Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930, Galați, Romania)

The first picture on the website is ‘Fakir’s Spectacles’, from L’Optique Moderne, a fluxus publication of 1963.

Spoerri’s artwork is more often about food, and he has called this aspect of his work “Eat Art.” He created “snare-pictures”: Spoerri would take the leftovers of a meal on a table, mount the leftovers to the table, and hang the table on a wall, turning it from a horizontal surface to a vertical one.

In 1962, Spoerri wrote Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (Anecdoted Topography of Chance). As Wikipedia has it: “Spoerri was then living at the Hotel Carcassone in Paris, in room number 13 on the fifth floor. To the right of the entrance door was a table which his wife Vera had painted blue. Spoerri drew on a ‘map” the overlapping outlines of all the 80 objects that were lying on the table on 17 October 1961 at exactly 3:47 p.m. Each object was assigned a number and Spoerri wrote a brief description of each object and the memories or associations it evoked. The descriptions cross referenced other objects on the table which were related. The Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard was printed as a small pamphlet of 53 pages plus a fold out map and index and was distributed as an advertisement for the exhibit.[11] The Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard is more than just a catalog of random objects, however; read in its entirety, it provides a coherent and compelling picture of Spoerri’s travels, friends and artistic endeavors.

For more, see http://danielspoerri.org/