TRACES: Daniel Spoerri
Today is the occasion to bear in mind Daniel Spoerri (27/3/1930-6/11/2024), the Swiss sculptor, performance artist and writer, founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme, originator of Eat Art. Daniel Spoerri must not be reduced to his “Snare pictures“. This is evident through the great variety in the artist’s works after 1961 and his activities and inventions such as “Eat Art“, the events with his students at Art Academies etc. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…
By Efi Michalarou
Daniel Spoerri was born in Galați, Romania, during the Second World War, Spoerri’s father was arrested and executed by the Nazi’s as a Jew.. His mother was Swiss and was therefore able to emigrate with her family to Switzerland. Spoerri turned to dance at the age of 20, taking lessons in Zurich and Paris, and eventually becoming the lead dancer at the Bern Municipal Theatre in 1954. However, in 1955, Spoerri’s attention turned to the theatre, he produced and directed Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano”. During that period he met a number of Surrealist artists, including Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and also a number of artists subsequently associated with the Fluxus movement, including Robert Filliou, Dieter Roth and Emmett Williams. In 1959 Spoerri founded Editions MAT (Multiplication d’art Transformable), a venture which produced and sold copies of three-dimensional constructed artworks by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely. In 1960, Spoerri made his first “Snare-Picture”. He explained “Snare-pictures” as follows: “Objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (snared) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical. Example: remains of a meal are fixed to the table at which the meal was consumed and the table hung on the wall”. His first Snare-Picture, “Kichka’s Breakfast” was created from his girlfriend’s leftover breakfast. In connection with a solo exhibition of his Snare-Pictures at the Galerie Lawrence in Paris in 1962, Spoerri wrote his “Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard”. Spoerri drew on a map the overlapping outlines of all the 80 objects that were lying on the table on 17/10/161 at exactly 3:47 p.m. 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 exhibition. Spoerri was one of the original signers of the manifesto creating the Nouveau Réalisme Movement. A major theme of Spoerri’s artwork is food, and he has called this aspect of his work Eat Art. This is seen not only in his Snare-Pictures, but in a variety of other contexts. In 1963, he enacted a sort of Performance art called “Restaurant de la Galerie J” in Paris, for which he cooked on several evenings. In closing, Spoerri’s Sentimental Museums are almost the perfect culmination of a career dedicated to opening our eyes and mind to how much the ordinary world around us is infused with our passions and obsessions, and that in the end this is what culture is truly all about.
