Eating Art By Dabert Spoerri Analysis

Consuming Art with Daniel Spoerri
A boy born in 1930 to a Jewish family, who migrated to Switzerland at the age of 12 with his mother after his father’s execution by the Nazis, grew up to work as dancer, choreographer, poet, cook and an artist Daniel Spoerri said in 1970 during the opening of Eat Art Gallery - I am interested in the issue of how we survive; i.e. first of all whether we have to survive, and from what point of view. The theme that we somewhat tackily call Eat Art is broad enough to encompass both decadence and also the creative act of rebirth. And making an artwork out of life itself appears to me to be the most delicious way to employ one’s time.”
Daniel Spoerri, through his conception of Eat Art engaged with the
Interrogating what the food preferences of an individual could convey about them, snare pictures were tables or planks once used for consuming a meal, but now hung horizontally on the walls along with the used dishes, used silverware glasses, leftover meals, cigarettes and other objects that were present when the last meal was served on table. These thought provoking compositions of, as it were; the unclean were allowed to form by the means of chance and were later glued by Spoerri so they could be hung on the wall. The way he chose not to interfere with the natural process, precisely trapped that moment. This act not just rationalized the entrapment of the present but also went further to investigate the notion of art being an artist’s property. A critic Alain Jouffroy refers to these trap pictures as ‘landscapes of death’ in his view of their stillness which laments the absence of past. These trap pictures were hung horizontally on the wall rather than keeping them vertically on the floor which according to Jouffroy was a way to face things rather than dominating them. This action of the artist not just effected alienation of the viewer from that moment of the past but also compelled them to discover the unseen meanings in these often ignored everyday objects. The artist by detaching these objects from their utilitarian uses also indicated to a non teleological world view. The clutter prompted on the tables, that Spoerri’s trap pictures held in them invoked in the viewer a desire to unchain one’s self from the prevailing commodity fetishism that followed the Second World War. The artist’s endeavour to cease movement leaves the viewer craving for the