Daniel Spoerri, born March 27, 1930 became known as an artist, mainly through his so-called „ snare pictures“ (1960s). However, his career started in the 1950s as a dancer in Bern. Later he made a name for himself as a restaurant manager (1970s) and as the founder of Eat Art ( Eat Art Galerie in Düsseldorf and several banquets).
Found here
But this technique for picturing food is not a recent revelation born out of Tumblr or Instagram. In 1960, Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri constructed his first snare pictures: assemblages of objects like plates, coffee cups and ashtrays glued on to tables from restaurants and domestic spaces, recreating the exact arrangement of how the items were found. Spoerri, who identifies as a “paster of found situations,” sources these assemblages from specific and personal instances. For example, when his girlfriend Kichka left her breakfast dishes and dregs in the kitchen one morning, Spoerri attached the readymade composition of leftover eggshells, coffee pots and cigarette butts to a wood panel and titled it Kichka’s Breakfast I.
In this process, Spoerri turns meal into memory. When Spoerri installs his work, he attaches it to the wall, facing outward. These foreshortened, wall-bound objects read as rectangles, inviting the audience to approach the pieces as two-dimensional surfaces rather than as sculptures. Spoerri’s snare pictures challenged the conventions of traditional still-lifes, notable in oeuvres ranging from Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s to Wayne Thiebaud’s, long before the advent of the Internet.
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These one-trick ponies are the dispensable images that inundate our contemporary visual culture and cloud our understanding of the nuanced difference between an aesthetically pleasing picture and a compelling photograph.
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If we, as photographers or viewers, assume the point-of-view of God (or the Cloud, whichever operates at the center of your personal belief system), we expose our own buried desire to have complete control over the food we consume.
....we are programmed to be enchanted by an aerial viewpoint that perceptually flatters our innermost ambition to be omnipotent.
