Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri designed the restrooms for Luna Luna. He created an anti-fascist work with a façade referencing Nazi architect Albert Speer's Reich Chancellery, featuring fake, steaming piles of excrement on columns. Inside, he constructed a 3-D installation that featured objects left at a table following a meal.
Artist
Daniel Spoerri
Attraction
Façade and sculptures for restrooms
Born
1930, Romania
Founded the concept of Eat Art, a movement that centralizes art as food and social situations that surround consuming meals.
Known for his “Snare Pictures,” a type of assemblage that incorporates meal leftovers such as plates, glasses, cutlery, food often affixed to the table where the meal was eaten.
In 1963, Spoerri transformed Galerie J in Paris into his first ephemeral restaurant, creating a different “Snare Picture” from guests’ leftovers every evening.
Swiss-Romanian artist Daniel Spoerri (born 1930, Galati, Romania; lives and works in Tuscany, Italy and Vienna, Austria) creates sculptures and installations immortalizing objects from daily social encounters. Along with Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, Spoerri was a founding member of Nouveau Réalisme (“New Realism”), a movement founded in 1960 by the critic Pierre Restany in which reality was a medium in itself. Artists reused everyday objects–even junk–to make sculptures, installations, and performances to criticize burgeoning consumerism and mass-production.
While collecting scrap iron for Tinguely, Spoerri began gluing random objects he found in flea markets—especially drawn to the end-of-day leftovers—to the wall in elaborate assemblages, improvising art from chance. These early “Flea Market Carnivals” led to the creation of Spoerri’s well-known “Snare Pictures” in the 1960s, assemblages of detritus left on the table at the end of a meal. The collections of used napkins, empty bottles, and dirty plates reflect Spoerri’s long standing interest in dissolving the boundaries between art and life.
...Spoerri’s long-standing interest in dissolving the boundaries between art and life.
For over six decades, Spoerri pioneered the Eat Art movement with projects spanning handwritten recipes, palindrome menus, banquets, and an entire restaurant in Düsseldorf (Restaurant Spoerri) serving foods arousing delight, surprise, or disgust among audience members. Spoerri also designed Il Giardino di Daniel Spoerri in 1997, a sculpture park with the work of numerous artists in Seggiano, Tuscany
Spoerri reimagined Luna Luna’s public bathrooms by designing them to resemble architect Albert Speer's “Reich Chancellery,” the Nazi Party’s building headquarters. Spoerri mocks and devalues Speer’s designs by naming his artwork Crap Chancellery, emphasized by two piles of steaming sculpted feces on the bathroom’s entrance columns. Inside the installation, empty teacups, half-finished bread and cookies, and dirty silverware covered the pink walls above the toilets.
