I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with Danial Spoerri…or atleast his flux pages. I used them as place mats and the food as an art medium to draw on paper.
I first encountered the work of Danial Spoerri in Allan Stone’s kitchen in Purchase. Going to the Stones as a child, was a little like going to a culture carnival: fantastically exciting with a little touch of fear and trepidation. The place made Kane’s Xanadu seem uncluttered and bourgeois. The Stone Mansion was more humble on the outside for sure, but right at the porch you were greeted by enormous naked bodies and monster-like heads and the inside was piled with thirty foot fighting statues and faces and tits and dicks and abstract craziness…. shrunken heads and skullls and bones and The kitchen was all Spoerri’s table tops as I recall… Danniel would take a whole setting after some debauched philosophical (symposium) meal with chicken bones and bits of bread and spilled wine and bottles and glasses and plates (Julian! We all know where you got the idea… but hell you did your own rif) and cigarrtte butts put out in a steak and he had some magic technique of perserving all these scraps like in a wax works and the whole thing got cut off at the legs and hung up on the wall like a painting. It didn’t seem like art to me at that age, it seemed more like archeology and fortunately I loved anything archeological. I didn’t get DeKooning untill I was painting in oil in College (you don’t know how hard it is to paint like that, untill you try it… it’s bloody worse than trying to paint like Ingres)… Spoerri I got right off the bat. I was a fat kid, I liked to eat… what’s not to get about Spoerri.
I’ve been banging my head against Spoerri’s radical game of reality vs. art since that childhood Christmas party revelation. Really, reality is so interesting, how can art compete? People like Rauchenberg and Christo and even Jackson Pollock have all given me answers and more questions. One interesting note is that when I had my first show of paintings in Switzerland (Zurich in 1991) Spoerri’s sister came to the opening and stayed the whole night. I hadn’t heard boo in New York about Spoerri in years and so had imagined him dead, but she assured me, he was alive and working and that he would’ve enjoyed my paintings. Anyways, he’s one of my five heavies and the first fluxus artist I ever encountered.
My DInner Mit Daniel
So I’m still working on the drawings (because I’m a painter, not really a neo realist, nor a fluxist… ) but someone told me that the most photographed thing with digital cameras (particularly cell phone ones which are now the greatest number of camera devices in the world) is food… what people are about to eat. After that is Sex…who they are about to fuck, or just did, or want to, etc. This is also the most blogged thing. So Spoerri was well ahead of the curve. The drawings are in the next post.
And the Swiss photos are from my mom, who just got back from a trip there… how’s that for timing?
