Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri was born on this day in 1930. 

Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri died a year ago today, at the age of 94. 

Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri died yesterday, at the age of 94. He made significant contributions to the world of artist books and multiples, as a curator, as a gallery and as an artist. 

The Paris Review

The Paris Review is an English-language literary magazine established in the spring of 1953, seventy-one years ago, in Paris. It was founded by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton (who served as editor for fifty years, until his death in 2003).  

Literary critic Joe David Bellamy called the Review "one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world”, publishing writings by Jack Kerouac, Philip Larkin, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Adrienne Rich, Italo Calvino, Samuel Beckett, Nadine Gordimer, Mona Simpson, Rick Moody, and Jean Genet, and interviews with Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Vladimir Nabokov, among many hundreds of others. 

In 1965, the journal launched a series of prints by major contemporary artists. Underwritten by Drue Heinz (actress and wife of ketchup magnate H. J. Heinz II), the series was conceived of to encourage an ongoing relationship between the arts and literary worlds. Artists who contributed prints include Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, David Hockney,   Robert Indiana,  Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol.

This copy (Winter 1966) was sent to me by Michael Dumontier, because of a project by Daniel Spoerri and Emmett Williams. 

In 1960, Spoerri creating his first "snare-picture”, which he defined as "objects found in chance positions, in order or disorder (on tables, in boxes, drawers, etc.) are fixed (‘snared’) as they are. Only the plane is changed: since the result is called a picture, what was horizontal becomes vertical.” The first example - now in the collection of MoMA - collected the remmnants of a breakfast with his girlfriend Kichka. Another collects the debris from a meal with Marcel Duchamp. 

Two years later, he began the Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a means of storytelling through the contents of a table, much like the “snare pictures”.  The work was first published as 53 page pamphlet and four years later it was translated and expanded by the Something Else Press. Dieter Roth published a German version in 1968. The original French version was reprinted by the  Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1990, and the Atlas Press in London reprinted a further-expanded English version in 1995. 

"In my (Tr. Note l.) room. No. 13 on the fifth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard, to the right of the entrance door, between the stove and the sink, stands a table that VERA painted blue one day to surprise me. I have set out here to see what the objects on a section of this table (which I could have made into a snare-picture) (see Appendix II) might suggest to me, what they might spontaneously awaken in me in describing them: the way SHERLOCK HOLMES, starting out with a single object, could solve a crime; (see Appendix III) or historians, after centuries, were able to reconstitute a whole epoch from the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii.

   In case it might be helpful in understanding this experiment, I should state that it was after constructing a pair of eyeglasses equipped with needles to poke the eyes out that I felt the urge to recreate objects through the memory instead of actually displaying them.”

- Daniel Spoerri

 

Daniel Spoerri

Daniel Spoerri celebrates his 94th birthday today. 

Enrico Baj | Personaggio decorato

Enrico Baj

Personaggio decorato

Cologne, Germany: Edition Mat Mot, 1965

46 x 55 x 4.5 cm.

Edition of 100 signed and numbered copies

Enrico Baj made his New York debut in 1960, when Marcel Duchamp and André Breton included him in a group exhibition at D’Arcy Galleries titled “Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanter’s Domain.” He was one of the last artists who Breton aligned with Surrealism. 

In a 1963 essay, Breton described Baj's series Generals (pictured below), which would remain the artists' best known work: 

"A quite recent period in Baj's work has singled out from this brutish regiment several incarnations of the 'general in full dress uniform', a category summed up unforgettably by Benjamin Péret as being 'the grossly glided, perfectly poverty-stricken' [....] Had it not been for Baj, I would have been less attuned to the sight of the goldbeaters'-skins bulging out from behind all this paraphernalia."

These absurdist military characters adorned with medals and military regalia, which the artist found in flea markets, first appeared in his work in 1959, and in the next two years he produced around forty of the 'generals'. He would periodically return to them throughout his career, until his death in 2003. 

They were also the basis for his contribution to the Editon Mat Mot Collection 65. Personaggio decorato (or "Decorated Figure", in English) became the subject of a debate about authorship and value within the Mat Mot series. 

Baj's gallerist, Arturo Schwarz, wished to handle sales of the work, and objected to their low cost, fearing it would undermine his gallery prices. The work, he argued, was too similar to Baj's larger practice and would undercut sales and impact market value. 

Presumably at his urging, Baj initially refused to sign the multiples. Daniel Spoerri (founder and co-editor of Edition Mat Mot) eventually capitulated and agreed to indicate that the works were fabricated by Spoerri, distinct from an 'original' (see above pink poster). This ran counter to Spoerri's goal with the series, which was to de-emphasize the hand of the artist.