
Photograph by Mitchell Feinberg for New York Magazine, 2006
For two years, I’ve had this image on the wall in my studio — a step-by-step examination of a gradually diminishing Mallomar — which (other than a possible symbol for the slow food movement) is compelling because it is both one thing and many things: part x-ray, part information graphic, this photograph by Mitchell Feinberg (from a 2006 issue of New York Magazine) takes an untouched morsel of puffed chocolate and renders it, over time, with the diagnostic precision of a crime scene. Migrating swiftly from macro to micro, Feinger's portrait takes us from complete cookie to granular crumb in twenty simple steps.
But within those twenty steps lies the deconstruction of something much more basic, and it illuminates the degree to which the series, when shown on a single surface, carries with it a kind of implicit satisfaction that a series disseminated over time does not.

Early Netherlandish Diptych, National Gallery of Art
The study of multiples has a long history, dating back to early Christian literature and enduring through the Middle Ages as diptychs and altarpieces, panel paintings and other thematically connected structures of two. (Some aped a book structure, and many could even be open and shut.) While examples of dual and even triple images prevailed through the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries — advances in printing and photographic technologies eventually making such work more readily achievable— the heyday of real multiples didn’t come until the early 1960s, when artists like Claes Oldenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol played with repeat images, increasingly negotiating the simultaneous presences of multiple images on a single plane.

Andy Warhol, 100 Cans, 1962
The advent of the editioned imprint, a fundamentally modern-day conceit, made the repeat production of a single thing immensely more manageable, and indeed, more economically viable. (This very gesture loosely paralleled the mass production we came to associate with modern life in the second half of the 20th century.) But it is one thing to collect over time, exercising the curatorial impulse to aggregate with selectivity: in this case, the series is created by the individual, and the enjoyment of the series exists as a function of the chase. You, the collector, decide what is variable and what is constant, and by defining the paramaters, establish the organizational criteria that frame the collection — ergo, a series. Conversely, when the series itself is provided as a completed set of actions, that time-based endeavor is virtually nullified.

Benjamin Sabatier, Bacs 014, 2005
The Parisian artist, Benjamin Sabatier, takes familiar objects — scotch tape dispensers, ice cube trays — and creates sculptural objects in which the ubiquitous, manmade form is repeated ad infinitum. Sabatier’s grids adhere to a kind of geometric rhythm, and his fidelity to that rhythm is offset by the contents of his creations. One tape dispenser alone, awaiting another, is hardly a series: but when stacked into a sculptural entity, the gestalt of the whole is considerably more satisfying. You can see all the pieces, observe their repetition, and feel a visceral sense of satisfaction — a mental completion, even — as a result. Sabatier's ice cube trays provide a grounded armature — a sort of three-dimensional grid — and once you comprehend the structure you’re ready for the chaos within it.

John Giorno, from Welcoming the Flowers, 2007
Adopting the visual lexicon of the graphic designer, John Giorno’s screenprinted poems are typographic compositions that beckon to echoes of springtime (bursts of pastel colors, names of flowers) with limited means. Condensed letterforms welcome the delights of horticultural novelty, but with a twist: words like “narcotic” and “betrayed” are initially easy to ignore, and soon disturbing to discover. Taken singly, the poems are pleasant and unassuming: but as a series seen all at once, they’re thinly veiled visual haikus requiring a kind of tacit psychological adjustment, an extra moment to take it all in. What you see may be what you get — but it's not what you were really expecting to get.
This relationship between what you see and what you expect to see is, I think, the entire point. If a series of things appearing together lacks the dramatic denouement of the series released over time, it is perhaps because, like Giorno’s piece above, such work tends to prey on our expectations for completion. That said, some of the most compelling series are those which seem to intentionally subvert that completion, severing the connection between the mind and the eye, the parts and the whole, the crumbs and the cookie. For designers struggling to rationalize the very level of consistency that our work demands, there is often an equal desire to resist the inevitable boredom that comes with playing by such rules — playing, perhaps, being the operative idea.
At the end of the day, a series is really a story waiting to be told. Whether told in diptych, triptych, multi-paned storyboard or editioned variation, the desire to orchestrate in multiples remains at the core of so much of who we are. It's probably not the urge to get it right that keeps us coming back for more, but a series' capacity for endless iteration that draws us in, makes us wonder, pushes us to see something diferently. In so doing, the multiplied form continues to endure, vividly mirroring our own mysterious, by definition changeable — and indeed, fragmented — cultural identity. The series, I think, is us.
Comments [19]
Thanks for another interesting and beautifully written post.
09.18.08
12:22
cheers.
09.18.08
01:22
I ended up not buying any because just one of them alone just didn't seem as nice as the array. I lacked a place in my home for 20 flower pots!
09.18.08
01:35
Edward Tufte has long advocated the use of small multiples in information graphics, exactly for the reasons you state -- patterns, relationships, outliers, and disruptions are much more visible in repeated images that in series, as you put it, "disseminated over time."
ICA/Boston's current permanent collection exhibition includes a piece by Kader Attia that serves as a nice illustration of the contrast between serial and repeated image. Whenever we've included the piece (a video of sugar cubes melting under a stream of black oil) in our marketing publications, we've shown it as a grid sequence, which, to my eyes, is more powerful than the actual video.
Next month we will be opening a new major exhibition of Tara Donovan's work. If anybody captures the sublime nature of obsessive repetition, it's her.
09.18.08
01:57
09.18.08
07:01
09.18.08
10:13
09.19.08
10:48
09.19.08
12:14
09.19.08
10:32
09.20.08
12:53
09.21.08
12:16
09.21.08
06:11
Brave soul. I see your point in the context of this (excellent) photo, but I think the Slow Foodies would totally flip out over this statement.
Thanks for the article!
09.22.08
07:34
09.23.08
11:01
Multiples are a great escape for those who fear that running out will be the end of, well the end.
Thanks for the article, great insight.
09.23.08
11:06
The whole article deals with how one gets this relationship of expecting what you think you will see and then what you actually see. I have an issue with this statement, because of Andy Warhol’s work of the Campbell’s soup cans called 100 cans. This work is something that I would know what I would be seeing and it would be no surprise to me if I were to see it in a gallery. His work is plagiarized. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy his work if I were to see it on a book bag or purse, but to me this design (and many others of his) is Kitch. His design is repetitive and become boring. If he were to work like Mitchell Feinberg, then the design would be more original. Feinberg’s work of the Mallomar cookie is aesthetically pleasing to me. I like that he used repetition, but he also made the cookie look different in every scene. The design definitely helps me to see what he is trying to get across.
09.29.08
04:10
Using repetition is helpful in design to get a point across, or to make a pattern or make things more interesting, and I think the piece by Benjamin Sabatier is a great example of the right way to use repetition in design. He takes advantage of the lines of the ice cube trays to create grids and repeats it over and over, and the colors on the inside create a pattern overall. It's a nicely thought out and successful design.
Andy Warhol was a great repetition artist, which is shown here in his Campbell's soup cans piece of work. He took a common every day thing that we wouldn't normally think twice about, and turned it into a work of art by repeating it over and over, making a pattern and design out of it. Doing this gives the viewer a completely different view on the object being represented.
09.30.08
12:21
One of my favorite pieces that relies on series and repetition can be found here. It is an ad for Nescafe coffee, but it is quite interesting because of the way it uses series to set a very clear, calm flow, and then gradually changes, sending entirely different messages and ideas. "ZZZ" is a pretty common way of cartooning sleep, and when the "Z"s slowly turn into the "N" of "Nescafe" it represents the transition from sleeping to being awake. Clever!
The example work by John Giorno is pretty interesting in that it makes one feel quite assured and comfortable with the work until closer inspection, at which point the message changes entirely.
Patterns and series can be found everywhere in nature and otherwise, which may be the reason why we feel so comfortable with it's usage in design.
09.30.08
11:21
10.06.08
11:43