Born to a Jewish family in Romania, Spoerri left Switzerland to escape the Romanian Fascists and subsequently went to Paris in the '50s. There he became involved with the group of Nouveaux Realists, founded in the '60s by Pierre Restany. At that time Spoerri invented "snare pictures." The idea was to record the topography of tabletops filled with dishes after a meal. The residue of the meal implies a scenario of the dada activity that preceded. He then takes these assemblages and hangs them on the wall as art. He is a provocateur and a human polygraph machine, provoking the bait and recording the reaction to the new aestethic. His assemblages are theater sets of surreal pantomimes, an object-poem in the true tradition of Duchamp and Man Ray, with whom he collaborated. The chance operational principle Spoerri borrowed from Tristan Tzara's formula for dada poetry was utilised in a 1962 show that resulted in an artist's book called "An Anecdoted Topography of Chance," translated and further re-anedocted by Emmett Williams. In 1968 he opened the Eat Art Gallery in Düsseldorf, which introduced edible works of art by contemporary artists. Some of the well-known participants who left food for thought included Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys, among other Fluxus artists. In a recent conversation with Spoerri, he remarked, "I am not a surrealist, I am more of a dadaist ... I like it for the spectator to enter my work by telling himself a story, passing in terms of his own logic from one object to the next." Spoerri, in addition to being a visual artist, has also been a dancer, a theatre director, as well as the editor of a magazine and a gallery director. Now he is opening a small restaurant called Il Giardino in his Zen sculpture garden and preparing a retrospective proposed for 2001 at the Tinguely Museum.
