand.