que professeur, Spoerri se retrouvait face à un groupe qu’il dirigeait parfois comme une troupe, renouant avec sa vocation contrariée de metteur en scène. Là réapparaît le premier angle de mon étude : l’enseignement lui donnait l’occasion de retrouver des pratiques anciennes. En effet, après avoir été danseur à Berne, il devint en 1957 l’assistant de Rudolf Sellner à Darmstadt et il réalisa des décors de théâtre avec Peter Zadeck. En parallèle des projets menés par Sellner auxquels il participait, il mit en scène Ionesco, Tardieu, Becket, Tzara et s’intéressa autant aux décors qu’à la diction, au jeu des corps et à l’organisation spatiale. Il est d’ailleurs revenu à la mise en scène pour le *Cœur à gaz* de Tristan Tzara au Schauspielhaus de Düsseldorf en 1972. Au terme de cette première étape de travail sur le texte d’*Alice aux pays des merveilles*, une carte de l’itinéraire d’Alice fut constituée : les étudiant.e.s se répartirent les différents espaces de son aventure. Le récit faisait désormais l’économie des mots pour devenir une expérience esthétique et sensorielle. L’espace d’exposition fut entièrement repensé sur le mode d’un labyrinthe : on y entrait par un trou dans un mur, il fallait passer par une échelle, un toboggan, un passage complètement noir avec des éléments tactiles, puis des petites lumières au voltage très bas (12 ou 5 volts) permettaient de suivre les différentes étapes d’Alice. Des étudiant.e.s avaient créé des dioramas, que Spoerri appelle des mirages ; le magasin du chapelier fou avait été confié à une enseignante et sa classe qui avaient créé des chapeaux étranges. Spoerri avait fait une collection de tortues rétroéclairées visibles par des petits trous dans une paroi. En tout, on comptait vingt-deux ou vingt-trois œuvres différentes. Dans ce voyage littéraire et plastique, un lapin blanc circulait en toute liberté. L’exposition a eu beaucoup de succès et Harald Szeeman, qui l’a visitée avec Ingeborg Lücher avait pour projet de la présenter à Zurich, ce qui finalement n’a pas eu lieu.

Au travers de cette exposition, que Spoerri considère comme « Parmi les plus belles choses qu‘il a] faites avec les étudiants<fnref n="9" /> », le récit se mêlait à l’imaginaire et c’était finalement par le corps que l’on découvrait la mise en espace du conte. Le choix d’*Alice au pays des merveilles* était intéressant pour l’artiste à plusieurs niveaux : fonctionnant comme une métaphore de l’entrée en art, le passage dans un monde différent, diffracté et inattendu s’accompagnait d’une perte de repères et peut-être d’une perte d’innocence.

## Expériences sociologiques

Au-delà du récit et du conte, l’enseignement devint le lieu privilégié des recherches sociologiques de Spoerri. Il est d’ailleurs intéressant de noter que durant le *Nouveau Réalisme*, son travail portait bien plus sur le hasard et le réel

<footnote n="9">⁹ Entretien Bibliothèque nationale suisse, SLA-IMVOCS-V0359-67, Sans titre, 1992.05.17.</footnote>
que sur son aspect sociologique. Lorsque Restany utilisait ce mot pour qualifier la démarche du groupe, il le prenait dans son sens le plus large et le plus flou, et il est d'ailleurs bien rare de trouver chez ces artistes un souci analytique pour le réel qu'ils s'appropriaient avec appétit.

Pourtant, Spoerri a développé avec ses étudiant.e.s des projets véritablement sociologiques. C'est aussi un intérêt qu'il cultive au contact de sa compagne l'historienne Marie-Louise Plessen, avec qui il a notamment écrit *Le Guide de 117 fontaines sacrées de Bretagne*, publié en 1977 en allemand et traduit en 2004 en français<fnref n="10" />. Plusieurs projets dans le cadre de son enseignement allaient dans ce sens, s'apparentant à une recherche sociologique. En premier lieu, les projets consacrés aux *Musées Sentimentaux*. L'année suivant le premier *Musée Sentimental* qu'il avait créé dans le *Crocrodrome* de Zig et Puce<fnref n="11" /> pour l'ouverture du Centre Pompidou, il choisit de poursuivre ce type d'étude avec sa classe de Cologne. Ainsi en 1978, après une année entière consacrée à la préparation de l'exposition, Spoerri et sa classe ont inauguré le *Musée Sentimental de Cologne*, au Kölnischer Kunstverein. Spoerri dit que c'est véritablement avec cette exposition et l'expérience du travail collectif qu'il a inventé « le principe du Musée Sentimental. Avant, pour Paris, ce n'était pas représentatif. C'est devenu une exposition très importante pour Cologne. C'était la première fois qu'on faisait une exposition historique basée sur le sentiment. On a travaillé par mots-clés, [...] la cathédrale, eau et carnaval. Pour chaque mot-clé il fallait trouver un objet qui l'éclairait, comme une anecdote très significative, qui soit comme une révélation.<fnref n="12" /> » Le travail que Spoerri a demandé à ses étudiant.e.s était de l'ordre de la recherche introspective : il leur fallait trouver ce qui pour eux représentait la ville et dans quelle mesure les autres habitants se retrouveraient dans ces symboles et ces objets. Le sociologique est ici revu à l'aune du sentimental. De plus, l'ancrage local est particulièrement important dans ce projet, car les anecdotes exposées n'ont normalement de sens que pour les personnes qui connaissent véritablement Cologne, par exemple les chaussures à la semelle recouverte d'une gangue épaisse de caramel multicolore que chaque habitant de Cologne a dans son placard et sort une fois l'an pour marcher dans les rues couvertes de sucreries jetées durant le Carnaval.

C'étaient donc leurs propres anecdotes que les étudiant.e.s étaient invités à explorer et à analyser dans le cadre de ce travail. Spoerri définissait une

<footnote n="10">10 Daniel Spoerri et Marie-Louise Plessen, *Heilrituale an Bretonischen Quellen*, Oldenburg/Stalling 1977 ; Id., *Guide de cent-dix-sept fontaines sacrées de Bretagne. Rituels de guérison*, Paris 2004.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 « Ce pseudonyme Zig et Puce recouvre un groupe d'artistes, solidairement responsables de la manifestation et qui préfèrent la signer dans l'ordre alphabétique : Joseph Imhof, Bernhard Luginbühl, Niki de Saint Phalle, Rudolf Tanner, Jean Tinguely, Rico Weber, Paul Wiedmer. », *Le Bulletin du Centre Pompidou* 2, avril-mai 1977.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 Entretien Bibliothèque nationale suisse, SLA-IMVOCS-V0359-67, Sans titre, 1992.05.17.</footnote>
orientation et dirigeait les recherches, mais lui-même ne connaissait pas
vraiment Cologne. Dans ce cas, la familiarité que les étudiant.e.s avaient avec
leur propre territoire était véritablement au cœur de l'exposition. Mais au-delà
de cette connaissance intime qui lui faisait défaut, c'est bien la dynamique
du collectif qui a rendu ce projet possible. Une pluralité de voix se fait entendre
dans le travail de Spoerri : depuis toujours ses objets parlent, même indis-
tinctement. Leurs timbres différents se mêlent et se répondent dans des
assemblages où l'artiste ne cherche jamais à atteindre l'unisson. Il com-
pose au contraire des cacophonies de mémoires et d'anecdotes en réunis-
sant des objets bavards, suggestifs, qui en plus de leurs histoires propres se
répondent dans l'espace de l'œuvre. Les expositions que Spoerri a organisées
en groupe possédaient ces mêmes qualités. Elles étaient polysémiques ; en
elles les apports et les voix de chacun se conjugaient sans se mélanger, se
répondaient et s'accordaient sans s'aligner. L'artiste utilisait ainsi la force du
collectif pour créer des expositions reposant sur des enquêtes d'envergure,
ses propres anecdotes et ses propres dadas y étaient enrichis de ceux de ses
étudiant.e.s.

Pendant cette époque, il a continué à exposer dans des galeries et des musées
pour des expositions collectives. Mais lorsque l'on faisait appel à lui pour une
exposition personnelle, il entraînait la plupart du temps tout ou partie de sa
classe dans l'aventure. Après avoir repris contact avec la mise en scène et
le récit avec *Alice au pays des merveilles*, il a ainsi retrouvé le commissariat
d'exposition. Dès 1961, il découvrait en effet cette pratique au Stedelijk
d'Amsterdam, alors dirigé par Willem Sandberg, en assurant le commissariat
de l'exposition « Bewogen Beweging ». Cette expérience, qui a lieu au début
de sa carrière d'artiste plasticien, est importante en ce qu'elle signale non
seulement ses qualités d'organisation et de synthèse, mais aussi sa pensée
théorique, et sa lucidité quant à la réception. La création d'une exposition est
non seulement une entreprise collective, mais elle est aussi fondamentalement
tournée vers la prise en compte du public. Il s'agit d'être didactique, clair, et
de convaincre par une démonstration efficace. Avec l'enseignement, Spoerri a
donc réactivé cet aspect de sa démarche. Les détails des œuvres étaient en
grande partie laissés aux choix des étudiant.e.s ; lui s'attachait plutôt à la forme
globale, à la circulation et à l'enchaînement des pièces. Renouant avec son
travail de commissaire, c'est finalement à des stratégies novatrices d'inclusion
et d'ouverture au public qu'il travaillait alors.

En 1981, il a ainsi associé des étudiant.e.s à deux projets dans lesquels le
groupe a encore une fois été amené à réfléchir sur son environnement local
et sa sociologie. Le premier projet correspond à son invitation par le Musée
ethnographique de Cologne à participer à une exposition sur les usages de
la drogue. Là, selon les mots de la conservatrice : « Spoerri a conçu un
environnement réaliste qui identifie et situe les lieux où les drogues sont
<figure><img src="image_45.png" /><figcaption>3 Plan de l'exposition « Rapture and Reality: Drug Use in Cross-cultural Perspective », Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, 1981</figcaption></figure>

obtenues et consommées à Südstadt, le quartier de notre musée à Cologne<fnref n="13" />. »
Ainsi, dans l'espace qui lui était dédié, Spoerri a-t-il reconstitué une sorte
de panorama des lieux et des modes de consommation de drogues à Cologne.
On entrait par la salle des *Alcooliques anonymes*, pour ensuite trouver le kiosque
de nuit, la taverne, un distributeur de cigarettes, la pharmacie avec ses
tranquillisants, une devanture de sex-shop, sans oublier les toilettes avec des
seringues, recouvertes de photographies de murs graffités prises dans des
toilettes publiques proches du musée. La police locale avait accepté de prêter
une armoire contenant les drogues qu'elle avait confisquées. Enfin, le dortoir
des clochards, dans lequel deux étudiants avaient vécu quelques jours, avait
été reproduit pour l'occasion. Tous ces espaces étaient organisés autour du lieu
de la plus grande et de la plus banale des consommations d'alcool : le salon
de tout un chacun, où l'on boit le petit verre du soir (fig.3 et 4).

<footnote n="13">13 Karin von Welck, « 'Rapture and Reality: Drug Use in Cross-cultural Perspective' Variations of Emphasis and Acceptance of an Exhibition on Drugs in a West German and a Dutch ethnographic museum », dans *The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship* 3, 1984, p. 63.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_46.png" /></figure>

4 Plan de l'exposition « Rapture and Reality: Drug Use in Cross-cultural Perspective », Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, 1981

Au travers de ce projet, un élément apparaît : il ne s'agissait pas seulement pour Spoerri d'être commissaire d'exposition et de fédérer les énergies de son groupe, ni de maintenir le patchwork de toutes les voix des participants à un même degré. Ce projet expose ce qui était pour lui le grand enjeu de l'enseignement et forme mon second axe de réflexion : le rapprochement entre l'art et la vie.

En 1981 toujours, la *Promenade sentimentale. Eine Kölner Wallfahrt*, conçue dans le cadre du festival « Théâtre du monde », constitue une expérience extrême de ce rapprochement entre l'art et la vie. Deux de ses étudiants, Jürgen Raap et Thomas F. Fischer, avaient imaginé pour gagner leur vie un tour guidé de la ville en hommage à Andy Warhol. Jürgen Raap raconte qu'ils entraînaient leur public dans « un tour culturel et culinaire de Cologne » qu'ils appelaient *Andy's Reiseburo*, car Thomas Fischer considérait que « le design des toilettes de gare est dans un style typiquement Andy Warhol, tristes et ennuyeuses »<fnref n="14" />. Ainsi, ils visitaient des toilettes publiques, des ruines et des lieux typiques et étranges de la ville. Ce tour guidé a été le point de départ du projet avec Spoerri : il a constitué un groupe et avec Jürgen Raap

<footnote n="14">14 Voir Jürgen Raap, « Hommage à Karl Marx. Jürgen Raap über die Spoerri-Projekte an den Kölner Werkschulen 1977-1982 », *Kunstforum International*, Essen und Trinken 1/159, 2002, p. 52-53.</footnote>
et Thomas Fischer, ils ont exploré les coins sombres et les marges de la ville,
en commençant par ce que les deux étudiants avaient déjà identifié puis
en poussant plus loin leurs recherches. Là où Raap et Fischer s'intéressaient
à l'aspect esthétique, décevant, glauque des lieux, Spoerri a cherché à composer
une visite qui s'attachait avant tout aux habitants et à leur quotidien.

On retrouve aussi dans cette œuvre-performance son intérêt pour le *punctum*
et le *studium*, la grande et la petite histoire, leurs voix mêlées, coexistent dans
les mémoires et dans les lieux. Cet événement se situait dans la droite ligne
de « l'agit-prop » : il s'agissait de conduire le public au contact d'une certaine
réalité et de créer les conditions de sa prise en charge individuelle et collective.
Spoerri et ses étudiant.e.s misaient sur une stratégie du choc. Les visites entraî-
naient en effet les spectateurs bien au-delà de leur zone de confort. Il est possible
de voir dans l'expérience de la *Promenade Sentimentale* une déclinaison
hybridant les *Musées Sentimentaux* et le *Dylaby*, le « Labyrinthe Dynamique »
auquel l'artiste participa en 1962 au Stedelijk Museum. Dans cette exposition,
les spectateurs passaient d'une atmosphère à une autre, depuis le *Musée inversé*
de Spoerri jusqu'au *Raysse Beach*, en passant par une installation de Tinguely
avec des ballons. À Cologne, les spectateurs étaient en effet conduits, durant
toute une soirée, dans huit lieux différents. Une partie du projet portait sur
la circulation dans des espaces marginaux : des squats, un bunker, un garage,
une fonderie abandonnée. Une autre partie concernait la rencontre des
habitants et usagers de ces lieux. Partout et à chaque instant, les histoires
individuelles et l'histoire collective se croisaient et s'entrechoquaient.

Le déroulé de cet après-midi de juin 1981 a été raconté par Spoerri, et nous
pouvons suivre ainsi à distance le cheminement de la *Promenade Sentimentale*.
La première étape se déroulait au Friedenspark, où un aigle monumental
dissimule dans sa colonne des espaces où vivent des personnes sans abri.
Autour de ce monument, des restes de constructions du IIIe Reich sont à moitié
recouverts de lierre et oubliés par les passants. Spoerri et ses étudiant.e.s
sont allés rencontrer les personnes vivant là et leur ont proposé d'entrer en
dialogue avec les spectateurs du Theater der Welt. Ils ont accepté de participer
à la rencontre, et c'est ainsi que Spoerri a commencé par guider le groupe le
long de l'escalier sombre au cœur de la colonne. Au milieu de leur ascension,
François Dufrêne - dissimulé - a commencé à déclamer un *Crirythme*<fnref n="15" />. C'est
donc dans une atmosphère étrange, plutôt angoissante, que la soirée débuta.
Mais Spoerri se soucie de l'ambiance d'un groupe, « il était et est encore
aujourd'hui doué pour mettre les gens en contact les uns avec les autres<fnref n="16" /> ».
Arrivés en haut, la discussion avec les occupants du lieu s'est faite autour d'un
verre, dont il souligne qu'il était bien nécessaire pour que tous ces participants

<footnote n="15">15 1981 est l'année de l'enregistrement de *Crirythmes exprès*, la première anthologie de ses poèmes sonores.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Cat. exp. Paris, 2002 (note 6).</footnote>
très différents se détendent et se parlent. Une autre étape consistait à aller dans
le bunker de Cologne construit sur le site de la synagogue Ehrenfeld détruite
en 1938 (il est aujourd'hui devenu un lieu d'art contemporain mais il était alors
laissé à l'abandon). Arrivés près du lieu, les spectateurs ont été pris à partie par
une horde de punks surgie des fourrés. Au bout de quelques minutes, Spoerri
a sifflé et tous les punks se sont mis en formation de chorale pour se mettre à
chanter. Il s'agissait d'une performance commandée à une école d'acteurs.
Mais les vrais punks de la ville ont eu vent de cette mascarade et, à partir de ce
moment, ont cherché à intimider le groupe de spectateurs.

Comme l'émotion creuse, l'étape suivante emmenait le groupe dans une
fonderie abandonnée, l'usine Peter Stühlen, dans laquelle il fallait entrer en
passant par une brèche dans le mur et en marchant sur du verre brisé. Là, sur
de grandes tables, Spoerri avait fait installer des nappes où étaient imprimées
des photographies de ces mêmes tables recouvertes de déchets. Le menu était
composé d'une soupe à l'oignon et de bon pain, un orchestre d'étudiant.e.s
jouait du jazz. Mais la soirée ne s'arrêtait pas là. L'étape d'après a été, selon
Spoerri, la plus rude: il avait mis au point une rencontre avec des familles qui
squattaient des appartements. Celle-ci a rapidement pris des accents de
confrontation, le choc entre des spectateurs encore passifs, nourris et déjà
un peu ivres, et ces personnes, qui ouvraient les portes de leurs modestes
logements, a été très mal ressenti. Cette expérience peut être perçue comme
un cas limite des expériences sociologiques de Spoerri. L'aventure frise avec le
voyeurisme et la réaction des habitants squatteurs est révélatrice de violence
sociale<fnref n="17" />. Le groupe est donc reparti en direction d'un garage participatif loué
par des passionnés de vieilles voitures. Chaque véhicule diffusait de la musique
de son époque. Spoerri raconte : « On a mis l'arrière-grand-mère de l'une des
étudiantes avec un casque dans une voiture des années trente, d'autres dans
une voiture des années soixante dansaient le bipbop ». Enfin, la dernière étape
devidait réunir les spectateurs et les participants locaux sous une grande tente
pour le dîner et la fête de clôture. Mais, comme le dit encore Spoerri : « ça a
été un désastre parce que tout le monde avait trop bu » depuis l'apéritif
dans l'aigle du Friedenspark.

Plus que les autres peut-être, cette performance participative entremêle l'art
et la vie : les spectateurs ont été confrontés à des lieux qui résonnent avec
l'histoire de la ville, les traces matérielles laissées par la Seconde Guerre
mondiale ; mais ce parcours les a également menés aux marges actuelles de
la société, à la violence du contemporain ; ils ont été amenés à rencontrer des
personnes, à entrer dans des lieux inhabituels et peut-être à modifier leur
regard sur eux.

<footnote n="17">17 En ce sens, les œuvres les plus sociologiques ultérieures de Spoerri présentent des modalités d'expérience plus simples et moins en prise avec la réalité, comme par exemple le diner « Jamais un coup de dé », aussi appelé « Diner riches/pauvres ».</footnote>
La pratique de l'enseignement a donc permis à Spoerri de renouer avec certains de ses centres d'intérêts, qu'il avait délaissés pour privilégier son travail plastique : la mise en scène et le commissariat d'exposition. Elle a aussi constitué pour lui un lieu de liberté, car il a bénéficié au moins autant que ses étudiant.e.s de l'atmosphère d'atelier. La classe est en effet un espace d'expérimentation, loin du marché, loin des critiques, où il s'agit justement de chercher à faire jouer au maximum les normes et les cadres. Spoerri y creuse plus que des interstices, il ouvre dans l'édifice normé de l'enseignement artistique de véritables brèches où s'engouffrent le quotidien, le banal, l'espace et les gens. L'art et la vie se mêlent et se confondent. Puisque l'on apprend à être artiste, rien n'est interdit : du plaisir du récit à celui des repas partagés, l'enseignement de Spoerri passe avant tout par une volonté de dissoudre ce qu'être artiste veut dire.
Daniel Spoerri and Ray Johnson:
Intersections

Leda Cempellin

Introduction: Different attitudes towards correspondence

After visiting the archives of Daniel Spoerri<fnref n="1" /> in Bern during the summers of 2013 to 2016 and those of Ray Johnson in New York City in early 2019, I realized that questions concerning the specific circumstances of Spoerri and Johnson's acquaintance would not be answered by the scarce and scattered documentation available. Exactly when and how did Spoerri meet Johnson? Was Spoerri ever officially part of Johnson's correspondence network? Why is the available correspondence concentrated in certain periods of Spoerri's professional life and not in others? Indeed, almost all the letters from Johnson to Spoerri preserved in the Spoerri archive are either from between 1964 and 1965, during Spoerri's stay in New York City (where Johnson had been living since the late 1940s), or 1968 and 1970, the time during which Spoerri founded the Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf and subsequently the Eat Art movement. Some sketches dating from between 1988 and 1992 found in the Ray Johnson Estate archives confirm Johnson's obsession with Spoerri's Eat Art. Curiously, while the Spoerri archive houses about a dozen letters from Johnson to Spoerri, the Ray Johnson Estate contains no letters addressed to Johnson from Spoerri. Clearly, while Spoerri was a keeper, Johnson was a circulator.<fnref n="2" />

A closer look into the extraordinary evolutions of both artists reveals that
they met at a time in their lives when their work had already begun to show signif-
cant signs of maturity. Despite their different geographical provenances—

<footnote n="1">1 My heartfelt gratitude goes to Rosario Batana for permission to publish this manuscript, which has grown out of my prior research published with Vernon Press; the editors of this anthology, Déborah Laks and Jill Carrick, for their transformative feedback; DFK Paris for supporting the October 2018 Spoerri Colloque, from which this study originated, and for this publication as well; Beat Scherrer and the Spoerri Archives at the Swiss National Library for their assistance; my copyeditor, Professor Katie O'Leary; copyeditor Hayley Haupt; Maria Ilario for her assistance in researching relevant materials for this paper during my visit to the Ray Johnson Estate and for image permissions; to Dr. Pat Crawford, Director of the School of Design, South Dakota State University, for her support. Last but not least, I wish to thank Daniel Spoerri for his crucial insights on his acquaintance with Ray Johnson and Barbara Räderscheidt for having facilitated our contact.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 In our interview, Spoerri claimed that Johnson was always “busy moving people, letters, packages, all sorts of things.” Daniel Spoerri, phone interview by the author, unpubl. recording, 8 February 2019.</footnote>
Johnson having grown up in the United States and Spoerri in Europe—the thoughts behind their work present some important affinities stemming from their common foundation in Dadaism, Neo-Dadaism, and Fluxus.

Aspects of Spoerri's subsequent art seem to have been affected in part by his extraordinary encounter with Johnson. This contribution to the scholarship dedicated to Spoerri attempts to reconstruct the intersecting paths between these two artists at certain crucial moments in their careers. Of particular interest are the reciprocal influences as well as the different ways Spoerri and Johnson developed a relational component to their art-making process, released or retained control, and embraced a degree of chance.

Simultaneously and paradoxically, there were some deep and irreconcilable differences in these artists' approaches to mail art that made Spoerri ineligible for permanent inclusion in the New York Correspondance [sic] School.<fnref n="3" /> In particular, Spoerri's tendency to treat correspondence as a private matter worth keeping clashed with Johnson's view of mail art as an artistic joint venture progressively enriched through circulation. It is clear that the differing views held by Spoerri and Johnson on their correspondence are the major cause of the significant gaps in the holdings of both archives; this circumstance makes the reconstruction of interactions between these two artists largely a matter of intriguing speculation.

## Before the encounter: Biographical anecdotes and early artistic identity

Spoerri's and Johnson's earlier biographies offer some key contextual elements that help explain the development of their artistic attitudes, which, on the surface, exhibit several commonalities but, on a deeper level, present some crucial differences.

To begin, their places of origin play an important role. Raymond Edward Johnson, the champion of distance communication, was born in Detroit, Michigan, located in the Midwestern United States. In this vast region, characterized by a low density of population and geographical isolation, reducing the sense of distance through the circulation of goods via mail holds great importance. Just a few decades before Johnson was born, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. had begun distributing its mail-order catalogs, extending its reach to even the smallest rural towns.

This context elucidates Johnson's highly developed capacity to break the barriers of geographical dislocation by building correspondence networks for material exchanges.

<footnote n="3">³ This is the technical term purposefully misspelled by Johnson and used to refer to mail art (see note 50).</footnote>
Daniel Spoerri's upbringing was quite different: born Daniel Isaac Feinstein in Romania, he, along with his mother and siblings, escaped the Nazis, who had killed his father under unverified circumstances. Switzerland became his new home, and his adoptive uncle's surname, Spoerri, became his name. Spoerri has built his career around the table, which has a strong relational component. The true and deep friendship he shared with his fellow artists became a surrogate for familial intimacy; the table, as evidenced by *Topographie anédotée du hazard*, emerged as a place where tales of private life and artistic life intersect. Spoerri's art and correspondence are authentic at a deeper, biographical level than the connections Johnson created with his correspondence, in which he mixed fact and fiction for artistic purposes to the point of making one indistinguishable from the other. Johnson was the vehicle for a fast-paced progression of ideas,<fnref n="4" /> while Spoerri strived for coherence in his art making, creating at a much slower pace and thinking in terms of durability concerning materials, themes, and approaches.

Along with their earlier biographies, the artistic formations of Johnson and Spoerri preceding Fluxus somewhat reveal the opposing attitudes these two artists would develop toward circulation and what made Spoerri ill-suited for the aims of the New York Correspondance School.

Johnson's enrollment in the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the summer of 1945 greatly impacted him during his formative years.<fnref n="5" /> One particularly influential figure was former Bauhaus professor Josef Albers, who initiated an approach in his color theory course based on the notion of the “formal relationships between the elements,”<fnref n="6" /> which can be observed in his series *Homage to the Square* created a few years later. Another key figure was graphic designer Paul Rand, whose bio was included in the Bulletin but

<footnote n="4">⁴ “Johnson’s mind was like a computer; it worked rapidly: he thought of a name, and then a word that rhymed with that name or is an anagram of it, then moves from there and draws an image, that then gets reproduced over and over again, and becomes the signifier for that person or name he began with.”, “Maria Ilario on Ray Johnson”, interview by Leda Cempellin, in *Juliet* 193, June-September 2019, p. 91. This modus operandi seems like an acceleration of the development of Fluxus *intermedia* parallel to the progressive speeding up of the pace of life since late modernism.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ *Ray Johnson Estate 1927-1953*, URL: http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/timelines/1927-1953/ [accessed: 26.02.2019]. The Ray Johnson Estate preserves a few of the bulletins that were periodically issued by the school. Johnson signed the cover of the Summer 1945 bulletin, so it is safe to assume that this was his personal copy and that the highlighted portions inside, including the names of faculty teaching courses that semester, are those in which he was interested. *Black Mountain College Art Institute pamphlet*, Summer 1945, pp. 4-7, Ray Johnson Estate, box 138, drawer 3.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Frederick A. Horowitz, “What Josef Albers Taught at Black Mountain College, and What Black Mountain College Taught Albers”, in *Black Mountain Studies Journal* 1, URL: http://www.blackmountain-studiesjournal.org/volume1/1-9-frederick-a-horowitz/ [accessed: 01.09.2019]. Johnson’s correlations between words, sentences, or thoughts are to be interpreted as more formal and symbolic in nature than biographical.</footnote>
who was ultimately unable to teach that summer.<fnref n="7" /> His book *Thoughts on Design*, published in 1947 (though it is plausible that he began developing his ideas even earlier), considers collage as a means for the designer to put together “seemingly unrelated objects or ideas as a single picture.”<fnref n="8" /> Johnson found the combination of collage and mail correspondence to be the perfect tool with which to infuse his own life with art.<fnref n="9" /> It was the catalyst for the creation of a new network of ever-changing correlations between objects and the people with whom he interacted, in which even the most intimate biographical elements were to be read artistically.

In contrast to Johnson, Spoerri's introduction to the visual arts did not happen in class. In April 1955, the young professional ballet dancer turned concrete poet and director of experimental theater visited the exhibition *Le Mouvement* at the Galerie Denise René in Paris, which featured the work of Marcel Duchamp along with that of various kinetic artists.<fnref n="10" /> He decided to apply his understanding of the notion of movement in the audiovisual experiment *Material*, a four-volume series of concrete poetry, as well as in the *Edition MAT*, a collection of multiples in sculpture presented in several editions.<fnref n="11" /> In these early ventures, Spoerri was the orchestrator and leader of groups of artists brought together by his larger vision, who then responded on their own terms. While Johnson was relinquishing control over his work to constantly evolving networks, Spoerri remained the orchestrator of his collaborative ventures, in which individual contributions were clearly distinguishable, and simply shifted from one artistic domain to another.

## Encounters with Dada, Neo-Dada, and Fluxus: Different ways of challenging the notion of authorship

In the early phases of their artistic careers in the United States and Europe, respectively, Johnson and Spoerri familiarized themselves with Dada and Neo-Dada artists, making their confluence in Fluxus a natural next step.

<footnote n="7">7 Paul Rand is one of the faculty names listed on page five of the Summer 1945 Black Mountain College Bulletin; a mark next to his name suggests that Ray Johnson may have been interested in taking his class. However, some publications mention the presence of Rand that summer; others do not. I contacted the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center, and Program Director Alice Sebrell confirmed that "Paul Rand was scheduled to teach at the 1945 Summer Art Institute, but he had to cancel." Alice Sebrell, e-mail communication, 6 October 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Paul Rand, *Thoughts on Design* [1947], New York, 1951, p. 77.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 A sentence highlighted in the December 1943 Black Mountain College Bulletin states that "learning is not confined to classrooms but pervades daily life." It is, therefore, clear what attracted Johnson to this school. *Black Mountain College Bulletin* 2/3, December 1943, p. 4, Ray Johnson Estate, box 138, drawer 3. The highlights were presumably added by Johnson (see note 5).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 K. G. Pontus Hultén, *Jean Tinguely "Meta"*, Boston, 1975, p. 28.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Leda Cempellin, "From theater to the visual arts: Spoerri's debut into the art world through the *Edition MAT*", chap. 1, in *The Ideas, Identity and Art of Daniel Spoerri: Contingencies and Encounters of an "Artistic Animator"*, Wilmington, DE, 2017.</footnote>
By 1948, Johnson had moved to New York City and become acquainted
with John Cage, who also lived in an apartment in the “Boza Mansion” (as
they referred to it) “named after the building’s landlord.”<fnref n="12" /> In 1952, Cage, who
had introduced a groundbreaking pedagogical concept based on chance at
Black Mountain College,<fnref n="13" /> created the musical performance 4’33,” consisting of
three movements, in which the actual music is the chance sounds made by the
audience. This proximity to Cage must have taught Johnson a great deal about
releasing the control over one’s creative act to chance events. Johnson started
to create irregularly shaped collages he later called “moticos” (an anagram of
the word “osmotic,” meaning a kind of transfer),<fnref n="14" /> which he would send to his
friends via mail in the mid-1950s.<fnref n="15" />

Both Cage’s 4’33” and Johnson’s mail-art collages furthered the questioning
of notions of chance and authorship that had started with an incident involving
Duchamp’s *La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même*: due to mishandling
during transport, the glass composing the artwork cracked—a flaw Duchamp
accepted as part of the piece.<fnref n="16" /> Cage’s and Johnson’s work systematically
welcomed the active intervention of others: for Cage, the musical audience;
for Johnson, the recipients of the mail he sent. Johnson’s Correspondance Art
is comprised of two elements: one derived from Dada’s nonsensical approach,
namely the mixing of truth and invention, which can peacefully coexist within
the artistic space of the letter (see the Hotel Dixie’s letterhead in fig. 2); the other,
inspired by Cage’s approach, the circulation within networks, which includes
additive and subtractive qualities that escape the artist’s control. Sometimes
Johnson called for the expansion of the collaboration beyond the original sender
and recipient by requesting the letter be forwarded to other addressees. Since
there were no formal restrictions, the last recipient may not have known what
Johnson originally sent because others could have tampered with the envelope’s

<footnote n="12">12 Donna De Salvo, “Correspondences”, in id. and Catherine Gudis (eds.), *Ray Johnson: Correspondences*, exh. cat., Columbus, OH, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Paris/New York, 1999, pp. 15-42, here p. 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 “In all of his work with chance, Cage sought a balance between the rational and the irrational by allowing random events to function within the context of a controlled system.”, Marc G. Jensen, “John Cage, Chance Operations, and the Chaos Game: Cage and the ‘I ching’”, in *The Musical Times* 150/1907, Summer 2009, pp. 97-102, here p. 97, URL: www.jstor.org/stable/25597623 [accessed: 06.06.2020].</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Selected biographical chronology from De Salvo, 1999 (note 12), p. 203. It is necessary to highlight that “moticos” was a term used by Johnson to indicate a broad spectrum of elements that were in flux.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 “Cage’s influence on Johnson is suggested by his approach to collage as a performative act, and an awareness of the world itself as a collage in time and space.”, De Salvo, 1999 (note 12), p. 18.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Richard Hamilton, “The Large Glass”, in Anne D'Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine (eds.), *Marcel Duchamp*, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art/Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1989, p. 67.</footnote>
contents at some point.<fnref n="17" /> One of the major responsibilities of the postal service has always been to protect the secrecy of communication between sender and recipient through the postal seal; establishing a single communication channel between two people ensures that authorship is always clearly identifiable.<fnref n="18" /> Johnson chose to make the mail communication system part of the creative process by inviting a third party to disrupt both the two-way communication process and the notion of authorship, as it became impossible to identify individual contributions by the end of the chain.

At the other end of the spectrum, Spoerri approached the notion of authorship as a process of self-reaffirmation, enriched along the way by chance circumstances he identified and exploited. After seeing Duchamp’s work at the aforementioned *Le Mouvement* exhibition, Spoerri visited the artist’s Parisian studio and asked him to contribute work to his first *Edition MAT*. Duchamp was supportive of Spoerri’s idea and sent him his *Rotoreliefs*<fnref n="19" /> and subsequently approximately 40 “original signatures” to be applied to the multiples.<fnref n="20" /> The separation of Duchamp’s signatures from his artworks in his contribution to the *Edition MAT*, though only momentary, inspired Spoerri to embrace an expanded notion of authorship. In 1962, Fluxus artist and gallerist Arthur “Addi” Køpcke invited Spoerri and others to participate in the annual Danish art association exhibit *Majudstillingen*. Since there was very little time to prepare, Køpcke volunteered to produce the works for the artists involved by imitating their styles, with which he was quite familiar. Spoerri printed and signed some *brevets de garantie* to be added to Køpcke’s trap pictures to authenticate them as licensed works.<fnref n="21" /> Taking the dissociation between author and work introduced by Duchamp a step further, Spoerri placed his signature on a work that was made using his process and resembled something he could have made but that had actually been made by another artist. In doing so, he affirmed his authorship of a collaborative venture.

<footnote n="17">17 “Some alter, some add, some subtract, some detract, some discard, some hoard, and others conscientiously forward the materials on their appointed rounds. Ray Johnson says he doesn’t care what is done, that there are no rules, but he once circulated a list of people dropped from the NYCS for various offenses.”, William S. Wilson, “Ray Johnson: NY Correspondance School”, in *Art and Artists* 1/1, April 1966, pp. 54–57, here p. 55, URL: http://images.rayjohnsonestate.com/www_rayjohnsonestate_com/Wilson NYCS.pdf [accessed: 26.02.2019].</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Beginning in the post-World War II era, the Post Office Department began witnessing a steady increase of junk mail and even forms of unlawful or obscene communication. The postal seal was taken very seriously by the Postal Inspector, who could not break it even if he suspected that a particular letter contained such illegal communications. Arthur E. Summerfield and Charles Hurd, *U.S. Mail: The Story of the United States Postal Service*, New York, 1960, p. 130.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Katerina Vatsella, *Edition MAT: Daniel Spoerri, Karl Gerstner und das Multiple. Die Entstehung einer Kunstform*, Bremen, 1998, pp. 39 and 214–215.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Marcel Duchamp, letter to Daniel Spoerri, 1 December 1959, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, Afr. 585y.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Peter van der Meijden, “The Festum Fluxorum in Copenhagen, 23–28 November 1962”, in *Tania Ørum (ed.), *A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950–1975*,* Leiden, 2016, pp. 492–507, here p. 498.</footnote>
In those years, while Johnson completely relinquished control of his creative work to others in a shared but secret exchange involving additive and/or subtractive components, Spoerri retained and expanded his authorship throughout the artistic process, even when it was collaborative in nature.

## Spoerri and Johnson's encounter in New York City

Spoerri and Johnson must have at least been aware of each other prior to their first encounter: during the Fluxus Yam Festival, held in New York City from 11 to 12 May 1963, Johnson exhibited alongside Spoerri's earliest Fluxus friends: Køpcke, Robert Filliou, Emmett Williams, and Dieter Roth.<fnref n="22" /> This fact suggests that, by then, Spoerri and Johnson had most likely at least heard of each other through mutual friends. Johnson's earliest dated correspondence in the Spoerri archive occurred on 10 July 1963, before they met in the United States. The letter is addressed to someone named George, not to Spoerri, even though the sender is Ray Johnson. It is not explicitly indicated whether he was referring to George Maciunas, George Brecht, or someone else. However, given that he writes, "I hope things are well, with you and [sic] that you continue to make major contributions [sic] to American Art,"<fnref n="23" /> he was most likely writing to Maciunas, who had migrated to Europe. In the fall of 1961, Maciunas had indeed closed his AG Gallery in New York City after giving Johnson his first show and moved to Germany. There, he took advantage of the supplies at his day job working for the US Army and Air Force post office to form a complex network of multimedia artists from the United States, Europe, and Japan through correspondence; together they organized several Fluxus Festivals at various locations.<fnref n="24" /> Spoerri soon became involved in Fluxus, and in October and November 1962, he organized the Festival of Misfits at the Gallery One in London.<fnref n="25" /> Assuming the intended recipient of Johnson's 1963 letter was in fact Maciunas, it is possible that, at some point, Johnson chose to send or forward this letter to Spoerri, as Maciunas had become a common link between the two artists and their cultures. In our phone conversation, Spoerri claimed that it was a habit of Johnson's to send to a recipient someone else's materials,<fnref n="26" /> which corroborates this hypothesis.

<footnote n="22">22 Ken Friedman (ed.), *The Fluxus Reader*, Hoboken, NJ, 1998, p. 259.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Ray Johnson, letter to George, 10 July 1963, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 592.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 Colby Chamberlain, "Design in Flux", in *Art in America* 102/9, October 2014, pp. 122-123, accessed on the EBSCOhost Research Platform.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Hannah Higgins, *Fluxus Experience*, Berkeley/Los Angeles, 2002, p. 135.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Spoerri, 2019 (note 2).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_47.png" /><figcaption>1 Daniel Spoerri, 31 Variations on a Meal: Eaten by Ray Johnson, 1964</figcaption></figure>

Spoerri claims that it was Dorothy Podber who introduced him to Johnson, but the exact date and circumstances escape his memory<sup>27</sup> (they also cannot be reconstructed from the currently accessible records). Johnson maintained a friendly relationship with Podber. In his 1964 report of the New York Correspondance School, in which he surveyed existing members and those remaining in the network, he wrote: "Dorothy Podber we love you and will never drop you."<sup>28</sup> One of Spoerri's very few recollections of Johnson is that, at the time of their encounter, he asked to visit his apartment but Johnson refused, inviting him to come the following day. When Spoerri went to Johnson's loft with Podber, he found it completely empty; upon opening the door to another room, however, they saw all of Johnson's furniture and belongings inside. Spoerri defined this visit as a "performance"; he added that that these types of happenings were part of Johnson's art and aimed to put people "in a strange situation."<sup>29</sup>

Spoerri's exploitation of the concept of interchangeability through the intro-
duction of the aforementioned *brevet de garantie* also has interesting parallels
with the attitude of the American Pop artist Andy Warhol. During an interview

<footnote n="27">27 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Ray Johnson, *New York Correspondance School Report, 1964*, part II, Ray Johnson Estate, Box 48, 19c.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 "He was always astonishing people...I liked him very much.": Spoerri, 2019 (note 2).</footnote>
with Gene Swenson in *Art News* from November 1963, Warhol stated: “I think it would be so great if more people took up silk screens so that no one would know whether my picture was mine or somebody else’s.”<fnref n="30" /> Warhol combined the ideas of painting and graphic design in his approach to the notion of imperfections, considering them slight variations applied to the repeated treatment of a subject matter, each iteration exhibiting something unique, like an evolving logo design. Warhol’s work presented a reflection on the concept of variation that must have appealed to Spoerri, who had already begun working in that direction with his literary and artistic editions in the late 1950s. Johnson had known Warhol since at least 1956, when both were working “as graphic designers and [designing] book jackets for New Directions, New York and other publications.”<fnref n="31" /> Although not documented, it is logical to speculate that Johnson introduced Warhol to Spoerri, who then invited Johnson, Warhol, and Duchamp, among others, to participate in his 31 *Variations on a Meal*, a series exhibited at the Allan Stone Gallery for three days in March 1964.<fnref n="32" />

*Eaten by Johnson* (fig. 1) represents Johnson’s modifications to a standard table gestalt designed by Spoerri (with the same glasses, dishes, cutlery, and flowers placed in the same positions at the beginning of each artist’s meal). The *tableaux-piège* (trapped tables), captured after the meal was consumed, must be considered the ‘archaeological’ relic at the intersection of Spoerri’s staging of the performance and Johnson’s artistic intervention; the gap between art and life is closed by the actual meal consumed by the artist. The remains on the table that are extraneous to the original arrangement conjure possible explanations in the minds of the viewers. Mysteriously, there is a cork bottle stopper on the table, but the bottle has disappeared. It is reasonable to believe that once Spoerri had arranged the table for Johnson’s meal, he did not manipulate it while the performance was in progress by removing props. Is it then possible that Johnson—as the circulator—engaged in risky behavior by taking the bottle with him on his way home?<fnref n="33" /> If so, this could have been the inspiration for Spoerri’s later reflections on cultural norms. Johnson was keenly aware of the cultural differences between him and Spoerri and explicitly exploited them, as

<footnote n="30">30 Andy Warhol, interview by Gene Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from Eight Painters, Part I”, in *Art News* 62/7, November 1963, pp. 26, 60–61, here p. 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 *Ray Johnson Estate 1954-1964*, URL: http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/timelines/1954-1964/[accessed: 19.02.2019].</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 The original leaflet indicates 29 *Variations on a Meal*. Daniel Spoerri, 29 *Variations on a Meal*, March 19-22, 1964, exhibition leaflet, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr.58u.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 The absence of the bottle in *Eaten by Ray Johnson* could represent a subtle reference to the restrictive American laws concerning the carrying and consumption of alcohol in public. Spoerri was introduced to American culture during his 1964-1965 stay in New York City. In our 2013 interview, Spoerri recalled that Johnson had lived ten blocks from him at the time, so he would drop by his hotel at night and leave things for him. One day, one of Johnson’s instructions sent Spoerri to the second floor of a specific address in Harlem (which, at the time, was a very dangerous area), where he risked being shot. Daniel Spoerri, interview by the author, Seggiano, Italy, 10 June 2013. This part of the interview is unpublished.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_48.png" /></figure>

43RD STREET WEST OF TIMES SQUARE • NEW YORK 36, N. Y.

WISCONSIN 7-6000

TELETYPE NY1-4622

700 ROOMS WITH BATH

21" TELEVISION-RADIO

AIR CONDITIONED

<figure><img src="image_49.png" /><figcaption>first blue knife</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_50.png" /></figure>

November 16, 1964

Daniel,

I tried to call you and Kichka yesterday afternoon at 3:30 to go to a tea party but you was not home. I am sorry I could not go to lunch with you when you called ear lier but I was a sleep. I usually sleep until I am sure it is time to get up and I am not too depressed. But you was not there and I had thought possibly of asking if I could borrow Kichka for the tea party because that would have been funnier for her and I to go without you.

The reject story I found in my mail box today made me feel sad. My book about death is my own and perhaps there will be a Daniel Spoerri page.

At the tea party was a artist from Chili name Enrique Castro-Cid and his wife who is a thin fashion model for Richard Avedon and he told stories about Mexican abortions and remembered meeting me last summer when I was very drunk and pouring champagne on Anne Wilson's head I was wearing a bright green shirt and was sun burned and passing out green cards. That sure sounded like me.

Also at the tea party was Farley Granger, a Hollywood movie star of years ago aloof and wearing an interesting belt.

I have for Kichka an object with a hole in it made of bone for hanging around the neck it will not ti

<figure><img src="image_51.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_52.png" /></figure>

RESERVATIONS FOR ANY

<figure><img src="image_53.png" /></figure>

MAY BE MADE AT OUR FRONT DESK

BOSTON
HOTEL ESSEX

ALBANY

NEW YORK
HOTEL DIXIE

BOSTON
HOTEL AVERY

HOTEL WELLINGTON

NEW YORK
HOTEL GEORGE WASHINGTON

<figure><img src="image_54.png" /></figure>
evidenced by some of their correspondence: in a letter dated 3 March, Johnson addresses Spoerri as “Dear Daniel, innocent Frenchy a broad [sic].”<fnref n="34" />

Spoerri’s work after his return to Europe suggests the impact of his encounter with Johnson, visible in both an acute awareness of cultural norms and in the creation of distance communication networks. When Spoerri moved to the small island of Symi between 1966 and 1967, he started a diary to record his culinary explorations and revelations as an outlander about the correlations between food and cultural norms; this culminated in the *Itinéraire gastronomique pour un couple, sur une île grècque, dédié aux 23 abonnés du Petit Colosse de Symi*.<fnref n="35" /> At the same time, from the isolated island, Spoerri launched *Le Petit Colosse de Symi*, a series of newsletters produced in Greece and distributed by the Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, for which he elected his Fluxus friends as correspondents in various areas of Europe and in the United States.<fnref n="36" />

## After the USA: Reciprocal influences

During Spoerri’s stay in New York City, the two artists became involved in each other’s art-making process: Johnson participated in the series 31 *Variations on a Meal* (*Eaten by ...*), and, in turn, involved Spoerri in his correspondence circle.

The Spoerri Archives contain at least three letters sent by Johnson in November 1964, while Spoerri was temporarily staying in an apartment in Stanton Street. In particular, an unsigned letter from 16 November is clearly addressed to Spoerri and references Spoerri’s then girlfriend, Jacqueline “Kichka” Baticheff (fig. 2). In contrast to its impersonal flavor, because of Johnson’s decision to appropriate the letterhead from a “non-place,”<fnref n="37" /> namely the Hotel Dixie, the letter in question contains what one could consider confidential matter hinting at a very intimate friendship: Johnson writes, “I usually sleep until I am sure it is time to get up and I am not too depressed.”<fnref n="38" /> At the same time, however, one might question whether this personal information

<footnote n="34">34 Ray Johnson, letter to Daniel Spoerri, “March 3-a-baBy” [1965?], Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 592.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 Chapter four, “Eat Art: Beyond Food,” provides an in-depth explanation of how the well-traveled Spoerri’s isolation on a small island increased his awareness of the relationship between food-related behaviors and different cultural norms. See Cempellin, 2017 (note 11), pp. 111–118.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 Daniel Spoerri, *Le Petit Colosse de Symi, The Nothing Else Review* 2, 1966–1967, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 136.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Augé defines the “non-place” as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity.”, Marc Augé, *Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity*, trans. John Howe, London/New York, 1995, pp. 77–78, URL: https://monoskop.org/images/3/3c/Auge_Marc_Non-Places_Introduction_to_an_Anthropology_of_Supermodernity.pdf [accessed: 06.06.2020].</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 Ray Johnson, letter to Daniel Spoerri, 16 November 1964, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 592.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_55.png" /><figcaption>3 Ray Johnson, letter to Daniel Spoerri, November 21, 1964</figcaption></figure>

might be fabricated: that the letter itself functions as a performance, like the
empty spaces Spoerri found when entering Johnson's apartment.

Johnson's illegitimate use of someone else's letterhead, which occurs in
much of his correspondence, is rooted in his awareness of a much larger issue
faced by the US Post Office Department since the second postwar period—
namely, the increase of unlawful forms of communication between senders
and receivers, whose privacy was protected from postal inspection through the
inviolable secrecy of the mail.<fnref n="39" /> The fact that it was very unlikely he would be discovered intrigued Johnson and drove him to take some risks, including impersonating someone else. (fig. 3).

One envelope in the Spoerri Archives, dated 21 November 1964 (Fig. 3), features Spoerri's address in Paris, stricken through typewritten marks, and his first address in Stanton Street, New York below. The sender is Johnson and the return address, Suffolk Street, located just a few blocks away; however, the postmark reads Phoenix, Maryland. The letter contains a brief message from Grace Glueck—at the time, a high-profile art news editor for the *New York Times*—asking when Spoerri's gambling event would take place. Included is a photocopied page citing a local law prohibiting gambling. Was the author of the letter Glueck or Johnson? Glueck's name does not appear in the list of contributors to the historical Whitney exhibition of correspondence art.<fnref n="40" /> It seems more likely that the author was Johnson, who possibly used the anonymity offered by a typewriter to impersonate someone else and drove three hours to the post office in Maryland.

Despite adopting the Fluxus-inspired, joking spirit of the collage as a means of artistic expression, Johnson was very adroit and methodical in gathering information when he wanted to involve someone in his correspondence network. His working method was characterized by a thematic approach. As William S. Wilson claims, Johnson would gather information about people he met so he could tailor the correspondence based on what he knew about them:

> "Ray Johnson first notices something about a person, an image which might be central or marginal, and then he fills an envelope with scraps of images that comment on or add to or combine with that image [...]. He files a person under something in his mind, and then sends along through the mails whatever he feels belongs in the same file."<fnref n="41" />

For instance, a collage Johnson sent to Spoerri on an unknown date (fig. 4) contains several loose fragments including a photographic portrait of Spoerri and some other images that are evocative of his love of food and company, drinking and partying, and interest in women.

Spoerri's storytelling genius met Johnson's contagious correspondence process when Spoerri published the US Fluxus edition of *Topographie* through Something Else Press in 1966. The publisher's announcement invited subscribers to mail in further anecdotes correlated to the objects, people, and places cited in

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Summerfield/Hurd, 1960 (note 18), p. 130.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Ray Johnson, “New York Correspondance School”, exh. leaflet, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 2 September-6 October 1970, Ray Johnson Estate, box 51, folder 2e: 1970-79.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Wilson, 1966 (note 17), p. 54.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_56.png" /><figcaption>4 Ray Johnson, collage [loose fragments, rearranged for display], n.d.</figcaption></figure>

the book to further expand the never-ending network of contextual knowledge.<fnref n="42" />
This request was part of a declared intent to periodically issue supplements to
the book or new editions. In this process of synthesizing correspondence and
storytelling, Spoerri further developed his reflections on the notion of variations
that had started with the *Edition MAT*, which he referred to as the “original in
series.”<fnref n="43" /> By staging the evolution of his works through variations and drawing
from Johnson’s use of correspondence networks, Spoerri came to understand
that projects could be built from a distance and variations could be created over
time.<fnref n="44" /> Additionally, Johnson’s letters, with their inextricable mixture of truths

<footnote n="42">42 Higgins, the publisher, indeed received some submissions, for instance, a letter from the Canadian critic Arnold Rockman. The analysis and comparison of the various editions of *Topographie* falls outside the purview of this scholarly contribution; however, I believe that Spoerri, whose efforts extended in multiple directions, intended to launch a creative provocation rather than to programmatically follow through with this idea. For more on this episode and more on the Fluxus edition of *Topographie* in general, see Cempellin, 2017 (note 11), p. 100.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Wies Smals, “MAT: een gesprek met Spoerri en Gerstner”, [author’s trans.], in *Museum journaal* 15/1, February 1970, p. 31, PARA 4, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 98a.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 See note 42.</footnote>
and inventions, deeply resonated
with Spoerri's fascination with inter-
rogating anecdotes through story-
telling; he developed this interest
over the following decades with
projects, such as the *Musée Sentimen-
tal* and *Pharmacie Bretonne*.

After Spoerri’s time in the United
States, Johnson’s correspondence
seems to stop and then intensify
again between 1968 and 1971.
When Spoerri founded Eat Art as a
series of post-Fluxus multisensory
events, unfolding over the years in
both localized and dislocated venues,
he had Johnson’s full attention. In
December 1970, Johnson wrote to
Spoerri suggesting that a banquet
event (whether real or fictional)
of the “New York Corraspondence
School” (with a different misspelling,
perhaps alluding to Spoerri’s
variations?) should be advertised “as
a Daniel Spoerri Eat Art Gallery
Spoerri.”<fnref n="45" /> Evidently, Johnson—who
early on had chosen the technique
of collage to connect distant people,
places, and times—understood that
Eat Art went beyond the staging of
individual events to encompass
variations of relational happenings
spread across large expanses of space and time.<fnref n="46" /> (fig. 5)

On 30 June 1971, Johnson mailed a letter to Spoerri at his Eat Art Galerie in Düsseldorf. It was a sketch in black marker of what look like hooks attached to the top of a rod or a pump with a bulb towards the bottom (fig. 5).<fnref n="47" /> Its sketchy nature leaves it open to interpretation: perhaps it is a metaphor for creativity as a pump that produces new ideas to illuminate the bulb or a

<figure><img src="image_57.png" /><figcaption>5 Ray Johnson, “Eat Art Galerie,” June 30, 1971, Poster suggestion for exhibition?</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="45">45 Ray Johnson, letter to Daniel Spoerri, 27 December 1970, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 592.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46 See Cecilia Novero, *Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art*, Minneapolis, 2010, p. 156.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47 Ray Johnson, letter to Daniel Spoerri, 30 June 1971, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, GFr.716. The date is reported on the envelope inside the frame.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_58.png" /><figcaption>6 Ray Johnson, Spoon on plate with phallic cut-out, 1.30.91 "For Daniel Spoerri 12.30.88; 12.20.89" written below</figcaption></figure>

metaphor for Spoerri himself—a catalyst with the potential to hook creative ideas coming at him from all directions. In any case, this letter could have been a suggestion for a poster or an exhibition proposal for Eat Art that Johnson was submitting via correspondence as an end in itself. Perhaps this was Johnson's way of complimenting Spoerri on his generative and prolific approach to art, or maybe Johnson was showing Spoerri a way to imagine the banquet through correspondence.
A sketch dedicated to Spoerri bearing two dates, 1988 and 1989 (fig. 6), reveals Johnson’s obsession with Eat Art, which continued long after the establishment of the movement in Europe. It is impossible to know whether or not Johnson meant to send this to Spoerri at some point; it is now held in the Ray Johnson Archives along with some other sketches related to the theme of Eat Art made roughly during the same period. The sketch in question features a spoon resting on a plate—a clear reference to banquets. Some elongated shapes in dark ink seem to allude to fingers and are quite phallic in nature. One of these shapes has been cut out, allowing the surface on which the sketch is placed to show through as if it were penetrating the image. This subtle allusion to food and women, both well-known passions of Spoerri’s,<fnref n="48" /> points to the preservation of life through nourishment and reproduction. Indeed, during the Henkel banquet in late October 1970, which inaugurated the Eat Art movement, Spoerri himself stated, “I realized that this one glued moment was only a lightning second in the course of a whole cycle, which means life and death, decay and rebirth.”<fnref n="49" />

Conclusion: the paradox of attraction and exclusion

On 8 February 2019, in a phone interview with an almost 89-year-old Daniel Spoerri, I asked the artist about the origin and nature of his acquaintance with Ray Johnson. He answered by highlighting the term “dance,” which is also contained in the title of the major 1970 retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, *New York Correspondance School*, as Johnson chose to have it misspelled.<fnref n="50" /> The show featured the work of Johnson and that of artists within his network, including some from the United States, others who were originally from somewhere else but had relocated to the United States, and even artists living outside the United States, such as Ian Milliss from Australia and Gary Lee-Nova from Canada.<fnref n="51" /> Daniel Spoerri’s name does not appear on the list of participants of this major exhibition. However, an imaginary seating chart from Morocco, dated 21 February 1969, features a rabbit head of Spoerri among eighty other heads bearing the names of artists well-known to Spoerri, such as Arman, Christo, Warhol, and several of the artists on the list of participants

<footnote n="48">48 In the book *Lo Spoerri di Spoerri* (Vercelli, 2008), which is the Italian translation of the 2001 German edition *Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri* (Basel/Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001), the artist examines thoughts, events, and encounters related to various moments in his artistic career, including several anecdotes and allusions to women and food.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 Daniel Spoerri, "Introductory speech at the Eat Art Banquet at Henkel's", 29 October 1970, Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives, AFr. 567k.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50 A manual correction in pen, presumably added by Johnson, is visible in the list of contributors to the 1970 exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, Ray Johnson Archives, box 48, envelope 39c.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 Included in the archives of the Ray Johnson Estate is a list with the objects received from the participants of the exhibition on various dates between July and August 1970 as well as their addresses.</footnote>
of the Whitney Museum exhibition.<fnref n="52" /> In 1976, Johnson received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to document the New York Correspondance School: the extensive list does not include Spoerri’s name.<fnref n="53" />

In our phone interview, Spoerri explained that he did not remember much about Johnson because they had never become close: their personal interactions were limited by the performative nature of their communication. The information contained in Johnson’s letters, including those that appear most ‘personal’ in nature (see fig. 2), could either be true or invented—there is no way to find out which. This aspect of Johnson’s modus operandi must have fascinated Spoerri, who had already started to incorporate storytelling in his art with *Topographie* a couple of years before they met. However, the lack of authenticity and depth in their relationship prevented Spoerri from including Johnson in his projects following his stay in the United States, including, presumably, Eat Art.<fnref n="54" /> Spoerri’s relational art is a biographical extension of himself in time: *Topographie* narrates the comings and goings of Spoerri’s friends in his apartment at the Hotel Carcassonne, what they were served, what they brought or removed, and what they consumed. The Giardino di Daniel Spoerri, Spoerri’s sculpture garden in Seggiano, Italy, intentionally features only work from his friends,<fnref n="55" /> and Johnson was not among them. Given that Spoerri never had access to the ‘real’ Johnson, their artistic relationship terminated with the end of their physical proximity, when Spoerri moved back to Europe. The exclusion was mutual. In our conversation, Spoerri claimed that Johnson had never fully considered him a part of the New York Correspondance School because Spoerri only sometimes followed Johnson’s enclosed instructions to forward his letters.<fnref n="56" />

While this encounter between two major modernist artists has left some scattered evidence and intriguing anecdotal tracks that provide crucial insights into reciprocal influences within their divergent artistic approaches, it has also left many questions unanswered. Any art historical effort to reconstruct a linear chain of events is frustrated at this point in time. Paradoxically, a mixture of historical reconstruction and speculative guesswork is most suitable in the study of these artists, whose creativity was nourished by an anecdotal attitude and whose artistic identities thrived in their common roots in Fluxus—albeit each on his own terms.

<footnote n="52">52 Ray Johnson, “The NYCS Rabat, Morocco”, 21 February 1969, Ray Johnson Estate, Box 116, Binder 36.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 “I have drawn silhouettes of the following people, who have kindly posed for me”, Ray Johnson, “Silhouette University”, 16 December 1976, Ray Johnson Estate, box 125, binder 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54 Spoerri founded his Giardino, where only work from the artist’s friends is displayed, in 1997; Johnson died two years earlier. This would not have prevented Spoerri from posthumously including him, as he did with other artists, but he chose not to include Johnson.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">55 Daniel Spoerri, interview by Leda Cempellin, “Hic Terminus Haeret – Qui Risiede il Confine”, in *Gli Artisti del Giardino di Daniel Spoerri*, exh. cat., Rottweil, Forum Kunst Rottweil, Rottweil, 2013, pp. 12–15, here p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56 Spoerri, 2019 (note 2).</footnote>
# Re-collecting Natural History:
Spoerri in Vienna (2012)

Cecilia Novero

This essay analyses contemporary artist Daniel Spoerri’s 2012 retrospective exhibition titled *Ein Inkompetenter Dialog*<fnref n="1" /> held at the Natural History Museum Vienna (NHM). The exhibition comprised a selection of works from Spoerri’s oeuvre shown alongside examples of the museum’s specimens. I argue that *Ein Inkompetenter Dialog*<fnref n="2" />, both as a collection of Spoerri’s works and as an archive of the artist’s career, playfully calls into question the ‘nature’ of art, the presentation of nature in the Natural History Museum Vienna, and the temporality of the archive and natural history. Much of Spoerri’s oeuvre involves the reworking and assemblage of his own collections of found objects. These imaginative assemblages, which merge human and non-human life, present concrete visions of alternative natural histories. Further, they prompt us to rethink natural history from a multispecies perspective, where humans and non-humans function as co-agents, and where history and natural history are fused. In the following pages, I shall suggest that Spoerri’s creative exploration of the material archives of natural history presents both an alternative approach to re-collecting the past, and the possibility of writing history with an eye to a non-anthropocentric future. Over the last twenty years or so, natural history museums have increasingly enlisted artists to work and exhibit in their spaces, either by way of artist in residence programs or through commissions. Rather than simply providing another setting, natural history museums encourage artists to interact with their collections and displays as well as with the history and function of the museums themselves. As Bergit Arends, a former curator of the Natural History Museum London, states, the artist’s role in this case is “to provoke and challenge the Museum’s understanding of itself [...] to disrupt engrained perceptions for the benefit of the Museum, to change its course and to reveal new knowledge in this process.”<fnref n="2" /> In turn, the artists have used the institutional settings as alternative spaces of exhibition insofar as the natural history museums stand apart from the institutional and market-oriented art worlds.

<footnote n="1">1 I thank Daniel Spoerri and Barbara Räderscheidt for providing crucial information about Spoerri’s *Inkompetenter Dialog?* My thanks also go to Gautam Ghosh for his precious comments on an earlier version of this essay, as well as to the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury, in particular to Philip Armstrong. This essay is a revised version of “Art in the Archives of Natural History: The Temporalities of Spoerri’s Ein Inkompetenter Dialog?” in *seminar* 53/3, 2017, pp. 251–274.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 Bergit Arends, “Contemporary arts in the Natural History Museum London: symbiosis and disruption”, in *Jcom* 8/2, 2009, pp. 1–3, here p. 2.</footnote>
In recent years, a number of artists have carved a niche by carrying out archival artist projects, mainly site-specific but in some cases process oriented, which have potentially critical and institutive implications.<fnref n="3" /> The art set in natural history museums is often archival in that the artists work with the museums' collections to reanimate the crowded yet silent exhibition spaces and enliven the typically sedate specimens and displays. For example, for her 2007 exhibition *Little Savages* at the Natural History Museum London, Tessa Farmer constructed displays of taxidermied animals preyed upon by a painstakingly fabricated imaginary species of hybrid parasite-fairies. Drawing on her study of the parasitic lives of Lepidoptera larvae, which feed on the internal organs of caterpillars, Farmer's exhibition served to insert the magical, dark, and in many ways aesthetic themes of symbiosis, ecology, and decay into the display cabinet.<fnref n="4" />

With Mark Dion’s 2007 exhibition *Systema Metropolis*, also held at the Natural History Museum London, the visitor could examine, among other things, the outcomes of the collaborative fieldwork of the artist and the museum scientists in the urban natural areas of London, including the graves of Karl Marx, Thomas Huxley, and Emmeline Pankhurst.<fnref n="5" /> Prior to the exhibition, the museum’s entomologists, soil experts, and molecular biologists carried out a series of taxonomic experiments around the graves based on the classical morphological observations of Carl Linnaeus and contemporary molecular analysis. The outcomes of these cross-disciplinary experiments were displayed in a multi-media visual format comprising installations, paintings, displays, and object art. Somewhat uncannily, the grave of Charles Darwin’s acolyte Huxley turned out to be the most biodiverse. Nonetheless, this too could be explained scientifically, as Huxley’s grave lies under an oak, a tree generally regarded as having relatively high numbers of associated species.

Directed at the investigation of nature as discourse and discipline, Dion’s art focuses on exposing the pitfalls of ‘representation’ while moving beyond institutional critique. Instead, his work approaches scientific methodology with an eye to repurposing it or at least refuelling it with alternative strands of imagination by using playfulness to rethink the knotted relations between humans and their environment. Nonetheless, despite its subtle and playful eloquence, in explicitly dealing with the issue of nature, Dion’s work remains

<footnote n="3">³ See the lectures and discussions promoted by the partnership of the *Natural History Museum - Queens Museum*, in particular the talks by Mark Dion, Hans Haacke, and Gavin Grendon at the inauguration of the project on 14 September 2014, URL: http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org [accessed: 04.02.2017], Mark Dion, Hans Haacke, and Gavin Grendon, "Natural History Museum - Queens Museum", *YouTube*, 14 September 2014, URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFqyuCPQwfc [accessed: 01.02.2017].</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ Giovanni Aloi and Eric Frank, “In Conversation with Tessa Farmer”, in *Antennae*, 1/3, 2007, pp. 16–25.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Matt Brown, “Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis”, in *natura.com*, 15 June 2007, URL: http://blogs.nature.com/london/2007/06/15/mark-dion-systema-metropolis [accessed: 02.02.2017].</footnote>
somewhat blind to the questions of if and how art manifests its own natural-
historical temporality.

Notwithstanding their differences, the works of Farmer and Dion share what Hal Foster has called the “archival impulse” or the desire to render present the invisible, lost, or displaced.<fnref n="6" /> Following Foster, these art projects can be said to manifest an intention to partially and personally compile inventories of the vast amounts of material found in natural history museums with the aim of excavating new connections and meanings. Rather than aiming to rescue or conserve the archival artefacts (as natural history museums have done since the nineteenth century), the artists seek to momentarily insert them into new cultural, aesthetic, and scientific contexts. In doing so, the artists probe the museums’ desire to inventory, classify, and display life, whether as art, science, or both. For example, Dion pits the common critique of taxonomic order against the uncontroversial contemporary ecological discourse on biodiversity, highlighting the conundrum that the conservation of biodiversity is dependent on taxonomic work; for her part, Farmer questions the tainted histories of museum conservation and collecting.

In the most incisive and provocative cases, art exhibitions in natural history museums seek to either interrupt the world of scientific displays by producing jarring temporal dissonances or by presenting themselves alongside, atop, or against the collections. From a Benjaminian perspective, the works take the form of allegories by incarnating the natural historical processes that the museums wish to interpret and illustrate. According to Walter Benjamin, allegories are manifestations of the traces of an artwork's natural life (*natürliche Geschichte*) as a dialectical process of singularity and repetition.<fnref n="7" />

Among the most poignant artistic interventions in natural history museums, I argue, are those that interrogate the relations between historical change, the temporal scales of natural history, and the nature of art, by which I mean the persistence through history of definitions of art. In this respect, Daniel Spoerri’s exhibition *Ein Inkompetenter Dialog*, which launched the art program at the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2012, is a case in point.

Spoerri's *Ein Inkompetenter Dialog*, comprising a retrospective of the artist's work, was displayed in two rooms alongside selected specimens from the museum's collection. These assemblages were set apart from the museum's other exhibition spaces, and the two rooms his works occupied were temporarily altered at Spoerri's request to more closely resemble a 'neutral' exhibition space. Nonetheless, as I see it, Spoerri's assemblages importantly dialogued with the Museum's exhibits. Indeed, as a curated selection of Spoerri's own objects,

<footnote n="6">⁶ Hal Foster, "An Archival Impulse", in *October* 110, 2004, here pp. 3-22.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ On the concept of allegory as it relates to natural history in Walter Benjamin, cf. Beatrice Hanssen, *Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels*, Berkeley/Los Angeles, c.1998. This is still the definitive book on Benjamin's notion of natural history.</footnote>
crucially as a “retrospective”, his works figured here, in the National History
Museum Vienna, as “specimens”. The selected specimens of Spoerri’s object
art ostensibly served not only as representatives of his oeuvre but also as
the key principles guiding his art. The idea of a retrospective, furthermore,
temporalized the spatial relationship between Spoerri’s object-based art,
the museum’s systematized and taxonomized collection, and ultimately the
natural historical processes that undelie them both. The concept of the
retrospective itself typically aims to capture the continuities and discontinuities
in an artist’s life’s work. Spoerri’s exhibition temporalized the concept further
and differently, in that it juxtaposed it against, confronted it with, and
comprehended it within the larger evolutionary mechanisms of nature as
captured in the museum.

Furthermore, by devising his exhibition as a retrospective, Spoerri was able
to effectively focus on the temporality of art. Thus, unlike other site-specific
commissioned art such as Dion's and Farmer's, Spoerri's work highlighted the
connections (and disconnections) between the life of art and natural history, and
the ways artists and natural historians go about both. Unlike Dion and Farmer,
who move as artists but also as 'field researchers' in the natural history museum,
Spoerri came to the Vienna Natural History Museum as a lay naturalist,
a keen amateur of natural history, and a passionate collector. As Spoerri
has stated in several interviews, he loves collecting and has long purchased
used items at flea markets, but not however to simply preserve or order
them. Rather, he integrates these old and worn objects into his assemblages,
and thereby consigns new life to them. Nonetheless, Spoerri clarifies that he
is not attached to the individual items he acquires, and thus does not call
himself a true collector.

The “incompetence” of the dialogue to which the title of Spoerri’s exhibition
refers appears to ensue from the irreverent yet caring and delightful curiosity
and attention to objects that Spoerri associates with “Universaldilettantismus.”<fnref n="8" />
This term also aptly describes Spoerri’s critical approach to object making, in
that he always leaves the seams and sprues of the items he fixes, glues, and casts
in bronze intact. Moreover, the title, *Inkompetenter Dialog?*, gestures to the fact
that *Dilettantismus* originally informed the practices out of which natural history
museums were born in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the question mark at
the end of the title, rather than simply instilling doubt, signals that Spoerri’s work
begs the questions of competence and dialogue: Is the artist an incompetent
archivist? What is competence? Is the work in dialogue with the collection and
collecting? Alternatively, as Spoerri’s exhibition brings to the fore, the title raises
the question of whether the museum is able to contain the temporal disorder
of its specimens, their origins, and their history, and subject them to a univocal
order.

<footnote n="8">8 Heidi Violand-Hobi, *Daniel Spoerri: Biographie und Werk*, Munich, 1998, p. 68.</footnote>
However, the key factor that distinguishes *Inkompetenter Dialog?* from the art most commonly found in natural history museums is that Spoerri was not commissioned to address museum practices or tainted histories. Rather, as a retrospective of his own work set in the halls of the Natural History Museum, *Inkompetenter Dialog?* focused on folding art into natural history and, above all, folding the contemporary into evolutionary temporalities.<fnref n="9" /> Indeed, through the imaginative juxtaposition of the Natural History Museum’s specimens and the specimens of Spoerri’s art, the exhibition prompted the viewer to rethink both history and natural history from the perspective of multispecies entanglements, where the human and non-human intertwine and function as co-agents, or, as Donna Haraway puts it, “messmates at the table”.<fnref n="10" /> As I endeavour to show, by merging human and non-human ‘life,’ Spoerri’s inventive assemblages engendered probable evolutionary variations and variants, thereby transforming that which has been, first, into that which could have been and, then, —through the belatedness of historical returns—into that which could be viewed as a future-oriented horizon of possibilities, such as: “it might become because it could very well have been different”. The complex temporalities embedded in and generated by this exhibition, I conclude, call for creative explorations of how the material archives of natural history collect, indeed re-collect, the past and rewrite history—that is, as a history projected toward a future in which all matter speaks its stories.

In juxtaposing specimens of natural history with specimens of Spoerri’s own artistic practice, *Inkompetenter Dialog?* highlighted a natural historical approach to art that can be observed throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Specifically, from the archaeological perspective of the *long durée*, Spoerri’s art extends beyond the singular cultural-historical moments in which it was produced and, as a result, expands the confines of human agency. In an imagined dialogue with the ancient Latin poet Lucretius Carus, author of the long poem *De Rerum Natura*, Spoerri subscribes to the poem’s materialist view of death, insisting, however, on the eternity of the idea. Rather than an ending, death is a permutation of matter into life, of things into memories, of memories into new things, of time into history.<fnref n="11" /> Similarly, while wittingly subjected to the unavoidable (natural) attrition of time, that is the erosion of meaning and the dissolution of the body, Spoerri’s transient art, born of and displayed in the context of

<footnote n="9">9 From such perspective, one could identify a natural historical approach to contemporary art in *Inkompetenter Dialog?* This exhibition emphasizes the non-anthropocentric aspect in Spoerri’s overarching oeuvre, the fact that this art often situates itself within the framework of the *long durée*, minimizing the role humans play on earth. Spoerri states: “The fact that I’m saying that everything would go better without us is already a suicidal [stet] point of view regarding the whole of humanity ...” Quoted in Jill Carrick, “*L’Optique Moderne*: Daniel Spoerri’s ‘Optical Readymades’”, in *Art History*, 39/4, 2016, here p. 766. When life is mentioned in other words it is less bios that is intended than energy or force.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Donna Haraway, *When Species Meet*, Minneapolis/London, 2007, p. 301.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Silvia Abbruzzese, “*Nil mors est ad nos*”: “Der Tod betrifft uns nicht”: (Un)möglicher Dialog zwischen Daniel Spoerri und Titus Lukretius Carus, Milan, 2014, p. 58.</footnote>
natural history, also resists it. Rather than alienated and scattered objects, Spoerri's specimens comprise assembled material translations of multifarious anecdotes and ideas that evolve in time and place, and that return as new forms, as new compositions of matter.

Before turning to an analysis of *Inkompetenter Dialog?*, I will briefly illustrate the role of temporality in Spoerri's practice to date. I do so by focusing on select works that, while informed by the key principles underlying Spoerri's art making, also exemplify archival tendencies.

Born in Romania in 1930, Spoerri is a European artist whose career of sixty years has spanned multiple countries, languages, and artistic contexts. However, his favoured medium, the art of assemblage, has remained remarkably congruous. Assemblage is an artistic medium consisting of three-dimensional elements, namely found and used objects. In Spoerri's case, these elements project out of, or from, the substrate. The assemblages included in the retrospective in Vienna comprised what he calls *Trap Pictures* alongside series of *détrompe l'œil*, some collections of objects (which started with *L'Optique moderne* between 1961 and 1962), and other "situations of objects."<fnref n="12" /> All of these practices testify to the guiding principles and substance of Spoerri's work, and, in particular, to the theme of chance.

Spoerri uses the term ‘trapping’ to denote his practice of situating found and/or used objects in chance situations. These trappings generate collective cultural-historical landscapes that are not exempt from the consumption of time; some critics have called them “*still lifes* of actions” (*natures mortes* of actions). Spoerri defines these landscapes or situations, whether individually, in succession, or in juxtaposition to one another, as “Territorium.” These territories, which Spoerri marks with found and/or used objects, range in temporal and spatial scale. They include the trapped remains of meals stopped at a seemingly random point in time and fixed onto the tables around which the meals were consumed, his found situations of objects in flea markets, and the spaces of entire cities. For example, his early trap paintings fixed unfinished meals onto horizontal tables that were subsequently hung vertically on walls: first on the walls of his hotel room and then as exhibits on the walls of galleries. In this way, Spoerri transformed the event of the meal into a personal-collective material territory that he could then—belatedly—recognize. Spoerri’s trap paintings also came to encompass various series of situations of used objects, which he bought in the arrangements in which he found them at the stalls of various flea markets. In these instances, Spoerri fixed the situations of objects in the exact manner the objects were presented for sale. As Spoerri explains,<fnref n="13" /> these situations by chance re-produce, either ‘verbatim’ or pictorially, the lyrical and artistic ideas of his forerunners and colleagues of the avant-garde, including

<footnote n="12">12 Carrick, 2016 (note 9), pp. 744–771, URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12266 [accessed: 26.06.2020].</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 *Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri*, exh. cat., Basel, Museum Tinguely, Basel/Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001, p. 98.</footnote>
Le Comte de Lautréamont, Marcel Duchamp, and Constantin Brancusi, among others.<fnref n="14" />

In Spoerri’s *Musées sentimentaux* (*Sentimental Museums*), an exhibition concept he devised in the 1970s and presented in cities including Paris, Cologne, Berlin, and Basel, the artist trapped actual territories, including the much wider areas of cities. In this case, the territory of a city was represented through objects selected from local material culture – high and low, past and present.<fnref n="15" /> The objects thus selected were displayed in alphabetical order, without any particular historical or semantic connection. At the time, Spoerri was interested in investigating the emotional power of objects, or how some gain the status of a relic or become records of history while others are discarded as worthless. He focused on the museum as a privileged institution endowed with the power to lift the same object from one condition to another. Importantly, Spoerri rooted his archival investigations of the affective territory of cities in the logic of trapping, a practice that, as mentioned, is itself informed by chance. In the *Sentimental Museums*, the visitors were prompted to invest the selections of whimsical and ludicrous objects with personal memories or stories of everyday life. Alternatively, if they were unable to relate to these trappings, and therefore unable to order them, the visitors were so to speak free to consign the objects and the museums to the status of cultural garbage, in their minds only, of course. In short, the prompt was to consider how and why the objects on display could be(come) significant, and to whom, that is, to what person or collective, and to whose history.<fnref n="16" />

In the *Sentimental Museums*, chance is established as the internal mechanism of the symbolic order that reigns within museums’ collections. In an attempt to manage contingency, whether by obsessively ordering it or keeping it out, museums find it to be the disturbing core of their archives.<fnref n="17" /> Contingency, in turn, is revealed as the unrecorded and unrecordable moments that make *history-work* relevant. In the *Sentimental Museums*, the private and collective mnemonic exercise in seeing and apprehending reality is driven by contingency. This exercise counters the mimicking process of placing (as in “putting into place”) that is required by the symbolic order of representation (*ein-bilden* rather than *ab-bilden*). In the process, *memory-work* resignifies history-work and distances itself from the preserving intent inherent in the drive to reconstruct authenticity. Similarly, when Spoerri collects his objects at flea markets, stores them, and then fixes them in assemblages, in an act that could be regarded as quasi-conservation, he is gathering history only insofar

<footnote n="14">14 Cecilia Novero, *Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art*, Minneapolis, 2010, p. 154.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 As Anke Te Heesen points out, these museums' practices of display (once considered experimental) have since become ordinary in cultural historical museums, cf. Te Heesen, *Theorien des Museums: Zur Einführung*, Hamburg, 2015, pp. 149-151.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Violand-Hobi, 1998 (note 8), p. 81.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Sven Spieker, *The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy*, Cambridge, MA, 2008, pp. 53-54.</footnote>
as it appears here as the cacophony of the stories lost in and never quite
possessed by the objects. He preserves this cacophony (the sentiments
enveloping the objects) by adding new stories through situating the objects
in new, imaginative contexts. Overall, these remembrance/remembering
pieces emerge as agglomerates of shards of reality held together by myriad
unverifiable yet authentic anecdotes.<fnref n="18" />

Spoerri’s trapping practices have recourse to the diverse strategies that the avant-garde had enlisted earlier to shake confidence in the nineteenth-century archives. His trappings have introduced contingency and chance into the archive of art history, presenting the record as a random product of accident, precisely that which the archive produces as the other of itself: the anecdote or story and the discarded object.<fnref n="19" /> The materialization of these principles and their function in Spoerri’s art are perhaps best illustrated in his recurring works called *Rattenfallen* (rat traps), a multilingual double entendre. Spoerri regularly pokes fun at the transparency of words and their transitivity, most glaringly perhaps in his series of *Word Traps* (1964). There, but elsewhere too, Spoerri enjoys eroding the stable meanings of words, especially through multilingual games of translation. In the case of the *Rattenfallen*, Spoerri translates *Ratte* into the English “rat,” which he then reads as an anagram of “art.” The German word *Art*, on the other hand, translates as “species” in English. The word *Falle*, “trap,” also sounds a lot like the German word *Fall*, which translates in English as “case,” in the sense of a legal case. Thus, the case being made here is the fall of art into the species of the rat, which—once caught in the trap upon which rat/art chances—perishes only to generate a multiplicity of diverse life/art forms from its cadaver.

Spoerri once recounted what had happened to the corpses of some trapped mice
he had left in a meadow to rot:

> “Nature immediately set to work on these little mouse corpses under
> the open sky: Attracted by the smell, the flies came and laid their eggs
> in the mouse corpses; two days later, they were teeming with worms,
> and then came the birds to eat them, and the cats ate the birds [...] in
> an incessant and rapid cycle of production. [...] This death had actually
> created an abundance of life!”<fnref n="20" />

Of his assemblages, he equally asserts, “Each element has its own nature, its own essence. As soon as it touches the table and connects with the other elements, it stops simply being what it was and creates a new entity: it ‘emerges’ from these retired, one could say ‘dead,’ objects, as they were given away.”<fnref n="21" />

<footnote n="18">18 Abbruzzese, 2014 (note 11), p. 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Spieker, 2008 (note 17), p. 6.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Abbruzzese, 2014 (note 11), p. 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Ibid., p. 30.</footnote>
Rat traps populate an early assemblage, *Le Bonheur de ce monde* (1960–1971), which I consider to be emblematic of the temporal relays in Spoerri’s practice. *Bonheur* comprises a large cabinet containing a number of traps in its individual compartment. In each compartment we find dead mice next to the traps along with elements such as loose printed pages from books, a single empty glass, photographs, nails, staplers, and a cage. Many of these objects testify to the deadly human impulse to trap, whether in photographs or cages, whereas the taxidermied raptor, trapped unawares in its eternal life, is ready to take flight. In many ways, this cabinet can be compared with the series of drawers that Spoerri fixed first as part of a series of trapped tables in 1961 and then individually, as singular works, in the 1980s. Thus, from a natural historical point of view and considered as a “classification” within Spoerri’s series of drawers, *Bonheur* reveals itself as a proto-collection of Spoerri’s own collections. The drawers of *Bonheur*, Spoerri explains, contain a hodgepodge of things that he collected perhaps because of their sentimental value or with the presentiment that he would make use of them again in the future.<fnref n="22" /> Spoerri collects and stores objects with a view to incorporating them in his assemblages. Thus, the drawers embody the archive of the artist’s disorderly collections of objects. One drawer in which Spoerri found an old photo of himself is tellingly titled *Self Portrait* (1982). *Drawer* (1960), which was displayed at his first solo exhibition at Arturo Schwarz’s Milan gallery the following year, also contains a passport. In short, Spoerri’s many drawers are mini storage containers in which anything can end up, including the artist—an object among objects.

Rats make themselves at home in storage spaces. Schwarz not only exhibited Spoerri’s work in 1961, but also started collecting some of his trap paintings. After discovering that rats had devoured the leftovers on one of these paintings while in storage, Schwarz begged Spoerri to restore the damaged trap painting. However, Spoerri refused on the grounds that to do so would imply that the trap paintings bore the artist’s signature. In contrast, the trap paintings were meant as collective products to be consumed, be that by humans, rats, time, or forces of nature. So, Spoerri decided to change the work’s title by simply adding the words “in collaboration with the rats.”<fnref n="23" />

Spoerri has illustrated the ‘art = rat’ equation in multifarious art actions and artworks, not least of all his détrompe l’oeil work *Rats* (1998). In contrast to *trompe l’œil* (deceive the eye), Spoerri’s détrompe l’oeil works—works that undelude the eye—are anti-illusionistic, material assemblages, in which random objects are fixed onto painted idyllic landscapes or onto realistically painted figures or photographs. The juxtaposition of the assorted objects and the realistic ground leads the observer to question the relationship between

<footnote n="22">²² Violand-Hobi, 1998 (note 8), p. 97.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Novero, 2010 (note 14), p. 165.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_59.png" /><figcaption>1 Daniel Spoerri, *Aviary of the Sleeping Birds*, 1997, Il Giardino, Seggiano, Italy</figcaption></figure>
reality and realism, nature and naturalism. In *Rats* (1998), Spoerri created a physical link between a found painting of two mice gnawing on a piece of cheese and the lived space and time of the viewer by gluing two actual rat tails on the painted mice, which hang down past the frame.

The *Giardino di Daniel Spoerri: Hic Terminus Haeret*, a sculpture garden located in Seggiano, Italy, is scattered with works by Spoerri and donations from other artists. The Giardino's motto, *Hic terminus haeret*, which Spoerri adapted from Virgil, reminds visitors entering the sculpture garden that this liminal place is suspended, or rather trapped, between life and death.<fnref n="24" /> Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, oversees the borders of the garden and the threshold between life and death. By translating the verb *haerere* as “to adhere” or “to glue,” Spoerri reconnects the Giardino to his trap pictures such that, in his garden, the border between the living and the dead becomes ‘stuck.’ The Giardino itself serves as both a vast trap picture of a cemetery, where Spoerri remembers his dead friends through their artwork, and an agricultural field (threshers operate there in the summer). Furthermore, this graveyard includes funereal markers for non-human animals.

One installation in the Giardino (*Aviary of the Sleeping Birds*, 1997, fig. 1) is scattered with numerous bronze bird statuettes created around the turn of the nineteenth century. The symbolism attached to these sculptures is particularly pertinent: they represent the souls of dead newborns caught in limbo. These were and still are sold to heartbroken parents as mementos and as a consolation for their loss, as the birds hold the promise of the children awakening from their sleep. Their origins also matter here because the sculptors who created them were animalists. Accordingly, the silence that surrounds the caged ‘sleeping’ birds in the garden resounds today as an urgent ecological alarm (and as a memento of Rachel Carson’s *Silent Spring*, 1962): what would the world be without song? At the same time, the installation’s location within the garden turns the frightening vision of extinction on its head, for it resituates the birds’ death within both the mundane and quotidian dynamics of decay and regeneration and within the framework of the *long durée* of natural historical evolution.

All the while, a bronze trap painting in the vicinity of the bird installation is left to slowly deteriorate. The trap painting is a copy made from a mold of the excavated remnants of a trap painting of an elaborate meal Spoerri buried in 1983 with an eye to its future excavation (fig. 2). A team of French archaeologists (INRAP) conducted the excavation in 2010 with the aim of scientifically studying both the durability of modern consumer goods after thirty years of interment and, more facetiously, the social customs of an enclave of members of the art world.

<footnote n="24">24 Silvia Abbruzzese, *L'Odissea del Giardino: Otto speculazioni*, Vercelli, 2009, p. 81.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_60.png" /><figcaption>2 Daniel Spoerri, *Déterrement du Tableau Piège*, bronze cast of a piece from an excavation (by INRAP) of Daniel Spoerri’s *Déjeuner sous l’herbe* (1983), 2010, Il Giardino, Seggiano, Italy</figcaption></figure>

Spoerri’s art temporarily takes hold of the fleeting present by projecting itself into the present from the perspective of a future from which his art emerges as a leftover, a trace, or an archaeological fact. Spoerri’s art, in this sense, participates in all of these temporalities at once without favouring one over another. In interlacing the natural historical with the historical, Spoerri’s art is neither melancholic nor fatalistic, neither conservative nor agonistically revolutionary. Art represents a way of playing with time; as Spoerri, in analogy to Gertrude Stein, puts it, “art is art about art about art.”<fnref n="25" /> Although human agency is not retracted or flattened out in Spoerri’s natural historical approach, it is rescaled so that ‘will’ is diffused and becomes ‘effect.’ In other words, the effects of human and other-than-human forces such as, most prominently, chance and

<footnote n="25">25 Margit Berner et al., *Daniel Spoerri: At the Museum of Natural History, An Incompetent Dialogue?*, Bielefeld/Berlin, 2012, p. 108.</footnote>
decay are combined. Quoting the French biologist Jacques Monod on evolution and the emergence of life, Spoerri states, “Pure coincidence, nothing but coincidence, absolute, blind freedom as the foundation of the wonderful edifice of evolution ... neither did the universe bear life, nor did the biosphere bear human beings within it.”<fnref n="26" />

In *Inkompetenter Dialog?*, Spoerri exhibited his works alongside specimens from the museum's collection. The museum pieces were displayed in the original vitrines and labelled according to the disciplinary classifications assigned to the museum's collections; Spoerri's art, was also classified, albeit by means of differently colored labels.<fnref n="27" /> The retrospective spanned Spoerri's career and included some of his older trap paintings; his major assemblages, such as *Carnival of Animals* 1995-1996; Spoerri's own collections of objects; and some of his more recent works. Among the latter were works from his *Kunsthaus* in Hadersdorf am Kamp, Austria, and others usually on view in the Giardino (the copy of the excavated trap painting).<fnref n="28" />

By presenting his object art as a personal retrospective within the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Spoerri pushed previous claims made in his work beyond artistic discourse, especially that of originality, and allowed his works to encompass broad existential and epistemological questions. By situating his *chance art* in a natural history museum, he also focused the viewer's attention on the ephemeral and decaying dead ends, regenerations, and variations engendered by evolution rather than by, for example, the teleology of a natural selection, which has favoured *Homo sapiens*. Overall, Spoerri's artistic manoeuvres in the Natural History Museum, his incompetent dialogue, served to downplay the privileged role of humans as artists, natural historians, shepherds, and rescuers.

If Spoerri's retrospective in the Natural History Museum deterritorialized human art by enfolding it in natural history, it also aimed to uncover the aesthetic underpinnings of scientific records, especially and specifically the art in natural history displays.<fnref n="29" /> The exhibition exposed the knots that tie factuality with fabulation in every human apprehension of the world. Spoerri's assemblages and collections further suggested that natural life itself is a congealing of biological and imaginative processes, where matter and meaning

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Ibid., p. 109.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ For a brief history of the Museum of Natural History in Vienna and its departments, cf. Max Fischer, et al. "Das naturhistorische Museum in Wien und seine Geschichte", in *Annalen des naturhistorischen Museums in Wien* 80, 1979, here pp. 11-12.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Cecilia Novero, “Daniel Spoerri’s Carnival of Animals”, in Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, Paul Youngquist, *Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective*, University Park, PA, 2012, pp. 151-166.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, *Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature*, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis, 1986.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_61.png" /><figcaption>3 Daniel Spoerri, *Darwin's Nudibradl Collection*, 2009-2010</figcaption></figure>

constitute the fabric of a storied world.<fnref n="30" /> By bringing the museum's discarded origins in the cabinets of wonders back to the surface and into the present, Spoerri's retrospective also operated as the Natural History Museum's involuntary memory. Spoerri accomplished this by highlighting the continuities and discontinuities between the *naturalia* of the museums and the *artificialia* of his assemblages, which themselves are always assemblages of both, as were the cabinets of wonders. As a retrospective, *Inkompetenter Dialog?* also helps us to see that the same methods have informed Spoerri's art; his work has been devoted to understanding the same evolutionary processes documented in the Natural History Museum, but in a different realm—one that includes mundane practices and different objects and aims.

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Stories Come to Matter”, in id., *Material Ecocriticism*, Bloomington, 2014, pp. 1–20, here p. 5.</footnote>
For example, since the 1960s, Spoerri has collected simple kitchen utensils (potato peelers, meat grinders, knives, and noodle cutters), which assist us in banal everyday practices and come in myriad shapes and colours. Two collections of these utensils, namely noodle cutters and knives, feature in *Inkompetenter Dialog*? For instance, *Darwin's Nudlradl* (2009–2010), which comprises a collection of found, used noodle cutters, is explicitly dedicated to Darwin (fig. 3). In this array of quotidian and banal objects, Spoerri finds a translation of Darwin's concept of chance variation in evolution: the slightest variations among the same practical tools are seen as evidence of evolution's incessant drive to change. He qualifies the process of evolution as one that “trie[s] again, question[s] itself, improve[s] and express[es] itself anew”.<fnref n="31" /> Accordingly, Spoerri compares this collection to a drawer in a natural history museum containing multiple varieties of the same genus of bird (namely the *Piranga*, belonging to the cardinal family).

With a nod to the tricks that evolution plays on humans (particularly scholars)—for it is almost impossible to fathom let alone account for the immense variety of species living and extinct—Spoerri compares his collection of knives with an ancient pocketknife found during the archaeological excavations at Hallstatt. He then half-jokingly comments, “Here is the proof that a clever ‘Austrian’ had already invented the jack-knife 2500 years ago!”<fnref n="32" /> In Spoerri’s words, he collects “Variations of objects”; in this sense, the signs of wear and tear that his collected kitchen tools bear, the unique changes brought upon them by time, add to their differences.<fnref n="33" /> The used tools present themselves as ‘individuals’ within a species, with each tool comprising a visible repository of stories. These anecdotally (culturally) acquired stories are reinvented in the process, even though they cannot possibly be preserved intact and objectively passed on from generation to generation as genes are. Spoerri declares, “I buy all that which captivates me and then I eavesdrop on the stories of the used things that by chance ‘end up’ in the flea markets”<fnref n="34" /> He adds:

> “When something [an object at the flea market] piques my interest, I ask about its story. In all these years, I’ve heard a lot of stories and imagined many more! [...] I enjoy buying them, putting them together, and allowing them to become something new; each individual object, however, retains its own story, while the new composition yields new stories.”<fnref n="35" />

<footnote n="31">31 Berner, 2012 (note 25), p. 158.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Ibid., p. 170.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 Abbruzzese, 2014 (note 11), p. 21.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 Ibid., pp. 15–16.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_62.png" /><figcaption>4 Daniel Spoerri, *Circle of the Unicorns / Navel of the World / Omphalos*, 1991, 9 Bronze elements. Il Giardino. Seggiano, Italy</figcaption></figure>

Another installation in *Inkompetenter Dialog?*, the one hundred meters long *Genetic Chain of the Flea Market* (2000), is an accumulation—or trap, in Spoerri's sense of the word—of used, abandoned, and found objects, which further testifies to his obsession as he calls it, with collecting, storing, and trapping. This genetic chain can be interpreted as a facetious rendition of Spoerri's artistic DNA as well as a comparison of the human genome to what he considers the equally important life of things. In an irreverent move against both the theological image of the Great Chain of Being and Darwin's concept of natural selection, Spoerri's *Genetic Chain of the Flea Market* is an assemblage of non-hierarchically ordered elements that reflects the non-deterministic connections among all living creatures and non-living entities. By inextricably entwining the intersecting scales of evolutionary time, the installation highlighted, in the museum especially, the temporalities of the stories, lives, and histories of objects and people, and the recurrent mutations and permutations that have occurred throughout evolution.

In Spoerri's assemblages, the random constellations of objects illuminate the lives of quotidian and/or discarded things and their stories as the unfulfilled prophecies of bygone eras. His art thus claims its place in the natural history museum as an awkward compound of the asynchronous temporalities of decay and as the emergence of new constellations or contexts. A key example of a return of the past as the future in the present can be found in some of the mythological unicorn figures that were included in *Inkompetenter Dialog?*<fnref n="36" />

<footnote n="36">36 *La stanza dell'unicorno: Daniel Spoerri ai Musei Civici*, Ilaria Pulini and Cristina Stefani (eds.), exh. cat., Modena, Museo Civico Archeologico Etnologico and Museo Civico d'Arte, Modena, 2008.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_63.png" /><figcaption>5 Daniel Spoerri, *Circle of the Unicorns*, 1991, Detail, Il Giardino, Seggiano, Italy</figcaption></figure>
These figures form the centrepiece of his Giardino (fig. 4-5) and their form and material vary slightly, from one exhibition space to another. The 'unicorns' however generally consist of an equine skull to which the 'tusk' of a narwhal, a unicorn-like species of whale with a large protruding tooth, is attached; in the Giardino, a cast of a gloved human hand is attached to the tusk as though it were holding it. In Vienna, the unicorns were accompanied by another natural wonder: the skull of a two-toothed narwhal that Spoerri found in storage at the museum. With this find, Spoerri restored the wonder once held by the unicorn before it was deemed a myth and cast out of natural history by the discovery of the narwhal.

Spoerri's assemblages are the unpredictable outcomes of ongoing temporal dialectics between natural history and history, science and art. Their presence in the museum is uncanny: the museum seems like their natural home and yet it is a home they render unnatural in the way they simultaneously merge and contrast with the specimens on view as revenant oddities and anomalies. Situated in the Natural History Museum, Spoerri's assemblages emerged as concrete manifestations of the multifarious forms and itineraries that could have ramified out of the past or been the outcome of alternative evolutions. The evolutionary trajectories that Spoerri's assemblages made credible and actualized in the context of the museum were reinforced through his reorganization of the distinct disciplinary categories and departments that order the Natural History Museum Vienna, such as botany, mineralogy, palaeontology, anthropology, prehistory, geology, zoology, and their respective subdisciplines. By displaying and classifying his exhibition according to those disciplines, Spoerri brought his own specimens into dialogue with the museum displays. However, rather than imposing the museum's disciplinary order on his works, Spoerri's assemblages subtly challenged disciplinary expertise. Notably, the cross-disciplinary connections between his 'undisciplined' works and the museum's collection allowed for the reconstruction of the natural and cultural contexts from which his specimens stem.

Initially, Spoerri's practice appeared to coincide with the museum's scientific methodology. As the curators of the retrospective at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Margit Berner and Reinhard Golebiowski, write,

> "Particularly in the biological sciences, the process of acquiring findings takes place on the basis of concrete objects. Objects removed from their original natural context are analyzed in the museum and placed in a new systematic context; thereby, they become epistemic things, cognitive things."<fnref n="37" />

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Berner, 2012 (note 25), p. 17.</footnote>
Similarly, Spoerri estranges objects from their familiar contexts and relocates them to new situations. However, unlike science, Spoerri’s assemblages come to foreground the epistemic (that is, knowable) nature of things because they are always part of a context that cannot be entirely or innocently systematized in either time or space. In contrast to Marcel Duchamp’s singular objects, Spoerri’s own work, as he sees it, provides the onlooker with a constellation of objects; these constellations are ‘contaminated’ by the objects’ stories and the actions that have left their traces on them.<fnref n="38" /> Thus, rather than placing his objects in taxonomic order, the museum context contaminated Spoerri’s art with associative meanings, histories, and connections and vice versa.

In *Inkompetenter Dialog?*, the most pronounced mutations of the taxonomic organization of the Natural History Museum Vienna occurred in Spoerri’s ‘palaeontology’ and ‘zoology’ displays. For example, the assemblage *Coral Brain* (2011), comprised a human skull endowed with an oversized brain made of coral. Rather than simply conflating two different animal species—namely, human and coral—this assemblage knotted together the vastly distant temporal scales of humans, plants, and minerals, yet it did not reconcile them. Until the eighteenth century, corals were classified as plants that were believed to petrify if touched. Today, corals are classified as polyps that live in symbiosis with algae—in other words, plants. Each thin, soft-bodied polyp secretes a hard outer skeleton of limestone (calcium carbonate), which attaches either to rock or to the dead skeletons of other polyps. The product of an ongoing collaboration between animals and plants that spans approximately 25 million years, corals compose the largest structures of biological origin on earth. Spoerri’s *Coral Brain* not only represents the difficulty human brains have in grasping such temporal scales. It also strongly suggests, simultaneously and explicitly, that humans must be viewed, on the one hand, in the framework of the symbiotic collaboration among species and, on the other hand, in the framework of the long temporalities involved in such collaborations. By situating his post-human *Coral Brain* assemblage in the mineralogy and palaeontology section of his exhibition, Spoerri also allowed the ‘mistaken’ pre-modern classification of corals to inform the present, suggesting that it is precisely human touch, or what is currently called the “human footprint,” that is killing and ‘petrifying’ the coral reefs and thereby endangering life on earth.

The second instructive work in Spoerri’s mineralogy and palaeontology section is the *Tatzelwurm* (2012). In alpine folklore, the *Tatzelwurm* is a small, lizard-like creature that resembles a cat with no hind legs and a snake-like tail. Spoerri’s very different *Tatzelwurm* in *Inkompetenter Dialog?* accomplishes several things: first, it fossilizes the myth, turning legend into

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Exh. cat., Basel/Ostfildern-Ruit, 2001 (note 13), p. 97.</footnote>
‘reality’; second, itre-fictionalizes the legend; and third, it turns the new hybrid
into a time travelling cyborg. The *Tatzelwurm* Spoerri displayed in the
Natural History Museum is indeed a fossil, but not that of the legendary
 creature; rather, it is an odd admixture of a fish skeleton with a taxidermied
 bird between its teeth. This sui generis *Tatzelwurm*, while introduced as an
 all-too-real fossil, is simultaneously presented as more alive than the
 seemingly live—though effectively dead—bird caught in its mouth, for the
 *Tatzelwurm* perpetually feeds on the bird. Like the horn had functioned for the
 unicorn, and as a material reminder of the natural history museum’s own origins
 in the cabinet of wonders, this fictionalized fossil embodied the potential
 origin of a hybrid species that, in one sense, was presented as submerged in the
 past but, in another, as re-emerging in the present, thus allowing the viewer
to imagine a multispecies future.

Myths of origin return in transfigured form in Spoerri’s zoological assemblages. During one of his visits to the storage rooms at the Natural History Museum Vienna, Spoerri found the beheaded skeleton of an Indian python. He was granted permission to use the python for one of his assemblages—the only one in the exhibition composed entirely of specimens from the museum. The resulting *Tiger-Python* assemblage (2012) combines the snake’s skeleton with the skull of a Bengal tiger that, like the *Tatzelwurm*, appears to have been caught in the act of devouring a taxidermied bird.

This work is best interpreted through the lens of the unicorns in the Giardino,
whose title, *The World’s Omphalos*, refers to Delphi, the Greek home of Pythia,
the Oracle of Delphi. The god Apollo, who is associated with music and poetry,
had to slay Python, the carnivorous monster serpent that Gaea, goddess of the
earth, had used to guard Mount Parnassus. After the feat, Apollo usurped
Gaea’s place and named his oracle Pythia, after Python. From this perspective,
Spoerri’s *Tiger-Python*, a reincarnation of the mythical serpent, restores to the
earth her monstrous creativity, namely her fertility, and with it the power that
resides in the cycles of life and death over which the earth presides.

In another visit to the museum's storage space, Spoerri encountered a num-
ber of tortoise shells that had been skilfully reattached to their cleaned skeletons
so as to allow the carapaces to open and close like coffers, granting scientists
access to the interiors of the animals. The surgical care required for such a
reconstructive operation struck Spoerri, reminding him of Georges Auguste
Escoffier's detailed instructions on how to behead a tortoise in a recipe for
tortoise soup, a recipe Spoerri quickly renamed "Rezept für einen Mord"
(Recipe for a murder)."<fnref n="39" /> In the assemblage shown in *Inkompetenter Dialog?*
entitled *Letter XI*, a hand-painted carapace of a tortoise was adorned with two
mighty horns, an exotic mask for a head, and a stone lion's paw (fig. 6).

<footnote n="39">39 Berner, 2012 (note 25), p. 141.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_64.png" /><figcaption>6 Daniel Spoerri, *Letter XI: Assemblage* from the series *Histoires de Boîtes à Lettres*, 1998-2004</figcaption></figure>
Dressed in ferns, the tortoise is positioned on a bed of seashells scattered with movable wooden letters originally used for letterset printing. Regarding his use of abecedaries in his work, Spoerri states,

> “With these letters you could write all the world’s letters. Again these are the background, so to speak the canvas or the backdrop in the theater, on which these letters would be written and in the foreground are the implied dramas, which are only hinted at, which however everyone has to tell to himself.”<fnref n="40" />

Thus, the random letters in this work suggest that there are stories behind this tortoise-goddess and messages she could weave and re-assemble.

The significance of the tortoises’ murder harkens back beyond their actual death and dismemberment in the museum all the way to the origins of Apollo’s musical instrument, the lyre. As the myth goes, after stealing from Apollo’s herd and sacrificing part of his spoils to the gods, the god Hermes found the door to his room blocked by a tortoise. Hermes killed the tortoise and, after emptying its shell, turned it into the very first lyre. When Apollo approached Hermes to reclaim his stolen animals, he was seduced by the lyre. Hermes then exchanged the lyre for the oxen and, in the barter, also received his caduceus (the staff surmounted by wings and entwined by two serpents, which came to symbolize Hermes). In *Letter XI*, the re-assembled animal body parts that were arranged on a bedrock of letters, especially the tortoise’s carapace with the ox horns, rewrote this tortoise myth. The novel totem animal, a composite of tortoise and ox, conveys the memory of the injury suffered by its mythological ancestors and the prepared specimens, whether in the name of artistic or scientific endeavours.

Horns and antlers appear in a number of Spoerri’s assemblages and installations, several of which were included in *Inkompetenter Dialog*? These works take issue with the practice of trophy hunting, albeit in an ostensibly whimsical manner. In *Krickerl, Kümmerlinge, Kümmerer* (Deer antlers, scallywags, and runts), the vitrines displayed examples of abnormal antlers, some retouched in ludicrous, indecent, irreverent, and, for the most part, carnivalesque ways. These embellished specimens offered a burlesque mockery of both the great trophies and the small antler deformities that end up as rarities in precious collections. Spoerri’s various other antler assemblages in *Inkompetenter Dialog*? referenced the extensive collection of massive antlers in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Arranged in a room with an antler armchair, Spoerri’s antlers appeared to specifically target Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s excessive passion

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Daniel Spoerri, *Daniel Spoerri beschreibt 54 Werke*, Basel, 2001, p. 104. See translation at: http://www.danielspoerri.org/web_daniel/englisch_ds/werk_einzel/38_histoires.htm [accessed 26.06.2020].</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_65.png" /><figcaption>7 Daniel Spoerri, *Galvanized Deer* from a series of galvanized animals for an installation, 2009</figcaption></figure>

for trophy hunting, while highlighting the origins of this practice in the big
taxidermy collections in natural history museums in general.

A final zoological example involving taxidermy and museum displays are Spoerri's galvanized animals. I argue that, although they do not quite fit the description, these taxidermied animals represent a case of what Steve Baker has named *botched taxidermy*. As Giovanni Aloi notes, botched taxidermy summons "an abrasive and uncomfortable presence."<fnref n="41" /> The galvanized animals that were displayed in *Inkompetenter Dialog*? at first appeared as examples of aestheticized taxidermy. However, in contrast to other taxidermied specimens in museums, Spoerri's galvanized figures stand out as personalities in their own right, as if declaring "I am not a specimen." On closer inspection, the shine of these emboldened figures appears to reveal traces of injury. The figure of a galvanized deer, for example, faced the viewer with nails stuck in its muzzle, thus exposing the tools used to construct the taxidermied deer as weapons—the weapons that kill every time a life is captured (fig. 7).

<footnote n="41">41 Giovanni Aloi, *Art and Animals*, London, 2011, p. 41.</footnote>
Finally, Spoerri’s taxidermied and galvanized animals do not belong among the species that are normally shown in natural history museums. Museums typically display specimens closely associated with big game trophies or exotic animals captured in the wild. Although familiar local faunas are also often taxidermied for regional displays and to demonstrate biological groups, the pièces de résistance in natural history museums have always been the bears, buffalos, rhinos, and elephants.<fnref n="42" /> In contrast to these displays, there is a sense of ‘wrong placeness’ to Spoerri’s taxidermied specimens, which are either familiar animals or domestic companions. Spoerri galvanizes not just cute Bambi-like deer but also birds, rats, and domestic cats. With this recycled taxidermy, he mummifies death rather than creating the illusion of life.<fnref n="43" /> Moreover, this sense of ‘wrong placeness’ points to the salience of Spoerri’s relocation of his art in the Natural History Museum—a relocation that is, as I have shown, also a re-collection. Spoerri’s art does not have a mission and does not have to have one, regardless of whether it is exhibited in art galleries, gardens, or natural history museums. For Spoerri, art does not add anything to life; it is part of the game of living—one way to be. By wedging itself into natural history, Spoerri’s art leaves traces for others, including rats, to find and follow. In this regard, his art sets itself apart from other art projects in natural history museums that are explicitly oriented toward visualizing specific ethical-political issues, such as conservation and biodiversity.

I have argued that Spoerri’s art intervention in the Natural History Museum in Vienna is unique owing to the complex temporality of its dialogic approach to natural history—an approach that allows us to revisit and recast, both critically and with hope, human relations with the non-human. In particular, the juxtaposition of—or “incompetent dialogue” between—Spoerri’s constellations of objects and the Natural History Museum’s expert displays of specimens highlights the overlapping dynamics that inform both. At the same time, the overlap of the impulses and principles that inform the practices of both artist and museum indicates their divergent stances on the objects and their histories and interpretation. As the title *Inkompetenter Dialog?* suggests, Spoerri’s delightful, amateurish intervention in and dialogue with the Natural History Museum in Vienna was an example of how art can interrogate the disciplinary and discursive orders of knowledge from the perspective of the temporal scales of natural history.

<footnote n="42">42 Susanne Köstering, *Natur zum Anschauen: Das Naturkundemuseum des deutschen Kaiserreichs*, Cologne, 2003, p. 116.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 Abbruzzese, 2014 (note 11), p. 51.</footnote>
# La bague de grand-mère

Camille Paulhan

## Portrait de Daniel Spoerri en scarabée bousier

Il semble qu'aucun texte ni aucune œuvre de Daniel Spoerri ne mentionne ce petit insecte intelligent. Pourtant, l'artiste et le scarabée bousier ont un point commun : l'un comme l'autre font des boulettes. L'art de la boulette, explique l'artiste dans son ouvrage culinaire *J'aime les keftédès* (1970), c'est de réussir à faire beaucoup avec peu, à transformer le déchet en richesse<fnref n="1" />. Ce livre de recettes toutes personnelles, qui prend place à l'époque dans la collection des « J'aime » - aux côtés de *J'aime la bière, J'aime le chocolat ou J'aime les noix* - porte un titre quelque peu mystérieux, la boulette de viande grecque étant possiblement mal connue des lecteurs. À l'origine, cette publication aurait dû s'appeler *J'aime faire des boulettes*<fnref n="2" />, un titre qui avait le mérite d'être plus facilement compréhensible pour les amateurs de cuisine mais aussi le désavantage, pour un éditeur proposant des livres gastronomiques, d'être plus ambigu quant à la nature desdites boulettes. Ce, surtout lorsqu'on connaît le goût de Spoerri pour les sous-entendus scatologiques. Dans ce guide, Spoerri développe, entre deux conseils sur la soupe de boudin, les paupiettes de veau à la grecque ou le knödel de pomme de terre, une théorie étonnante sur la boulette, perçue comme une façon de résister au dénuement : elle incarne en effet le refus de manger tels quels les restes (des riches), et elle demande une préparation, une attente, un malaxage, un assaisonnement puis une cuisson. « Le keftédès, écrit-il ainsi, c'est la façon du pauvre d'être riche, de faire le mieux de son peu, de savoir attendre le temps d'une longue préparation. »<fnref n="3" />

C'est en véritable scarabée bousier que Daniel Spoerri a organisé une partie de sa production, c'est-à-dire en agrégeant autour de lui ce qui pouvait relever de l'insignifiant, pour lui donner de la valeur. Le terme d'agrégation, qui peut renvoyer au processus de constitution d'une pelote de réjection, semble d'ailleurs tout à fait convenir à son travail, plutôt que celui d'accumulation, que son comparse Arman affectionnait. Spoerri se remémore le fait que « dès le début, il y eut conflit entre les accumulations d'Arman et [s]es collections »<fnref n="4" />.

<footnote n="1">1. Voir Daniel Spoerri, *J'aime les keftédès*, Paris 1970, p. 97-99.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Voir Daniel Spoerri, *Journal gastronomique*, Genève 1998, p. 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Spoerri 1970 (note 1), p. 99.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Daniel Spoerri, « Les collections » (non daté), Archives Spoerri, Berne, AFr. 569 d).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_66.png" /><figcaption>1 Daniel Spoerri, couverture de J'aime les keftédès, 1970</figcaption></figure>

La différence entre les pratiques, quasi concomitantes, des deux artistes – *accumulations* pour Arman et *collections* pour Spoerri – est en effet de taille. Arman réalise ses premières *Accumulations* en 1959 tandis que Daniel Spoerri débute ses collections sans doute au début des années 1960. Il ne s'agit d'ailleurs pas, concernant ces dernières, d'œuvres d'art mais bien de collections personnelles, qui par la suite intègrent des œuvres ou deviennent elles-mêmes des œuvres.

Aucune publication ne mentionnant de façon exhaustive ces collections, il est difficile d'en proposer une recension complète, et ce d'autant que l'inventaire ressemblerait à celui de Prévert : collections d'embauchoirs, d'épices, de recettes de boulettes ou de tripes, de râpes, de chopines de bière en bois, de cannes, de tendeurs à gants, de livres de recettes, de masticateurs, de serviettes, de prothèses dentaires, d'eaux de fontaines sacrées, de pièges, de couteaux
simples ou à éplucher, de lunettes, d'ustensiles de cuisine, de hachoirs, de
chaussures... Difficile de prime abord de distinguer ce qui peut bien les lier, tant
elles paraissent disparates. Mais pour la majeure partie d'entre elles, signalons
qu'elles sont constituées d'objets principalement domestiques, de peu de valeur
pécuniaire. Au moment où Spoerri commence à réunir ces objets, acquis pour
certains dans des marchés aux puces, Arman accumule des objets relativement
semlables : la célèbre accumulation de dentiers *La vie à pleine dents* (1960)
d'Arman est suivie, quelques années plus tard, par *Lo spazzolino da denti
abitualmente in commercio in Germania* (1976) de Daniel Spoerri : l'œuvre
consiste en un collage savamment désordonné de prothèses dentaires sur un
support sombre. L'intention des deux artistes diffère toutefois notablement, en
dépit des conflits qui les opposent parfois violemment à l'époque, aboutissant
à des chamailleries pouvant les entraîner jusqu'à l'affrontement physique.
Afin de clarifier sa position, Spoerri écrit : « Je m'intéresse aux 1000 sortes
de patates, alors qu'Arman prend la même patate 1000 fois. Je montre, dans
mes collections, qu'aucune patate ne ressemble à une autre. »<fnref n="5" /> Quelque chose
sépare donc irrémédiablement les deux artistes, dans la nature même des objets
rassemblés : Arman a accumulé un nombre important d'objets produits indus-
triellement, tandis que Spoerri a choisi ces objets en général les uns après les
autres, dans la perspective d'une collection à agrandir au fil des années.

Une deuxième lecture de la liste des collections de Daniel Spoerri permet de
faire émerger des tendances qui leur donnent un sens très différent des réflexions
contemporaines d'Arman sur la société de consommation balbutiante : de
nombreux objets concernent la cuisine, et d'abord des ustensiles permettant
la transformation de la matière première en produits transformés, à l'instar
des boulettes évoquées précédemment. Certains permettent de découper,
d'autres de presser, d'éplucher (hachoirs, râpes, couteaux, économes), d'autres
d'assaisonner (épices), d'autres encore rappellent la mastication et la digestion
(masticateurs, recettes de tripes). Dès lors, il est plus aisé de comprendre la
distinction idéologique qui le sépare d'Arman, à propos duquel Spoerri écrit
d'ailleurs avec une certaine acrimonie : « Je n'aurais jamais l'idée de faire une
œuvre avec cinquante objets qui sortent de l'usine, ou cinquante garde-boue
qui viennent de chez Renault »<fnref n="6" />, allusion cinglante aux séries bien connues
de son ami.

Certains faits historiques traumatiques lient toutefois les œuvres des deux
artistes : l'expérience de la Seconde Guerre mondiale est indispensable pour
comprendre l'intérêt de Spoerri comme d'Arman pour de tels objets. Pour
Arman, la découverte du documentaire *Nuit et brouillard* (1955) a eu un impact
déterminant sur son travail, principalement les scènes montrant les tas de
cheveux coupés, de lunettes, de peignes, d'ustensiles de cuisine, de vêtements

<footnote n="5">5 Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Spoerri, (note 4).</footnote>
ou de chaussures qui ont été arrachés aux déportés<fnref n="7" />. Mais c'est sans doute à cet endroit précis que la pensée des deux artistes se scinde : Arman n'a eu de cesse de faire allusion à la dimension monstrueuse, industrielle du génocide, là où Spoerri semble davantage se placer sous l'égide de la célèbre formule de Serge Klarsfeld : « la Shoah, ce n'est pas six millions. C'est 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + ... » Bien sûr, il est impossible de considérer le travail de Spoerri uniquement du point de vue de l'expérience de la guerre, toutefois, celle-ci infuse tellement ses œuvres qu'elle apparaît en sous-texte de toutes les réflexions ici développées. Spoerri a été, dans ses textes comme dans ses entretiens, très généreux en anecdotes<fnref n="8" /> mais il est demeuré relativement secret sur son enfance, délivrant les souvenirs de cette époque avec parcimonie<fnref n="9" />.

Il est possible de penser que les histoires de Daniel Spoerri, au demeurant un excellent conteur, avaient valeur – comme chez Christian Boltanski par exemple – d’histoires exemplaires, destinées d’abord à être considérées selon leur valeur métaphorique. L’un des rares grands récits d’enfance de l’artiste, relaté par lui à de très nombreuses reprises, est en cela un véritable modèle du genre. Ce récit veut que Spoerri, enfant, ait eu déjà le goût des objets en constituant une collection de trésors, collection qu’il aurait cachée dans un terrier au fond du jardin<fnref n="10" />. De ces richesses enfantines, on ne sait rien, si ce n’est que l’une d’entre elles était de la neige, qu’il mit de côté pour l’été. La « grave déception » de constater qu’on lui avait, quelque temps après, volé cette neige réservée pour plus tard, forme la conclusion de cette courte histoire<fnref n="11" />. Cette dernière, si l’on accepte de dépasser sa valeur profondément poétique, paraît affirmer ceci : ce qui est précieux peut disparaître, en dépit des cachettes et du

<footnote n="7">7 Voir Jill Carrick, *Nouveau réalisme. Retour sur les topographies du hasard*, traduction Hélène Sirven, Paris 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 *La Topographie anecdotée du hasard* (1962) en est un des exemples les plus marquants : par la suite, le mot même d'« anecdote » ne cesse de parcourir ses écrits : l'envoi, à Pierre Restany en 1961, d'une « note biographique anecdotée » (Archives de la critique d'art, Fonds Restany, FR ACA PREST ART 338), les lettres envoyées aux artistes pour la constitution de la *Boutique aberrante* qui mentionnent la recherche d'« objets en provenance de ton atelier ou d'autres auxquels se rapporte une anecdote » (*Les dossiers de la boutique aberrante*, Paris, éd. Centre Pompidou, 1977, [n.p.]) ou la constitution d'une hypothétique publication qui n'a jamais vu le jour. Anecdotes concernant l'histoire de l'Art en mouvement (Archives Spoerri, Berne, Afr. 68 I) en sont quelques exemples. Voir aussi, plus récemment, *Anekdotomania. Daniel Spoerri über Daniel Spoerri*, cat. exp. Bâle, Musée Tinguely, Bâle/Ostfildern-Ruit 2001.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Dans des entretiens récents, Daniel Spoerri a abordé son enfance, et notamment la déportation de son père, de manière plus spontanée que par le passé : voir « Mon capital », entretien avec Déborah Laks, *Daniel Spoerri Eats At Les Abattoirs / À table aux Abattoirs !*, Milan/Toulouse 2018, p. 305-306. Voir également Daniel Spoerri, *entretiens avec Alexandre Devaux, L'instinct de conversation*, Paris 2018.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Sur cette histoire, voir par exemple Danièle Giraudy, « Fourbis, entourloupettes et samilgondis », dans *Daniel Spoerri*, éd. par Danièle Giraudy et Danièle Bourgeois, cat. exp. Antibes, musée Picasso, 1990, p. 5 ou Wieland Schmied, « Le Hasard comme maître », dans *Daniel Spoerri : Coincidence as Master, Le Hasard comme maître, Der Zufall als Meister, Il caso come maestro*, Bielefeld 2003, p. 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Gilbert Lascault, « Objets sentimentaux et autres de Daniel Spoerri », dans *Artstudio* 19, hiver 1990, p. 62.</footnote>
fait de savoir garder un secret, ce qui ne manque pas de faire écho à l'expérience
de guerre de l'artiste.

Pour empêcher ce qui peut disparaître, il faut donc agir sur les choses elles-
mêmes, les transformer en objets magiques. En cela, la méthode de Spoerri
que nous étudierons ici rappelle pour beaucoup celle des ecclésiastiques en
mal de reliques au Moyen-Âge : d'abord piéger, figer, avant de fragmenter et
de disperser<fnref n="12" />. Les œuvres choisies pour cette étude sont essentiellement celles
des années 1960 et 1970, dans lesquelles se mettent en place ces logiques
reliquaires, mais cette réflexion aurait très bien pu être étendue à de nombreux
autres projets de l'artiste, au-delà de ces deux décennies très riches.

Piéger

Outre les iconiques tableaux-pièges, une série d'œuvres pour laquelle Daniel Spoerri a acquis, au moins en France, une notoriété importante, le piège a été une constante dans son travail. Une part majeure des collections de Daniel Spoerri, évoquées plus haut, concerne les pièges, que l'artiste dit avoir collectionnés dans toutes leurs catégories : pièges à rats, pièges à souris, pièges à oiseaux, pièges à cigales et même pièges à puces. Certains de ces pièges de collection ont intégré des œuvres, par exemple *Le Bonheur de ce monde* (1960-1971), formant un assemblage qui comporte de nombreux pièges à rats. Mais de manière plus générale, au tournant des années 1970, plusieurs œuvres ont intégré des pièges réels ou allusifs : c'est le cas par exemple des assemblages intitulés *Les dangers de la multiplication* (1971), dans lesquels des moulages de souliers d'enfant ont le pied gauche pris dans un piège à rongeurs, ou encore le *Double piège à hommes* (1970), un piège à rats de taille humaine exposé au CNAC en 1972. Dans un registre plus léger, mais toutefois inquiétant, citons ainsi *La Trappe-mouches* (1970), multiple dont le titre en forme de calembour joue nettement sur la sonorité du mot « trap » (« piège » en anglais) : l'artiste présente sous un cellophane transparent un ruban en serpentin recouvert de glu - de ceux que l'on trouve facilement dans le commerce pour se débarrasser des mouches - recouvert d'insectes pris au piège. La figure matérielle du piège n'est d'ailleurs pas nécessaire pour suggérer cette façon de s'approprier le réel et de l'empêcher de fuir : les recettes de tripes de Spoerri en constituent une métaphore exemplaire. Comme la boulette, la tripe n'est pas anecdotique : l'artiste eut un temps le projet, avant le Restaurant Spoerri de Düsseldorf, de lancer un restaurant dans le Nebraska sous l'appellation du « Guts Bucket »

<footnote n="12">12 Sur ce sujet, voir Nicole Herrmann-Mascard, *Les reliques des saints : formation coutumière d'un droit*, Paris 1975 ou encore le chapitre « Le culte des reliques », dans Louis Réau, *Iconographie de l'art chrétien*, t. 1 : introduction générale, Paris 1988 [1955].</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_67.png" /><figcaption>2 Daniel Spoerri,
*La Trappe-mouches*,
1970</figcaption></figure>

(littéralement : « seau à tripes »), puis de créer une chaine de restaurants en France portant le nom « L'attrape-tripes »<fnref n="13" />. Pour Daniel Spoerri, manger des tripes est un acte pour le moins chargé de sens, puisqu'il s'agit, selon son expression, d'un « estomac qui mange un autre estomac »<fnref n="14" />.

L'être humain, vu à travers la pensée de Spoerri, est perçu comme un pié-
geur, potentiellement piégé à son tour : la *Topographie anecdotée du hasard* (1961)
possède elle aussi un côté attrape-mouches, comme si les objets disposés
sur la table de travail de la chambre d'hôtel de Daniel Spoerri avaient été
fixés sur papier collant. On pourrait citer d'autres initiatives, pas forcément
revendiquées comme œuvres d'art, comme le choix de coller au plafond du
Restaurant Spoerri de Düsseldorf, au tournant des années 1970, une collection
d'insectes nécrophages.

<footnote n="13">13 Voir Otto Hahn, *Daniel Spoerri*, Paris 1990, p. 72.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 Cité par Christian Besson, « Daniel Spoerri gastrosophe », dans *Restaurant Spoerri. Maison fondée en 1963*, cat. exp. Paris, Jeu de Paume, 2002, p. 9.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_68.png" /><figcaption>3 Daniel Spoerri, *Max und Morimal*, 1969</figcaption></figure>

Le piège pour insectes a d'ailleurs inspiré Spoerri pour une série assez peu connue, *Max und Morimal* (1969) : celle-ci consiste en de petits objets coulés dans des blocs de plexiglas distincts, chacun accompagné de son histoire<fnref n="15" />. Contrairement aux inclusions d'insectes de commerce, interchangeables, chaque objet est chargé d'un souvenir précis, abondamment développé. La valeur sentimentale de ceux-ci est inversement proportionnelle à leur valeur marchande ou même historique : billet de chemin de fer de Robert Filliou, croûte grattée sur une brûlure de cigarette, ficelles de salami, edelweiss séché, morceaux d'un petit personnage en pain modelé par le sculpteur Reinhoud au restaurant Spoerri et abandonné sur la table, etc.

<footnote n="15">15 Daniel Spoerri, « Krims-Krams objekte », dans *Dokumente Documents Documenti zur Krims-Krams-Magie*, Hambourg 1971, [n.p.].</footnote>
À la même période, Spoerri produit une autre série, tout aussi mal connue, les *rifiuti* [déchets], des travaux réalisés à partir de déchets aspergés d'un liant, colle ou polyester liquide<fnref n="16" />. En 1971, il présente sous la coupole de la Kunsthalle de Hambourg une action au cours de laquelle il produit une série de ces *rifiuti*, à partir de déchets collectés pendant dix ans dans ses ateliers de Paris et de Düsseldorf<fnref n="17" />. Le coefficient d'art de ces déchets artistiques est valorisé par cette conservation sous forme de reliquaires plus proches de poubelles que d'objets religieux. Les débris divers, paquets de cigarettes, boîtes de conserve, et autres déchets sont répartis dans des assiettes ovales et copieusement arrosés de polyester liquide.

Un autre projet, pensé seulement quatre ans après les *rifiuti*, offre un écho à ce désir de conserver malgré tout, y compris le plus petit fragment, le plus petit débris. *Le vide-poches* (1975) prend la forme d'un multiple dans lequel on place des objets en attente d'utilisation mais que l'on se refuse à jeter : « menues pièces de monnaie étrangère, bague, montre cassée que l'on promet de faire réparer, crayon, clés, petit canif... »<fnref n="18" /> Encore plus que le *Tableau-piège*, qui vient figer le moment conjointement collectif et intime du repas, *Le vide-poches* est un agrégat qui condense toutes les rêveries sentimentales sur les objets personnels, en même temps qu'il dévoile le fait que ces objets sont communs à chacun, en dépit de leurs caractéristiques formelles et des souvenirs individuels qui leur sont associés.

Toutes les œuvres précédemment évoquées ont été réalisées après le séjour de Daniel Spoerri sur l'île grecque de Symi, où il a habité en compagnie de Kichka Baticheff pendant treize mois, entre 1966 et 1967. Ce séjour a considérablement bouleversé sa façon d'envisager ce qui relève du rebut, qu'il soit d'ailleurs sentimental ou pas. Selon l'artiste, pour les habitants de l'île, la notion même d'ordure mise au rebut n'existe pas, car tout objet est potentiellement réutilisable, recyclé pour d'autres usages : « Chez les peuples primitifs, il n'y a pas de déchets. »<fnref n="19" /> Il précise même : « les populations non-urbaines [n'ont] pas d'ordures. [...] Tout est usé jusqu'au bout »<fnref n="20" />. L'expérience de Symi est

<footnote n="16">16 Sur ces œuvres, voir Petit lexique sentimental autour de Daniel Spoerri, cat. exp. Paris 1990, p. 90. Pour l'exposition « Freunde-Friends-D'Fründe » à la Kunsthalle de Düsseldorf, Spoerri réalise en juin 1969 des *rifiuti*, mais « ils se désagrègent, la colle ayant été inadéquatement préparée » (p. 90). À Aachen, où Spoerri présente une exposition personnelle à l'automne de la même année, treize *rifiuti* sont réalisés, mais ils ne sont pas mentionnés dans le catalogue de l'exposition. C'est la troisième et dernière démonstration, réalisée en avril 1971 à la Kunsthalle de Hambourg qui fut la plus commentée.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Nous empruntons ces détails à [Anonyme], « Aus Müll wird Kunst », dans Hamburger Abendblatt, 7 avril 1971, Archives Daniel Spoerri, AFr. 84 u).</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 Hahn, 1990 (note 13), p. 91.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Ibid., p. 67.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Irmeline Lebeer, « Daniel Spoerri : Magie à la noix » [extraits d'un entretien en 1982 avec Daniel Spoerri dans cat. exp., Antibes 1990 (note 10), p. 9–14], republié dans L'art ? C'est une meilleure idée ! Entretiens 1972-1984, Nîmes 1997, p. 21.</footnote>
déterminante pour comprendre ces séries d'œuvres, fruits d'une société indus-
trialisée entrée de plein fouet dans la société de consommation, permettant
justement d'accepter l'idée du jetable, de l'objet du quotidien non-utilitaire.
À cette réflexion sur la société de son temps se mêle également son caractère
de témoin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, à laquelle il a survécu et dont il a
vécu les privations, assistant à l'avènement d'une société d'abondance dont
Le vide-poches pourrait être une des manifestations iconiques, si anecdotique
soit-elle.

Le *Musée sentimental*, dont plusieurs éditions furent présentées par Daniel Spoerri entre la fin des années 1980 et la décennie suivante, est également une excellente incarnation de cette propension à piéger. Le tout premier fut montré en 1977 au Centre Pompidou au sein du *Krokrodrome* (ou *Crocrodrome*) de Zig et Puce<fnref n="21" />, non loin de la *Boutique aberrante*, sur laquelle nous reviendrons par la suite.

Le *Musée sentimental* consistait en une galerie où furent exposés non des œuvres d'art, mais ce que l'artiste nomma des « objets témoins » ou des « reliques fétichistes de l'art »<fnref n="22" />. Il s'agit donc par exemple de présenter les dents de lait de Camille Saint-Saëns, la chouette de Rosa Bonheur, le chapeau melon de Magritte, l'étoile jaune de Max Jacob, la canne d'Edmond Rostand, le madras de Rimbaud, la palette de Delacroix ou le violon d'Ingres. Toutes ces reliques ne concernent d'ailleurs pas forcément des artistes, puisqu'on y voit aussi, les côtoyant sans hiérarchie, le doigt momifié du dernier condamné à mort suédois, un mouchoir taché de sang de Barbey d'Aurevilly ou des pseudo-clés de la prison de la Bastille<fnref n="23" />. Un texte de Daniel Spoerri accompagne l'opuscule édité à l'occasion de la manifestation au Centre Pompidou, où on lit notamment ces mots :

« Faut-il insister encore que la différence entre les cheveux de Mlle X et ceux de Victor Hugo consiste seulement dans le fait que les premiers évoquent seulement un sentiment chez celui qui aime Mlle X alors que chez ceux de Victor Hugo tout le monde est touché. [...] [L']art

<footnote n="21">21 Sur cette œuvre collective et plurielle, divisée en plusieurs espaces distincts, dont le *Musée sentimental, la Boutique aberrante*, mais aussi un flipper géant ou un train fantôme, voir notamment Déborah Laks, « Dans l'intestin du Crocrodrome : le Musée Sentimental et la Boutique Aberrante de Daniel Spoerri », dans id., 2018 (note 9), p. 148-151.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 *Les Dossiers de la Boutique aberrante*, Paris 1977, [n.p.].</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Les archives du Centre Pompidou ont conservé toutes les fiches de prêt et demandes de prêt, qui indiquent que Daniel Spoerri aurait souhaité présenter de très nombreux objets issus de collections privées et publiques françaises [dossier 92022/091]. Aucune publication ne mentionne la liste précise des objets exposés dans le *Krokrodrome*. L'émission Zig Zag du 5 juillet 1977 (Antenne 2) permet de voir Daniel Spoerri trier certains de ces objets, avant leur exposition. Nous nous permettons de renvoyer à la section de notre thèse de doctorat, « Reliques exiguës et représentatives de la “Boutique aberrante” et du “Musée sentimental” », dans Camille Paulhan, *Du périssable dans l'art des années 1960-1970* (sous la dir. de Philippe Dagen), Paris I-Sorbonne, 2014, p. 304-312.</footnote>
ressemble à Dieu, puisqu'il recrée continuellement alors que le fétiche
remplace Dieu, puisqu'il évoque seulement, [n'est] rien en soi.

[Ce] problème n'existe seulement parce qu'on est obsédé par l'idée
de la mort [sic], comme les Musées qui ne font rien d'autre que des
sépultures. »<fnref n="24" />

La dernière phrase de l'artiste, particulièrement sévère, qui rappelle la célèbre déclaration de Robert Smithson en 1967 selon laquelle « les musées sont des tombes »<fnref n="25" />, semble confirmée par la réaction de certains conservateurs de musée contactés par l'équipe du Centre Pompidou pour les prêts d'objets afin de les présenter au *Musée sentimental*. Ainsi, le conservateur du Musée national du château de Pau, refusa le prêt de poils d'Henri IV, pour le motif suivant : « Il me semble sincèrement que ce serait se moquer du public que les présenter comme étant de vrais poils de barbe d'Henri IV »<fnref n="26" />. Le conservateur en chef du Musée national de la Céramique de Sèvres, que l'on espère délicieusement ironique, exclua de prêter une coupe réalisée à partir du sein de Marie-Antoinette car « la coupe qui vous intéresse n'a pas, en réalité, été exécutée à partir du sein de Marie-Antoinette et ne présente donc pas la valeur “sentimentale” que l'on pourrait lui attribuer »<fnref n="27" />. Le poil ou le sein royal perdent toute valeur sentimentale par une simple déclaration, et leur exemple vient illustrer avec merveille le caractère fétichiste du musée, dévoilé par Spoerri : ce n'est pas tant pour la valeur esthétique des objets qui y sont présentés que l'on se rend au musée pour les y admirer, mais parce que lesdits objets véhiculent des récits, parce qu'ils ont été en contact avec des êtres dont l'histoire singulière nous marque.

Fragmenter

Le *Musée sentimental* ne peut s’envisager sans sa voisine immédiate, la *Boutique aberrante*, qui pourrait incarner toute la dimension fragmentaire du projet de Daniel Spoerri. Sa conception remonte à 1974, mais sa réalisation date du début de l’année 1977, quelques mois avant l’ouverture des deux expositions dans le *Krokrodrome*, lorsque Spoerri envoie à de nombreux artistes (et quelques critiques comme Irmeline Leeber ou Pierre Restany) une lettre leur proposant de

<footnote n="24">24 Daniel Spoerri, « La boutique aberrante et le musée sentimental », dans *Les Dossiers de la Boutique aberrante*, 1977 (note 22), [n.p.] [nous avons corrigé l'orthographe].</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Robert Smithson, « Some Void Thoughts on Museums », dans *Arts Magazine* 41/4, février 1967, reproduit dans Jack Flam (éd.), *Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings*, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Londres 1996, p. 42 [notre traduction].</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Archives du Centre Georges Pompidou, Boîte exposition « Le musée sentimental » n° 92022/91.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 Ibid.</footnote>
prendre part à ce « contrepoint au caractère officiel du “musée” » en fournissant des objets « démont[a]nt le mécanisme du fétichisme artistique »<fnref n="28" />. Dans les exemples personnels proposés par l’artiste, on peut découvrir un « os d’une vertèbre humaine, trouvé sur le cimetière de Christiansö, au large de l’île de Bornholm », daté de 1976, les « réminiscences d’une coupe de cheveux de 74 par Eva Aeppli, dans la cuisine du moulin Boyard » ou encore « deux cadavres de souris – ou ratons délaissés par le chat Bianca à Tosswil, ferme où j’avais mon atelier près de Zurich entre 71-73 »<fnref n="29" />. De nombreux artistes répondent favorablement à Spoerri, en jouant le jeu des reliques du travail artistique : déchets d’atelier pour Arman qui envoie un violon cassé, pour Eva Aeppli qui cède la main d’une sculpture « bouffée par les souris », ou encore pour Takis qui expédie de la limaille métallique. Mais peu s’aventurent vraiment à envoyer des objets trop intimes ou chargés d’affects, contrairement à ce qu’imagine peut-être Spoerri.

Un objet précis semble avoir été déterminant pour ses réflexions sur le piège du *Musée sentimental* et la fragmentation de *la Boutique aberrante* : il s’agit du coupe-ongles de Brancusi, que Spoerri dit avoir volé en 1960 : « c’est l’objet même que l’on utilise pour se défaire d’une partie de son corps, ce qui sépare le mort du vivant »<fnref n="30" />. C’est véritablement ce dont le corps est capable de se dépouiller qui a fasciné l’artiste : outre cette référence aux ongles, plusieurs de ses recherches ont inclus des cheveux – ceux coupés par Eva Aeppli, par exemple – ou, concernant les animaux, des queues ou de la laine, comme dans la série des *Objets de magie à la noix* (1967), que nous évoquerons ci-après. Ainsi que l’explique Louis Réau dans son *Iconographie de l’art chrétien*, « la partie valant pour le tout » en termes de reliques, si l’on recherche en général les parties nobles du corps quand il s’agit de dépecer un cadavre en vue de le fragmenter pour produire des reliques, « le plus petit débris [a] sa valeur et son efficacité »<fnref n="31" />. Autrement dit, le fragment d’ongle de Brancusi vaut donc pour Brancusi tout entier. Mais, en 1977, pour la *Boutique aberrante*, la proposition de Spoerri ne consiste pas en des fragments corporels mais en de petits flacons, issus d’un multiple, *La pharmacie bretonne*. Cette œuvre présente l’eau de 117 sources sacrées bretonnes collectée par l’artiste à partir de 1964. Au Centre Pompidou, Spoerri propose à la vente des flacons isolés, issus de la fontaine de Saint-Tugen, dans le Finistère, connue pour guérir la rage.

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Les Dossiers de la Boutique aberrante, 1977 (note 22) [n.p.].</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Ces exemples ne figurent pas dans *Les dossiers de la Boutique aberrante*, mais à la suite d’une lettre envoyée par Daniel Spoerri à Pierre Restany, datée du 23 février 1977 [Archives de la critique d’art, FR ACA PREST ART 338].</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Daniel Spoerri, « Le coupe-ongles de Brancusi », dans *Le Musée sentimental*, cat. exp. Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1977, [n.p.].</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ Louis Réau, « Introduction générale », dans *Iconographie de l’art chrétien*, t. 1, Paris 1988 [reprint de 1955], p. 393.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_69.png" /><figcaption>4 Daniel Spoerri, *Conserves de magie à la noix*, 1967</figcaption></figure>

Avec la fragmentation, plus encore qu'avec le piège, c'est la dimension sacrée, magique des reliques, mais aussi leur pouvoir curatif qui apparaît pleinement dans le travail de Spoerri. L'artiste explique en 1977 qu'il savait que le fait de transposer les eaux depuis les sources jusque dans les flacons « les priverait de leur caractère sacré et les rangerait au rang d'eaux banales »<fnref n="32" />. Toutefois, le fait que l'œuvre s'intitule *Pharmacie*, « pharmakon » à la fois remède et poison, ainsi que l'insistance sur le caractère sacré de ces eaux conduisent à penser que Spoerri se place en définitive sur la ligne de crête entre d'un côté le détachement amusé et de l'autre la croyance pieuse. Un récit de l'artiste, possiblement apocryphe, vient illustrer cette oscillation intellectuelle passionnante. En revenant en Suisse depuis la Bretagne dans les années 1970, chargé de nombreux bidons d'eau, il dit avoir été arrêté par les douaniers :

<footnote n="32">³² Daniel Spoerri, « La pharmacie bretonne » [préface de 1977 réactualisée en 2004] ; Daniel Spoerri et Marie-Louise Plessen, *Guide de cent-dix sept fontaines sacrées de Bretagne. Rituels de guérison*, Paris 2004, p. 13.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_70.png" /><figcaption>5 Daniel Spoerri, *Conserves de magie à la noix*, 1967</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_71.png" /><figcaption>6 Daniel Spoerri, *Conserves de magie à la noix*, 1967</figcaption></figure>
– « Qu'y a-t-il dans vos containers ?

– De l'eau sacrée.

Le miracle s'est produit.

– Vous pouvez passer. »<fnref n="33" />

En 1967, Daniel Spoerri, alors installé à Symi, réalise une série de 25 objets intitulée *Objets de magie à la noix*<fnref n="34" />, qui à bien des égards préfigure les rebuts figés de *Max und Morimal*. Toutes ces sculptures sont composées de fragments composites d'objets, en général trouvés, dont l'apparence importe moins que l'histoire qui leur est associée, liée au pouvoir desdits objets. Si l'artiste déclare être athée et ne pas croire à la magie, il dit toutefois envier les croyants<fnref n="35" /> et être fasciné par la magie<fnref n="36" />. De fait, on pourrait dire que Spoerri fait partie des incroyants inquiets ou fascinés de constater le pouvoir de la magie ou de la religion sur celles et ceux qui y croient. En cela, le titre de « magie à la noix » vient faire planer, toutefois sans cynisme, un voile de scepticisme sur la puissance avérée de tels objets. Dans les *Objets de magie à la noix* se croisent, pêle-mêle, au gré des compositions : une feuille de rose saisie à côté de la tombe d'Allan Kardec, la mâchoire d'une chèvre vue auparavant vivante, une petite bouteille trouvée dans un cimetière, une aiguille rouillée découverte dans le foie d'une chèvre... Autant d'objets souvent liés à l'au-delà, et dont la puissance est d'abord celle que leur auteur veut bien leur accorder et nous transmettre.

Un texte général vient accompagner les œuvres dans une courte publication envoyée par la poste à des destinataires choisis, *Le Petit Colosse de Symi*, dans lequel Spoerri vient expliciter son rapport à de telles reliques intimistes. Certains extraits sont singulièrement évocateurs quant à la puissance du souvenir face à la dimension fragmentaire de l'objet :

> « L'homme a toujours attaché une importance à l'objet qu'il a touché, que les morts ont touché, ou que les Dieux ont touché ; et quel objet n'est pas touché par les Dieux ? Dans la *Topographie* je voulais justement éviter ce côté-là, en décrivant un clou comme un clou, un quignon de pain comme un quignon de pain. Mais ce pain ramassé encore chaud sur l'autoroute entre Cologne et Francfort, projeté au loin dans un accident de voiture mortel, est-il compréhensible que je n'ai jamais pu le manger, est-il compréhensible que je l'ai gardé, et ne le garderiez-vous pas vous aussi, les 22 abonnés du *Petit Colosse*, connaissant son histoire ? Nous voilà donc tous des fétichistes pris au piège de l'objet. (...)

<footnote n="33">³³ Hahn, 1990 (note 13), p. 117.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Selon les publications, ces œuvres sont intitulées *Objets de magie à la noix ou Conserves de magie à la noix*.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Cat. exp. Paris, 1990 (note 16), p. 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ Hahn, 1990 (note 13), p. 67.</footnote>
L'objet est véhicule des affections, les cheveux de celle qu'on aime, la bague de grand-mère, l'eau bénite et ainsi de suite... jusqu'aux marchés aux puces du monde entier qui déversent continuellement les objets dévalorisés de leur magie et coupés du souvenir de leur histoire. Ainsi l'eau bénite devient de l'eau pourrie, les cheveux de la bien-aimée une poussière de poils, un os d'un saint un os pour un chien. Ce qui restera, c'est l'enveloppe, c'est ce que l'artiste a fait autour, c'est la boîte de conserve. »<fnref n="37" />

Le texte de Daniel Spoerri, éminemment mélancolique, révèle ici l'irrémédiable perte de la valeur affective des objets une fois que la personne pour qui l'objet avait une importance singulière disparaît. Une phrase de Bazon Brock, à propos des objets conservés par Spoerri dans les *Musées sentimentaux*, vient résumer la pensée de l'artiste : « Nous ne les aimons pas parce [qu'ils] ont de la valeur, c'est à l'inverse parce que nous les aimons, nous-mêmes ou ceux qui comptent pour nous, [qu'ils] ont de la valeur. »<fnref n="38" /> En rentrant de Symi, à la fin des années 1960 puis au cours des années 1970, Spoerri a d'ailleurs organisé à plusieurs reprises des séances de troc nommées *Kularing*<fnref n="39" />, pour lesquelles « les visiteurs sont priés d'apporter des objets auxquels se rattachent des souvenirs qui leur sont particulièrement chers : première dent de lait, souvenirs d'amour, etc. »<fnref n="40" />. Le témoignage de l'artiste à propos de ces actions est très lucide : « Ne croyez pas que c'était facile. On marchandait les histoires, chacun surévaluant les siennes. »<fnref n="41" /> Avec de tels actes, la dispersion des souvenirs – par le biais de reliques n'ayant de puissance affective que pour leur dépositaire originel – était en ordre de marche.

*

« La bague de grand-mère », qui donne son titre à cet article, est donc une des incarnations possibles des objets de l'affection mentionnés par Daniel Spoerri dans de nombreuses œuvres, comme autant de reliques laïques dont la valeur paraît impossible à déterminer en regard de l'économie de marché. L'artiste se rappelle ainsi des marchandages entre enfants : « Et n'est-il pas vrai qu'une dent fraîchement arrachée était plus précieuse que la plus belle des billes ? »<fnref n="42" />
Il faudrait insister sur le caractère humble de la réflexion de Daniel Spoerri, qui

<footnote n="37">37 Daniel Spoerri, « Conserves de magie à la noix – 25 objets archéologiques de et par Daniel Spoerri », dans *The Nothing Else Review* (« Le petit colosse de Symi ») 4, Symi 1967, p. 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 Cat. exp. Paris, 1990 (note 16), p. 70.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 Sur les trocs, voir ibid., p. 119-121.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 Cité dans Irmeline Lebeer, « Daniel Spoerri, descente initiatique aux cuisines », dans *Chroniques de l'art vivant* 21, juin 1971, p. 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 Daniel Spoerri, « La collection de Mama W. », dans *La collection de Mama W.*, Oiron 1993, p. 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 Cat. exp. Paris, 1990 (note 16), p. 96.</footnote>
fait de l'œuvre un objet semblable aux autres, dans un relativisme sentimental quelque peu provocant. « L'art, explique l'artiste, ne vit que de prétention. »<fnref n="43" />
Et, évoquant l'œuvre de Cy Twombly, investi

« d'une telle sensibilité, d'une telle minutie, que deux cents personnes dans le monde communient avec ferveur. Mais pour un épicier de Berneou un instituteur de Dijon, cette salade ne représente rien. S'ils trouvaient une gouache de Twombly dans un carton, ils la jetteraient aussitôt à la poubelle »<fnref n="44" />.

Entre le déchet et la relique, l'os de chien et l'os de saint, nous savions déjà qu'il n'y avait qu'un pas. Mais dans la conception spoerrienne de l'art, l'œuvre est également un objet précaire, sans certitude, si ce n'est celle de l'affection qu'il est possible de lui porter.

<footnote n="43">43 Hahn, 1990 (note 13), p. 82.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 Ibid.</footnote>
## Credits

### Cover illustration

© Daniel Spoerri

### Carrick & Laks

1, 5-6 © Daniel Spoerri

2 Photo Jill Carrick © Daniel Spoerri

3 © Creative Commons Zero (CCØ)

4 Photo Jill Carrick © Niklaus Talman

### Sissia

1 © Daniel Spoerri

2-4 © Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Graphische Sammlung: Archiv Daniel Spoerri

5 © H. P. Siffert

### Mareuge

p. 38 © CC 3.0, Warburg

1-6 © all rights reserved

### Carrick & Goutain

1-2, 4-5 Photo Jill Carrick © Daniel Spoerri

3 Photos by Vera Spoerri, Photo Jill Carrick © Daniel Spoerri

6 Photo Jill Carrick © Ginette Dufrêne

### Wagner

1-4, 7 © Daniel Spoerri

5 © The Onnasch Collection © Dieter Roth

6 © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

### Laks

1-2 © Karin von Welck, « 'Rapture and Reality: Drug Use in Cross-cultural Perspective' Variations of Emphasis and Acceptance of an Exhibition on Drugs in a West German and a Dutch ethnographic museum », in *The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship* (1984), 3, p.61-66
3-4 © Wieland Schmied, « Daniel Spoerri als Lehrer », in *Le musée vécu de Daniel Spoerri - Daniel Spoerri, Leben und Werk*, Die Zeitschrift der Kultur, 49, du-Verl, Zürich, 1989.

Cempellin

1, 5 The Ray Johnson Estate. Image courtesy of Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives © Daniel Spoerri

2-4 Photo Leda Cempellin © The Ray Johnson Estate. Image courtesy of Swiss National Library, Prints and Drawings Department: Daniel Spoerri Archives © Daniel Spoerri

6 Photo Leda Cempellin © The Ray Johnson Estate. Image courtesy of The Ray Johnson Estate

Novero

1-2, 4-5 Photo Cecilia Novero © Daniel Spoerri

3, 7 Photo Susanne Neumann © Daniel Spoerri

6 Photos Susanne Neumann, Rita Newman, Barbara Räderscheidt © Daniel Spoerri

Paulhan

1-3, 5-6 © Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Graphische Sammlung: Archiv Daniel Spoerri © Daniel Spoerri

4 Sammlung Stadt Leverkusen © Holger Schmitt © Daniel Spoerri
Le travail de Daniel Spoerri se situe au croisement de plusieurs courants et tendances artistiques. Pour la plupart des commentateurs, il est pourtant généralement abordé comme un artiste du Nouveau Réalisme, et son œuvre cantonnée au Tableau-Piège. Cette place délimitée, forgée par une historiographie largement marquée par les efforts classificateurs de Pierre Restany, ne correspond en réalité qu'à une petite partie de son travail. Ses films, sa poésie, ses livres, les éditions MAT, ses activités d'organisateur d'évènements et d'expositions sont autant d'exemples de la diversité et de l'ouverture de ses champs de recherche. Dans les années 1960, il se rapproche de Fluxus et de Zero et pose les fondements du Eat Art. Son œuvre s'inscrit dans des réseaux transnationaux mêlant des disciplines, des approches théoriques et matérielles différentes, et il importe aujourd'hui de réévaluer ses interactions avec les différents acteurs de la période.

Cet ouvrage constitue les actes du colloque « Topographies de Daniel Spoerri : l'artiste en ses réseaux » organisé au DFK Paris par Jill Carrick et Déborah Laks les 22 et 23 octobre 2018.

<figure><img src="image_72.png" /></figure>

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