On 10th January 2011, I boarded a coach from Wrocław (Poland) to Stuttgart (Germany). I made this overnight journey to sup with Daniel Spoerri the following night. Spoerri, an artist whose work flouts the verdicts of 18th-century aesthetics, develops projects which, besides appealing to the distance senses, also engage taste, the most intimate of the senses. As a restaurateur, a chef, and a gallery owner, Spoerri has made food the axis of his artistic practices, including both banquets that have made it to the chronicles of art history and tableaux pièges, compositions of petrified meal leftovers referred to as snare-pictures or trap-pictures.
The dinner in Stuttgart marked the finissage of Eat Art, a group show of contemporary artists who work with food as a medium of art. The event, which took place shortly after Spoerri’s eightieth birthday, was held at Wielandshöhe, whose chef Vincent Klink is known as a man of many talents – an author, a jazz musician, and a television personality rolled into one. The apparently innocuous meal proved to be an essentially perverse enterprise as it developed into a cannibalistic banquet where the diners consumed – bit(e) by delicious bit(e) – Spoerri’s own biography.
The first course – tocaná, a traditional Romanian pork stew with hominy – transported us back to the childhood of a Jewish-Romanian boy. Born in Galati in 1930 as Daniel Isaac Feinstein, Spoerri grew up in Switzerland, where his family took refuge from anti-Semitic persecution. This Swiss period in Spoerri’s life was evoked by crawdads with spinach on Klink’s menu. The following courses and accompanying wines conjured up Spoerri’s itinerary life of relocations and journeys, some of which were not prompted by the common enough urge to have a change of scene and air. Spoerri moved home several times, and lived, as an adult, in France, Greece, Germany, Italy, and the U.S. It is for good reason, indeed, that Arturo Schwarz, Spoerri’s good friend, has called him a “pathological nomad.”1
The dinner in Wielandshöhe featured a sequence of Romanian, French, Swiss, Italian, German, and Austrian dishes (Fig. 27). Greek cuisine was a missing element, although Spoerri’s stay on the Aegean island of Simi was highly
The menu of the dinner in honor of Daniel Spoerri with a handwritten note about the entremet
1 Débris of the Meal
Served as the second course, a monkfish and mullet bouillabaisse alluded to Spoerri’s Parisian period.3 At the time, the artist was living in room 13 of the Carcassonne hotel at 24 Rue Mouffetard. The small room quickly filled up with his first snare-pictures. This was where Spoerri was born as an artist
Since then, entrapping daily life in the “snares” of art and immortalizing chance incidents have been the cornerstones of Spoerri’s method. As he explains, “[t]he ‘tableau piège’ (snare picture) is a fragment cut out of reality, of everyday events, a breakfast, perhaps, or a dinner. The remains and the movement in these little dramas are fixed forever, as found, in the space where the action took place.”5 He glues whatever has remained on the table – plates, cups, glasses, bits of food, etc. – to its top, verticalizes the horizontal form, and displays it as a three-dimensional trap-picture (Fig. 28).6
Daniel Spoerri, Tableau piège, (28th November) 1972
© 2022, prolitteris, zürich
Spoerri’s first eating performances were also staged in Paris, where he opened a restaurant called Galerie J in 1963. The venue operated from 2nd to 13th March, and hosted over those ten days ten original meal events, which at the same time provided the material for new snare-pictures. They were later exhibited as part of the 723 Kitchen Utensils show.7 Art, which is understood as experience in the pragmatist tradition, results from the interplays and interdependences of action and reception. Spoerri’s restaurant was designed with the same idea in mind, as a metaphor for the contemporaneous artistic scene. Art critics (Alain Jouffroy, Jean-Jacques Lévêque, Pierre Restany, John Ashbery, and others) served as waiters who mediated between the artist-and-chef (Spoerri) and the audience.8 The tensions arising at the intersection of the various components of and participants in the performance were commented on by John G. Hatch: “The success or failure depends on the consumption of the meal, on the preferences of ‘taste’ of its consumers, and the word of mouth that follows.”9
One of Spoerri’s most recognizable snare-pictures shows the remainders of the meal consumed by the most famous Dada artist, Marcel Duchamp. A white cup with some coffee dregs and a white plate with unfinished food on it stand
To evoke Duchamp in this context is not just gratuitous name-dropping. His concepts clearly inform Spoerri’s projects. “The seeds of the absurd, irony, and destruction, with a pinch of provocation,”13 which Bożena Kowalska discerns in Duchamp’s art, are profuse in Spoerri’s works as well. In 1961, Spoerri put up a food stand with such products as baking powder and canned foods in Arthur (Addie) Kopacki’s gallery in Copenhagen. All the items bore a stamp reading Attention oeuvre d’art (“Attention, a work of art”). The change from the utilitarian function to the artistic one did not entail an increase in expense, as the objects were sold at their original retail price.14
2 Tensions
Decay is an indispensable element and a harbinger of new life. This is most visibly embodied in fermentation, a process akin to putrefaction. For a long time, the one was not distinguished from the other, and they were feared, because fermentation was perceived as both a miracle and a threat, with fermented things spawning anxiety since rotting could destroy the vital fluids. The obscure processes of annihilation, the metamorphosis of putrefaction and revivification are central to the production of cheese and wine.15
When decomposing, food remains impart their energy into plants and animals. The energy of death and disintegration morphs into the energy of life. Even a rotten apple may be a cradle of new life, as its pits will give rise to new trees. Balance is constituted by the dynamic of tensions between building and falling apart. The myth of Persephone, for one, implies that birth and death
Nature is not a petrified entity. Nature is mutability, pulsation, incessant movement, happening, cyclical changes, imperceptible transformations and sudden metamorphoses, the circulation of juices and energies, and flows of mesmeric fluids. Hence, the notion of “still life” stirs anxiety: “In a sense, every still life manifests, more or less directly, the idea of the finitude and insignificance of (one’s own) life – ‘Vanitas.’”16 When talking about his trap-pictures for the first time in 1961, Spoerri confessed to feeling discomfort when working on them, since movement, rather than stagnation, was his element.
Snare-pictures are founded on doubly unpleasant sensations. Firstly, they immobilize life by boxing it in as a work of art (a snare-picture). Secondly, the artist confronts the audience with an object which seems to suspend the force of gravity, while at the same time looking like it is about to drop smashing on the floor.17 This is a deliberate device aimed at multiplying the symbolic meanings of Spoerri’s pieces. The viewers have the dialectic of life and death held up to them, which Spoerri explicitly admits: “I am fond of oppositions and contradictions because they create tension, and a whole can spring only from opposites. Movement unleashes staticity; staticity, fixation, death should provoke movement, transformation and life.”18
3 Zoe en Stasei
Dinner is a performance in its pure form, since it only lasts as long as eating takes place, and it cannot be repeated in the same shape. Remnants are what is traditionally discarded – both after dinner and after a performance – but they are also the only vestiges representing nostalgia and a desire to conserve what is essentially unpreservable. Powered by his obsession to preserve leftovers, Spoerri explores the possibilities of archiving fleeting performance, whereby
Spoerri’s work is inscribed in contemporary avant-garde art in a double manner. First, it blurs the line between art and life, and second, it gives up on parading beauty in order to reveal concealed meanings and to look behind the scenes of culture. His actions have a dual structure, as in one gesture they bring everydayness to the forefront, and in the other they foreground the “back-room” of this everydayness.
Spoerri offers up utility as a sacrifice. In his hands, pitchers, cups, glasses, plates, cutlery, and other tableware items are stripped of their regular functions and utilitarian value. Put on display, they generate “value, of a different and higher type than economic value, capable of conferring prestige during one’s life and permanence after death.”19 Common objects and unfinished foods become monumentalized and obtain a new existence as “miniatures of eternity.” Remo Bodei draws on Jeanne Hersch’s insights to highlight the permanence of still-life paintings, which “open ‘a gap in time’ toward the absolute, which is touched fleetingly at the point of contact between becoming and eternity, thus hinting at what remains in what passes away.”20 This way of conceptualizing the still life genre highlights duration and is consistent with “the idea of something living and natural” reverberating in the corresponding terms in some other languages, for example, Dutch stilleven and German Stillleben, which suggest “static” or “silent,” but not “inert,” life.21
In a way, Spoerri’s art anticipates what will later be referred to as the abject, where what is discarded and jettisoned from memory forces itself into the very middle of things. Spoerri employs everyday objects and useless leftovers, which meander their way to a gallery instead of winding up in a garbage bin. What results from his work is “a fragment eternally fixed in the immovable time of art.”22 This gesture radicalizes some tendencies which have been regularly re-surfacing in modern art. Radicalization in this case does not entail a complete break with tradition. Tensions between the beautiful and the coveted on the one hand and the rejected and the distressing on the other have haunted humanity of old. Among countless exhibits on display in the Vatican
The temptation to steal a glimpse at and reveal goings-on in the wings, which prompted ancient artists to laboriously put mosaic pieces together and reproduce fish bones and other inconspicuous traces of reality, is, if anything, only gathering a momentum today. While rooted in the tradition of ancient art, Spoerri’s artistic practices are at the same time founded on pushing further the tendencies of modern and contemporary art. Leftovers, as the underside of a feast representing that which is consigned to nothingness and reluctantly acknowledged, if at all, are brought into relief. Artists who use food and refer to nutrition processes as a rule do not seek to afford easy pleasures to their audiences: “[I]n contemporary art, food is predominantly imaged in the state of destruction and decay. These art projects turn familiar victuals into the source of horror.”25 Multiple pieces explore forbidden zones, where beauty is ousted by a variety of aversive values. These prevail when the material for artworks is provided by such objects as orange skins overgrown with hairy, gray mold (Michel Blazy), gastroscopy images (Mona Hatoum), a hare carcass rotting at an accelerated pace (Sam Taylor-Wood), a raw chicken serving to test human relations, including maternal love and erotic attraction (Nina Sobell), a piece of sausage floating in formalin and resembling a part of the digestive system (Damien Hirst), or – the most repulsive of all meats – human flesh (Dieter Roth). In such cases, beauty is dethroned, and the warning feeling of disgust creeps in instead: “Everything seems at risk in the experience of disgust. It is a state of alarm and emergency, an acute crisis of self-preservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness, a convulsive struggle, in which what is in question is, quite literally, whether ‘to be or not to be.’”26
4
The perturbing beauty of Baroque still-life paintings often relies on the motif of decomposition as moral guidance for viewers. Paradoxically, these utterly sensual representations aim to divert onlookers’ attention from corporeal temptations and to channel human feelings and desires towards the eternal, the immutable, and the incorruptible, towards things exempt from worldly decay. Spoerri’s works likewise tell the story of the pleasures of life, but devote equal attention to eschatology. As Spoerri emphasizes, the moment when existence is captured marks its death. In the semblance of a photographer,27 Spoerri focuses on freezing the instant of time and perpetuity, but in order to do so, he conserves reality itself rather than eternalizing its image. Hatch observes that “in preserving a moment from life Spoerri kills it, rips it away from the flow of existence, to make it into a useless, lifeless object.”28 Nevertheless, it is not Spoerri’s intent to confront his audience with the pure horror of decomposition, and his abolition of the everyday has a productive facet to it as well. In the regular order of things, the inexorable course of events dooms common objects, and all the more so food scraps, to being an imperceptible element of existence. Snare-pictures help banal everyday things and food remains escape their destiny. Moreover, “the ‘corpses’ of meals” bring to mind the live experiences of the eaters who once sat at the tables now converted into “altars.”29
I think that actually this is the question of territory. Because I had lost my territory since childhood, and even during childhood. I never had a territory. I was a Romanian Jew, evangelical in an orthodox country, whose father was dead, without being certain that he was really dead. I swear to you, the first things I glued down were all that, that feeling.30
Sandra Solimano states that Spoerri uses art as “a way of interpreting life, of making sense of what happens and has happened in his existence.”31 Spoerri relocates life – remnants, used tableware, waste, old bric-à-brac, and other inconspicuous objects and situations – into the domain of art, thereby turning them into discursive tools. For art is a commentary on life. Pictures, maps, and notes add up to a coherent image of the artist’s life – his travels, his social life, and his creative pursuits. At the same time, art is an interpretation of life, setting the standards of experience for it. The perfection of life can thus be measured by the quantity of aesthetic qualities that harmonize and round off every experience.32
5 The Restaurant
The Wielandshöhe dinner included two German dishes. Rhineland was represented by a beef roast with savoy cabbage and mashed potatoes (Sauerbraten vom Herrmannsdorfer Ochsenfilet, Wirsingköpfchen), and Swabia by fried goat cheese. Two years after opening a restaurant in Düsseldorf in June 1968, Spoerri started the Eat Art Gallery in the same building at Burgplatz. The two were neighbors not only in the spatial sense, as both institutions were grounded in the same idea of the affinity of art and food. When the gallery began to operate, Spoerri felt drawn back to the kitchen and all the stages of cooking. As he recollects: “I even wanted personally to kill the chickens I ate and so I realized that the moment fixed on the table was but an instant, the blink of an eye inside a cycle we call life and death, decomposition and rebirth. The theme we call
In Düsseldorf, whoever wished to be a member of the artistic community but could not afford to pay for a meal could wait tables or help in the kitchen. Spoerri made sure that the project, which was designed to foster human relationships through the preparation and sharing of food, should not mutate into an elitist enterprise. The last thing he wanted was to make his restaurant one of the fashionable venues serving nouvelle cuisine. The menu included Mediterranean and German cuisine, ranging between traditional top-quality steaks and the extravaganza of omelet with ants, python chops, snake ragout, and bear paws.34 The walls of the restaurant were lined with his private correspondence. Spoerri’s prior theatrical experience helped him comprehensively arrange culinary experiences – he was certainly capable of stage-managing dinners.
A very special project was in progress throughout 1972. Spoerri made one trap-picture daily. The whole year’s work resulted in a show featuring 365 art objects. The Eat Art Gallery put on display the snare-pictures alongside other pieces which used foodstuffs, such as female legs molded from pink marzipan and placed in Arman’s plexiglass coffins, and Spoerri’s famed inedible bread sculptures.35 It was there that Richard Lindner exhibited The Blue Bosom Angel, a gingerbread woman figure. Gingerbread was also used by Roy Lichtenstein for a piece in his Brushstroke Paintings series, using black and yellow icing instead of paints. For his part, the sculptor Bernhard Luginbühl swapped his favorite material, iron, for chocolate then.36
6 Consummation
The dinner in honor of Spoerri was crowned with an Austrian classic – Apfelstrudel with vanilla ice-cream and pear (Fig. 29). This was meant as an allusion to another big Eat Art & Ab Art project, which was carried out in a small Austrian town in 2008. Like once in Düsseldorf, an art gallery in Hadersdorf shares the building with a restaurant. While the former Baroque monastery is a
Cooking was always a challenge to Spoerri, who set the bar high for himself by staging numerous artistic banquets recorded in the archives of art history. His Menu travesti (1970) confounded reason, the senses, and taste, as its courses repeatedly turned the expectations triggered by their appearance upside down. For example, the dinner opened with what the guests at first thought was coffee but proved to be a consommé, and further surprises followed suit as “ice-cream” of mashed potatoes and meat pralines were served next. The best known of Spoerri-staged feasts include L’Ultima Cena (The Last Supper) of 19th November 1970, Küche der Armen der Welt (The Cuisine of the Poor of the World) of 4th June 1972, and Hommage à Karl Marx (Homage to Karl Marx) of 14th April 1978. Palindromic dinners were perhaps the most ingenious of the meals concocted by Spoerri. Their menus were inspired by the work of his friend, fellow-artist, and palindrome-inventor André Thomkins.38 Belinda Grace Gardner recalls a palindromic dinner held to celebrate Thomkins’s seventy-fifth birthday as an unforgettable feat of inventiveness. The reversed meal traditionally started with a dessert of petits fours, which in fact had a savory stuffing, and finished with what looked like spaghetti with tomato sauce, but was actually vanilla ice-cream with fruit topping.39
Although pragmatists insist that life and art are very close to each other, and although the line between them is very fragile, artistic practices are a site where a transformation of “the ordinary into the extraordinary,” of life into art, which is profound but difficult to conceptualize, takes place. John Dewey believes that similar processes unfold within all experiences which must have closure if they are to be exceptional and real, whereby the integrative function is performed by aesthetic qualities.
Apfelstrudel with vanilla ice-cream and pear. Wielandshöhe 2011; photo: D. Koczanowicz
The dinner in Stuttgart aspired not only to be a sumptuous, festive repast, but also to be worthy of Spoerri, and for this ambition to be fulfilled, it had to be, at least partly, an artistic project. The banquet in Wielandshöhe was unusual in terms of the intensity of the experience it offered. It was certainly a meticulously designed “death of disorder and monotonous routine,” and its
Arturo Schwarz, “The Eternal Youth of Daniel Spoerri,” in Daniel Spoerri: From Trap-Pictures to Prillwitz Idols, ed. Thomas Levy, Barbara Raderscheidt, and Sandra Solimano (Milano: Silvana, 2010), 27.
John G. Hatch, “On the Various Trappings of Daniel Spoerri,” ARTMargins, 29 March 2003;
Spoerri lived in Paris from 1960 to 1966.
France was also important because Spoerri joined Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely as a signatory of the manifesto of the Nouveaux Réalistes. “Cuisine art” was Spoerri’s original contribution to the idea of anti-art.
Daniel Spoerri, Daniel Spoerri: Coincidence as Master, ed. Thomas Levy (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2003), 62.
Tableaux pièges, the French moniker of Spoerri’s pieces, is a play on words. The phrase is usually translated as “snare-pictures” (or “trap-pictures”), which fails to convey the ambiguity of the term. Namely, tableau also denotes “a table,” which multiplies the layers of meaning, as a table becomes a trap for the objects glued to it, while the resulting whole is ensnared in the trap of art, which captures and transforms life.
The names and venues of performances are listed in Sabine Kaufmann, “Daniel Spoerri i jego performansy,” in Daniel Spoerri. Sztuka wyjęta z codzienności, ed. Tomasz Macios and Mariusz Sobczyński (Kraków: Mocak, 2016), 22.
Renate Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust: Daniel Spoerri and the Establishment of Eat Art,” in Eating the Universe: Vom Essen in der Kunst, ed. Sylvette Babi (Köln: Dumont, 2009), 236.
Hatch, “On the Various Trappings of Daniel Spoerri.”
Klink’s menu did not include any American special, but the oysters served before the dinner can be construed as a culinary nod to New York.
See Kaufmann, “Daniel Spoerri i jego performansy,” 22.
Sandra Solimano, “If Chance Meets Art to Narrate Life,” in Daniel Spoerri: From Trap--Pictures to Prillwitz Idols, 19.
Bożena Kowalska, Od impresjonizmu do konceptualizmu. Odkrycia sztuki (Warszawa: Arkady, 1989), 77.
See Kaufmann, “Daniel Spoerri i jego performansy,” 30.
Piero Camporesi, The Anatomy of the Senses: Natural Symbols in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, trans. Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 37–63.
Heike Eipeldauer, “Vanitas – Allegorien von Leben und Tod,” in Augenschmaus vom Essen im Stillleben, ed. Ingried Brugger and Heike Eipeldauer (München, Berlin, London, and New York: Prestel, 2010), 97.
Spoerri made the vision of collapse very tangible in Basel in 1978. He deliberately fixed only half of the tableware to nine table tops. The other items crashed down with a thud while being put on the walls to the dismay of the surprised gallery owner. See Kaufmann, “Daniel Spoerri i jego performansy,” 36.
Qtd. in Solimano, “If Chance Meets Art to Narrate Life,” 19.
Remo Bodei, The Life of Things, The Love of Things, trans. Murtha Baca (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 72.
Bodei, The Life of Things, 99.
Bodei, The Life of Things, 129n1. In other languages, for example Italian and Polish, the equivalent terms of, respectively, natura morta and martwa natura, which literally mean “dead nature,” have somewhat different connotations.
Solimano, “If Chance Meets Art to Narrate Life,” 19.
Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26.
Cf. Silvia Malaguzzi, Food and Feasting in Art, trans. Brian Philips (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2008).
Eipeldauer, “Vanitas,” 98.
Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 1.
Cf. Martin Jay, “Photography and the Event,” in Discussing Modernity: A Dialogue with Martin Jay, ed. Dorota Koczanowicz, Leszek Koczanowicz, and David Schauffler (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi: 2013), 9–29.
Hatch, “On the Various Trappings of Daniel Spoerri.”
Maria Anna Potocka, “Estetyka praktyczna,” in Daniel Spoerri. Sztuka wyjęta z codzienności, 10.
Giancarlo Politi, “Daniel Spoerri,” Flash Art, no. 154 (1990): 119.
Solimano, “If Chance Meets Art to Narrate Life,” 15.
I refer to the pragmatist notions of art which are discussed in more detail in “Culinary Experience: A Pragmatist Perspective” in this volume.
Qtd. in Solimano, “If Chance Meets Art to Narrate Life,” 19.
Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust,” 238.
See Belinda Grace Gardner, “Capturing the Ephemeral and Then the Trap Snaps Shut: Daniel Spoerri’s Compositions of Chance and of the Essentials of Life,” in Daniel Spoerri: From Trap-Pictures to Prillwitz Idols, 43.
Buschmann, “Evocation of Pleasure and Disgust,” 238–39.
Another art venue founded by Spoerri was Il Giardino, a garden of sculptures. Lettuce with lemon dressing was an Italian hallmark during the Stuttgart dinner. Milan was where Spoerri held his eating performances L’Ultima Cena (The Last Supper) 1970 and Cucina Astro Gastro – 12 Stelle (Astro Gastro Cuisine – 12 Stars) 1975.
The Palindrome Banquet was restaged several times in Graz, Bremen, and Paris between 1988 and 2002.
Gardner, “Capturing the Ephemeral,” 43.
I refer at this point to Richard Shusterman’s depiction of aesthetic experience: “Aesthetic experience shines as living beauty, not only because it is surrounded by the death of disorder and monotonous routine, but because its own sparkling career projects the process of its dying as it lives.” Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, 2nd edition (Lanham, Boulder, New York, and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 33.