Lighter Fare Than Hitler’s Mustache
This post is about Fluxus and an artist named Daniel Spoerri.
- Briefly, Fluxus was a group of artists from around the world who blended “artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.”
- Such media included not only art and literature, but also architecture, music, urban planning, and design.
- Fluxus was influenced by Dadaism and espoused the concepts of anti-art, anti-modernism, minimalism and performance. Furthermore, it was considered to be an attitude as opposed to a movement or style of art.
- Five words: small, short, simple, brief, funny.
- Four more and a comma: spontaneous events, audience participation.
- Swiss, born in 1930.
- Jewish by descent, Christian by conversion, had his real name changed in order, essentially, to escape Nazi persecution.
- Spoerri was best known for his snare-pictures, which he explained 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.”
- Will mentioned that one such snare-picture was created when Spoerri invited Fluxus artists to dine and at a certain time, told them to step away from the table and leave everything as it was. He then affixed each object to the table and called it art.
- The Anecdoted Topography of Chance is where things get interesting. On October 17, 1961, at precisely 3:47pm, Spoerri outlined in pen(cil) all of the 80 objects that lay on a table that stood near the entrance to his hotel room.
- The table was blue because his wife, Vera, painted it so.
- Spoerri then numbered the objects and wrote a brief description of each as well as recorded the memories and associations each evoked.
- What resulted was not just a “map” of the objects on the table, but also a sort of autobiography of selected parts of Spoerri’s life.
- As much of Spoerri’s work involved food, he referred to his art as “Eat Art.”
