How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome

One of Joseph Beuys’s most ubiquitous multiples, the bag How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Be Overcome embodies his aesthetic ideology, termed “social sculpture.” Beuys argued that everyone was an artist, in the sense that every human has an innate capacity for creativity that can be exercised through daily activities for the greater social good. In 1967, he founded a political party for students and subsequently created several more political action groups, including the Organization for Direct Democracy through Referendum, which lobbied against West Germany’s corrupt parliamentary democracy.

To advertise the organization’s platform, Beuys printed 10,000 plastic shopping bags with a diagram of the group’s positions on one side, and on the other, a reproduction of one of his blackboard drawings, executed during a public lecture. Beuys fully embraced editioned objects, called multiples, as “vehicles of communication” that could distribute his ideas more widely than expensive unique works. He handed out the plastic bags during a street action in Cologne in 1971, and then sold them for a nominal sum in his Office for Direct Democracy at the exhibition documenta 5 in 1972.