They may have once hung on toilet walls, but put £2 in one of John Hayward's distinctive black-and-yellow branded Hayvend vending machines and you won't get a packet of anything fruit-favoured, nor something with strings or wings. What you will get is an original artist's multiple in the form of a painting, sculpture, print or concep tual work, dispensed in its own handy yellow fag-packet-sized box or Kinder Egg-style plastic bubble.
The project was set up in 1995 with one skip-salvaged vending machine and an idea to use it to promote and distribute his own and other artists' works (the artists keep half the money). Hayward's ongoing enterprise, under the title Hayvend Laboratories, is now a self-financing operation with its own linking website, 17 machines in galleries and art centres around Britain, including the Hayward Gallery, the ICA and one sponsored by Levi's in its store in Paris, and a list of more than 200 artists who have used them to sell work.
"I started calling the project Hayvend Laboratories because it was about experimenting with mak- ing things," Hayward explains. "With some of my own work it's not necessarily a foregone conclusion that it is art. I like that ambiguity because you have to think about it. At the same time it's about producing and distributing art that isn't elitist or made so that only the most intelligent or educated people can understand it. Art should challenge people to think about it but at the same time it should be accessible and easily digestible for people from any background."
Born and brought up in Chertsey, Surrey, 36-year-old Hayward's own background didn't set him up for an obvious artworld role. Following his father into an apprenticeship to become a telephone engineer, he trained and spent a miserable year in the job before deciding that life must have more to offer. A move to Bristol resulted in art classes, a discovered love for life-drawing and the path to an art career.
The latest experiment to come out of Hayvend Laboratories is Hypermart, a series of new artists' multiples in the form of digital images, music and short audio-visual works. The first is a piece of instrumental electronica by Marc Garrett. Each work is ready to run on an ordinary floppy disc and is on sale in selected Hayvend machines.
Currently dividing his time between maintaining Hayvend, running a weekly life class and working two days a week teaching computer skills to the ex-homeless users of Ladbroke Grove's Bridge Resource Project, Hayward has plenty of other ideas to expand and integrate the Hayvend network and website, including a Hayvend newspaper and a radio project distributed on cassette. "I'd like to think that Hayvend could expand in all sorts of areas," he explains. "I'd probably need to make a few modifications for it to work in space but to put a machine on a space station or on the moon would be great."
Hypermart discs are available in London from the Hayvend machine in the ICA, the Mall, London SW1. Details of all Hayvend projects, artists and artworks can be found at www.hayvend.com

HELEN SUMPTER