Les Choses de la Vie

Daniel Spoerri, Les Choses de la Vie is the gallery's first retrospective exhibition dedicated to this artist, a founding member of the New Realism movement. Born Daniel Issac Feinstein in Romania in 1930, Spoerri became Swiss by adoption and was, in turn, a poet, dancer, director, founder of the MAT publishing house, exhibition curator, visual artist, and restaurateur. Considering himself stateless, having lived throughout Europe, and a man of solid, multiple, and artistic friendships, Spoerri is one of the major artists of the 20th century. For this show, the gallery has brought together some twenty major works from the 1960s to the 1990s and is publishing a richly illustrated book with texts by Catherine Francblin, Samuel Gross, and Pavel Schmidt with les presses du réel. “What do I do? I try to affix situations prepared by chance in order for them to stay truly fixed, and I hope they make the viewer uneasy. I’ll explain why. I should point out that I do not hold individual creativity very dear. Perhaps a sign of snobbery; in any case, this certainty was entrenched long before I made snare-pictures. Snare pictures are merely a new way to substantiate this certainty. I have nothing against individual creative production, or at least not all of it. But art only interests me in the sense that it represents an optical lesson. Whether the creation is individual or not, I don’t give a damn. At any rate, the boundary between one and the other is difficult to draw. Rather than the artist, I believe the spectator hold the right to individual reaction. In my case, the optical lesson should consist in the act of drawing attention to situations or regions of our daily lives which are never or nearly never noticed. In other words, precision in form, chance in any moment. And I can be proud of chance in the sense that I am merely its vain and humble servant. Vain because I put my signature on these submissions, for which I am not responsible; humble becase I act merely as a deputy. Humility. Deputy of chance, that could be the title for my activity – still, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I am far from being the first to be employed by chance. Which pleases me, in the sense that I believe even originality is absolutely not essential. Why should my snare pictures provoke uneasiness? Because I hate motionlessness, anything static. I enjoy the contradiction residing in the fact that I affix objects, depriving them of their possibility for continual movement and transformation, when in fact I enjoy movement and change. I enjoy contradictions because they provoke tension. Only do extremes give a full picture. Movement near immobility. Immobility, Fixedness, Death should provoke movement, change, and life. At least, that is my reaction to these snare pictures. Finally, this: Do not think my snare pictures are artworks. They are in information, a provocation, an indication to the eye to see things it doesn’t usually notice. Nothing else… Besides, what is art? Perhaps a way and a possibility of living. In this case, perhaps.”[1] 1 - Daniel Spoerri, published for the first time in Zero, Vol.3. Ed. Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, Düsseldorf, 1961.

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