How food, art and life intersected in Daniel Spoerri’s amazing assemblages

Dining tables after a meal immediately bring to mind company and fun. For Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri, who died on November 6 at the age of 94, the chaotic mess of stained fabrics, crumpled napkins and food-stained plates was rich material for creating works of art.

He began working on his “Snare Picture” assemblages in the 1960s, capturing the remains of meals eaten by friends, lovers and strangers, and then hanging them vertically on the wall. These songs playfully suggest the connections, tensions, laughs and momentary arguments that may have occurred during the meal. While these works can be seen as highly conceptual, there is an undeniable humor and lightness to them.

Daniel Spoerri, September 1964. Photo: Wieczorek/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the artist was a social and creative chameleon, working with iconic names such as Marcel Duchamp and Dieter Roth and finding an affinity with movements as diverse as Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme and Dadaism. “I decided to become an artist not because I had the gift of drawing or sculpting well, but because I couldn’t do anything else” – artist he said. “It was a matter of survival. I could either kill myself or live like this.

Spoerri, real name Daniel Isaac Feinstein, was a nomad for most of his life, living in various cities and islands across Europe. He was born in Romania in 1930. During World War II, he moved to Switzerland with his mother and five siblings, where he was adopted by his uncle, Professor Theophil Spoerri, and changed his name. His father, a Jewish missionary who converted to Lutheranism, died in a pogrom in 1941. “Everyone has something that drives them through life,” the artist was later to say. “Being without a homeland is my driving force.”

His first adventure with art took place in the 1950s, when he studied classical dance. This led him to become a principal dancer at the Bern State Opera. During this time, he met many artists from the surrealist movement and staged avant-garde performances such as Picasso’s farce Desire trapped by the tail. Spoerri linked his early poverty to the art he pursued. “I come from a personal experience where I had no money… and I kept a piece of dry bread in a box for weeks, drinking it gradually with bad soups… When I had money, I immediately associated art (with) food. Before the banquet comes the food, then the kitchen, the restaurant, and finally “Eat Art”.

Chefs watch in awe as Daniel Spoerri turned leftovers into a work of art, 2002. Photo: Raphael GAILLARDE/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

“Eat Art” became the motto of his numerous explorations of art and food. His first “Snare Picture” captured a meal just consumed by his girlfriend, consisting of a wooden chair attached to a wall with a narrow top on the seat, covered with objects including an open can, an ashtray full of cigarette butts, and two empty eggshells. Kichki breakfast (1960) it is now part of MoMA’s permanent collection. It is an inherently romantic piece, bringing to mind the shared, stormy intimacy of lovers, as well as their, sometimes banal, everyday coexistence.

“I had to wait decades before someone said, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful!’ When I started, everyone was like, “Terrible!” Who would put something like that on a wall?” He continued anyway; his most expensive, “Snare Picture,” depicting the remains of Duchamp’s meal, sold at auction for just over $200,000 in 2008.

Spoerri was interested in capturing the tables after the meal exactly as they were, leaving their final arrangement to chance rather than their own order. “I just put a little bit of glue on things; “I don’t allow myself any creativity,” he wrote in the 1960s. These pieces exist somewhere between an object and a painting, hung on the wall like a painting, reflecting the symbolic potential of still lifes while maintaining an absurd presence when they protrude from the wall as if they were about to spill over floor.

Sculpture exhibition “Bad RagARTz” by Daniel Spoerri. Photo: Keute/ullstein bild via Getty Images.

Spoerri explored the emotional potential of objects with obsessive detail. In 1962 his Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (Anecdotal case topography) mapped all 80 items on his wife’s table, including personal memories of each of them. His words about these objects went far beyond their physical presence, highlighting his travels, connections with other people, and his own context. This book was translated in 1968 by Roth, who added his own reactions to Spoerri’s words.

The artist found other creative ways to introduce food into the art world, sometimes cooking meals or selling previously purchased canned goods in galleries. In the 1970s, he went a step further by opening the Spoerri restaurant in Düsseldorf as a tangled project colliding art and food. The Eat-Art-Gallery was opened upstairs and guests were asked to pay 1,000 German marks to keep their table as a work of art. He published shortly thereafter Food routea diary documenting his life on the Greek island of Symi, including recipes for local dishes. Then in the 1980s he created a humorous collection of offal recipes from other artists, attributing various organs and parts such as tripe for Roland Topor and fat for Roth.

Later in his career, he realized his works in bronze and opened a sculpture garden in Seggiano, Tuscany, which featured works by over fifty artists, including Nam June Paik, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Not Vital. Despite working with many famous artists until his death earlier this month, Spoerri seemed more interested in his work than the trappings of fame. “I was always sure, like a scientist… I was looking for something, the rest didn’t interest me,” he said. “I didn’t want to be famous, I was looking for answers to my anxiety, uncertainty, problems and questions that I have in life. “