Daniel Spoerri

Spoerri (born Daniel Isaac Feinstein in Romania 1930) had a peripatetic upbringing, serving apprenticeships at a Zurich import/export house, as a taxidermist and then studying dance in Paris and working as a tourist guide. He became principal dancer at the State Opera in Bern and produced a number of avant-garde theatre pieces there and in Darmstadt. During the 1950s and 1960s Spoerri was a leading contributor to the Fluxus movement and the Nouveau Réalistes. In 1962 he conceived his Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a celebrated table-top map of random objects in a Parisian hotel room, which developed into an autobiographical artist’s book, documenting with ironically tinged scientific fervour the life and times of everyday objects. In 1967 the artist opened the ‘Restaurant Spoerri’ in Düsseldorf and expanded it in 1970 with an upstairs gallery devoted to ‘Eat Art’. At the same time he commenced his renowned series of Fallenbilder/tableaux-pièges/snare-pictures that archived in resin the leftovers of shared meals.

Spoerri’s preoccupation with the history and art of both quotidian things and cooking came together in a series of originally twenty-five ‘archaeological objects’, which he produced during a twelve month sojourn on the Greek island of Symi in 1966-67, entitled Magie à la noix. The objects emerged from flotsam, stones, dried plants, animal bones, customised detritus and the leftovers of cooking, which Spoerri composed into apparently accidental assemblages. The objects simultaneously documented his everyday life and experiences on the island, evoked details of its natural and cultural history, served as accessories for the curious characters of his neighbours and guests, and, of course, showed themselves as Dadaesque pieces of art. The American poet Emmet Williams wrote that “in Magie à la noix he creates the histories and circumstances of objects whose past he cannot know. He treats them as objects in search of a history”. Spoerri himself testified that while even the most eclectic and absurd of these objects, displayed in his garden and on the walls of his house, passed virtually unnoticed by the islanders, nearly all of them felt compelled to advise him constantly on the creation and execution of the local cuisine.