On a surface lined with quarry stones stands a table with a large marble plate, perfect for sitting at, especially during the hot summer, in order to enjoy the wooded shade of this gently sublime spot. Interesting artistic elements can be found on the underside of this work: The plate does not stand on ordinary table legs, but on cast-bronze scraps that Spoerri found. One of these bronze scrap pieces appears to have been intended for a sculpture by Arman.

The table is set with plates, glasses, jugs and a ham made from marble. These movable pieces are work samples from a studio in Carrara, where the panels for the installation “Ultime Cene” were produced (WORK 91)

Atop a twisting column a hand holds up a small golden head, which appears to grow out of a flower bud. Daniel Spoerri dedicated this work to the Sicilian town of Gibellina, which was destroyed in an earthquake. Sometimes a ray of sunshine falls on the column – a particularly beautiful sight in this otherwise rather dark little wood.

The circle of unicorns is one of the first installations in the Giardino. The long horns can be seen even from afar, gently leaning in towards each other and towering up to the sky. Daniel Spoerri had wanted a unicorn horn, that is a narwhal tooth, for some time. When he finally got one, he wanted to show it to some of his students. But something made him smash this valuable item into pieces during the presentation. – The objects was restored, the missing fragments replaced with gold. The break lines are clearly recognisable in the bronzes. The skulls come from horses. Gloves hold the horns like lances. According to legend, the village of Seggiano once stood here, long ago. The picturesque spot (now) lies on the opposite hill.

If this reminds you of an ethnological carving, you would be right. In the early 1990s Daniel Spoerri created a series of montages for which he used masks and other objects from foreign cultures. Besides his admiration for these beautiful pieces, he was inspired by the observation that on, among other things, the shirts of African chieftains or on pieces of jewellery ordinary items appear which have come from European travellers and are come to be considered precious in another cultural context: bottle openers, soda cans, etc. Daniel Spoerri called this series of works »Ethnosyncretism«. The huddled »Idol« is a replica of a South Pacific fetish and fits well in this wood, which lies like an island in the surrounding landscape. The hammer with the nail on the head perfectly visualises the sayings »to hammer something into somebody« or »to hit the nail on the head«.

The title marks out the sculpture as the first station on the tour. The model for the bronze slippers were indeed the kind of felt slippers that are handed out at palace tours in order to protect the floors. Spoerri makes a reference to an artist whom he reveres and whose name is associated with felt: Joseph Beuys. However, he changes the positive characteristics of this material (soft, warm, inexpensive) into their opposite by having the slippers cast in bronze.

It goes without saying that a »snare-picture« must be included in the Giardino. Daniel Spoerri’s journey as a fine artist began with frozen everyday situations like this. Cast in bronze, this breakfast table with bread and egg defies storms and rain.

(See also No. 7)

Most art connoisseurs associate the name Daniel Spoerri with the pieces known as »snare-pictures«. In the early 1960s, Spoerri followed his own assertion: »I glue objects in their coincidental arrangement in such a way onto their various surfaces that they cannot be moved.« This was a programme counter to the notion of artworks as individual creations. The »Nouveau Réalisme« , whose manifesto was signed by such artists as Yves Klein, Arman and Spoerri in Paris just a little later, aimed to show the world as it is and to resist the myth of the creative artistic genius. A »snare-image« could be produced by anybody. It did not require the »signature« of an artist. Daniel Spoerri had two snare-pictures cast in bronze for the Giardino (Nos 6 and 7).

A young visitor noticed that Daniel Spoerri frequently incorporated meatgrinders into this sculptures and asked whether this was due to an earlier traumatic experience with such a device. In fact, it is the diversity of form exhibited by this piece of kitchen equipment that is, to Daniel Spoerri, so astounding and intriguing (he also collects potato peeling knives and spectacles for the same reason). The meatgrinder also represents the human mouth, the mincing of food, the first step of nutrition on the digestive journey. These fundamental mechanisms have provided Spoerri with endless fascination and ultimately led him to found »Eat Art«.

An oversized cup atop an antique capital: both were found by the flea market bargain hunter, Daniel Spoerri, who loves nothing better than to subvert what we are accustomed to see and to irritate the viewer, whether it is through unusual combinations, changes of perspective (when he freezes a set table and hangs it vertically on the wall) or through altering the scale. The giant cup finds its echo in the miniature Eiffel Tower for Nam June Paik (No. 71).

The Giardino holds 6 figure groups by Daniel Spoerri: Nos 11, 12, 13, 54 and 73. The Players are arranged in a circle and stand in relation to a sphere in the centre. All the figures stand equidistant from the sphere, yet each approaches the sphere in a different way: one possessively and purposefully (»SS-Officer«), another as if dancing (»Dandy«). They are additionally characterised by their names: the Poet, the Priest, the Prey, the Dandy, the Woman Scratching Herself, the Rider, the SS-Officer.

This installation has the most dramatic effect if you come up the steps from the bottom. Then the Jurors appear to expect you, placing you inadvertently in the role of the Accused, who, crouching with a flat Basque cap on his head, stands alone before the court. Despite his elevated seat, the Michelin Man acting as Judge in the middle of the figures arranged in a slight arc is not the most awe-inspiring figure. The meatgrinders used for the other scultpures present much more imposing symbols of mercilessly grinding justice. The meatgrinder is a recurring element in Spoerri’s sculptural work. We encounter it again in Meatgrinder Fountain (8) and in »Warriors of the Night« (13).

Graceful ladies. Ladies from Graz. The title of this figural group offers up a wordplay, combining both something graceful as well as the stilted artificiality of models on a catwalk. Various objects have been placed on the heads made of busts and are worn as fashionable hats: ploughing tools, a bone, a bottle dryer (which experts in art history will immediately connect with the name Marcel Duchamp, but which here acts as a light sunhat).

Meatgrinders have once again been combined with hat models in this early figural group. They stand in water and have rapidly taken on a black patina. This emphasises the impression of battle-scarred armour; a small army rising up from a pond.

This sculpture’s title is bestowed thanks to its similarity to the spherically headed hero of the Belgian comic series »Tintin« by Hergé. The elephant trunk is the hoseline of a drying hood. Spoerri bought it at a flea market. The market trader asked a high price and Spoerri tried to negotiate. However, the seller had a strong argument: »If an artist like Arman comes along, then he’s going to be making art with it and will sell it for ten times the cost.« Spoerri asked: »And what if somebody like Daniel Spoerri came along?« – »Then it would another three times more expensive!«

So he paid the price originally asked and removed himself from the scene before he was recognised.

Skulls are also one of the recurring elements in Spoerri’s work. The Giardino holds a whole »Skull Chapel« (No. 26). Here, however, they are part of a macabre totemic bouquet. They are planted at the top of three tree trunks and adorned with a variety of asseçoires. For example, wooden kitchen devices decorate one of the heads. This has a dual effect: these banal objects comically disarm death on the one hand and on the other the whirls in the wood hold a formal resemblance to small crowns, making them a convincing head decoration when coloured in royal blue and gold.

In the wood, just 100 metres behind us when we are looking at the Flower Bouquet, the »Skull Tree« (No.17) stands in the undergrowth, like the waymarker of a head hunting tribe. Here, Daniel Spoerri presents to us a further unconventional association: A flattened bucket forms the »vase« for the bouquet of flowers made from mirrors, a variety of rods and a chestnut roasting pan.

Here, again, a fragment from a traditional figure is integrated into a montage by Daniel Spoerri (see No.20). A monster stalking the river edge makes threatening gestures at the sight of a beauty mirrored in the water, who does not seem to notice it, so absorbed by her own reflection is she. The »Beast« bares its teeth (a Zitlala mask from Peru forms the head) and makes a rather helpless effect, not least because its physical mass does not appear to be very manoeuvrable.

This is one of four couples by Daniel Spoerri that can be found in the Giardino. The »Woman« is a fragment that he discovered at an antiques market in Pistoia. Lying down, she draws her skirts reprehensibly – almost sinfully – high, thus attracting the Devil.

Erotic cajoling and urging in an environment so close to the wood can be understood as one of the motifs of the Giardino (No.31 and No.19).

With his first sculpture in bronze (1970) Daniel Spoerri was trying to take a stand against increasing alcohol consumption. In Restaurant Spoerri in Düsseldorf, where he drank every evening with the guests, he found himself very burdened with this. And so the »Santo Grappa« came into being, a chair with a fearsome mask over it. »People didn’t understand,« said Spoerri, »how I could take a monster onto my lap, one that oppressed me – the grappa – one that has somehow become a kind of patron saint for me.« The sculpture was erected behind an old retaining wall in the behind which stretches the »Pig Wood«. The installation becomes a kind of field altar. Further casts of the work can be found in Museums in Solothurn, Amsterdam and Vienna.

To frighten and in the same moment to allay fear – that seems to be a key principle of Spoerri’s art. A postcard series published by George Maciuna, which Daniel Spoerri collaged together with Robert Filliou, was called »Monsters are inoffensive«. Reading the diminutive title »Little Werewolves« seems to call upon us to remember this, but this is reinforced when you see the little teeth and their feet (shoes) behaving themselves and standing neatly together. The fearsome thing is held in check with three clamps.

Tibetan monks’ skulls, two mummies’ heads and monkey skulls form the treasure of this chapel, formerly a rabbit hutch. Daniel Spoerri has collected many things, including skulls. The motto above the entrance says »Caput ipse homo« – The head stands in the stead of the entire human being.

When Daniel Spoerri’s good friend Roland Topor died in 1997, it spurred him to leave Paris and move to the Giardino. It was natural that there, where all his artist friends and important artistic encounters are documented by works, there should also be something to memorialise Topor. However, there are no sculptures by Roland Topor. He was a satirist and illustrator. So Spoerri selected a drawing. This graphic work provided the basis for the sculpture that we can now see in the Giardino. After a clay model was made, it was hewn in marble by a »scalpellina« in Carrara.

A large stone overgrown with ivy rises out from meadow and the undergrowth. Between the leaves can be found two intertwined hands in bronze: A sign of fraternity and friendship, a symbol of cultural, social or political agreement. When Daniel Spoerri made this stone into the Poet’s Grave, he was thinking of the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, of whom reference works state: »Having experienced no literary success, doubting the strength of human connections and despairing of the political situation, he took his life together with the fatally ill Henriette Vogel by Wannsee. Kleist died on 21.11.1811.«

What from a distance looks like a typical element of a classical park and gardens – an aviary for precious birds -turns out on closer inspection to be a chilling container in which a mass dying has taken place. The sight of the little bird corpses on the floor of the cage inevitably reminds the viewer of environmental catastrophes. The bronze birds once again reveal Daniel Spoerri to be a collector. He collected the various models at French flea markets over the years. In the nineteenth century these figurines were placed on children’s graves. The cogniescenti euphemistically call them »sleeping« birds.

After the aviary with the dead birds (29) the visitor comes upon a greenhouse, usually used to protect young or sensitive plants, but here containing highly artificial, electrical flowers: In the flower pots American lightbulbs glow, with blue and red filaments in the shape of little flowers. This installation really comes to full effect at dusk.

The woman spreads her legs and catches the attention of the boy, who still stands somewhat awkwardly and appears to be the more innocent of the two. The couple has withdrawn. The courtship dance and erotic approaches demand intimacy. This station may be closest to the literary model that Daniel Spoerri uses as the foundation for his Giardino: »The Dream of Polyphilos«, a book ascribed to Francesco Colonna from the fifteenth century, in which the protagonist goes in search of his beloved and, sometimes waking, sometimes dreaming, experiences a series of adventures. The tour through the Giardino leads to encounters with unfamiliar creatures that, thanks to the desires and habits that they express, nevertheless seem familiar.

These old-fashioned couches planted with grass require extensive maintenance. In the summer the sun simply burns too strongly, the iron frame heats up and the grass burns despite continuous watering. Daniel Spoerri remembers with a shudder having to trim the edges of the lawn under the supervision of his strict aunt. Controlled, pruned nature is the theme of this work. It is a certain variation of an earlier artwork in which he left his handprint on a freshly seeded surface so that it remained clearly visible: »Where he leaves his mark, no grass shall grow«, is the title of this work from 1964.

The image of a pre-Columbian neolithic cave drawing awakened Daniel Spoerri’s artistic interest. He altered the lines slightly in order to create a labyrinthine form that was then, as it were, drawn on the meadow using a low wall. It is spread across the entire hillside. Spoerri’s surprise was immense when he discovered that the dimensions of the original drawing were only 50 x 40 cm. The object of the display is a hermaphroditic creature with a phallus and breasts, symbolising a cosmic union of Mother Earth and Father Sun.

Through the binoculars on the little platform you can, in a northerly direction, view three columns topped with small sculptures on a meadow: »Ox Head«, »Tripod«, »Snow-Angel«. Up close, these figures cannot be seen very well as they are so high up and the panels on which they are affixed are too large. The title of the piece, »Voyeur«, refers to the secretive practice of spying – the gaze through the binoculars is also the gaze through the keyhole.

Playing with the appearance of size is also an element of this installation, and it is a theme that is already played upon at the entrance of the Giardino, with the oversized cup.

»Room No. 13, Hotel Carcassonne, Rue Mouffetard 24, Paris 1959 – 65« is handwritten on the external wall of the reconstruction of this room (the so-called »wood version«) that served as a model for the bronze caster and is now in the possession of Galerie Henze & Ketterer. The first »snare-picture« (see Nos. 6 and 7) was created in this narrow room and this was where Daniel Spoerri, who had come to Paris as a dancer, began his journey as a fine artist. Shortly afterwards, he and a number of other artists signed the manifesto of »Nouveau Réalisme«, which has now become a well-known term in art history. They committed themselves to remaining close to reality and signalled their opposition to gestic and abstract painting, such as Tachism.

In order to reconstruct the hotel room, Spoerri had to rely on his memory, because he was not permitted to take the precise measurements in the hotel, which still exists unaltered.

With the help of the bronze caster Pietro Caporrella, Daniel Spoerri fulfilled a long-held dream: an unmade bed in bronze. At the same time, he created a monumental »snare-picture«, which was not positioned completely vertically, but was placed on a foundation that inclines in two directions and thereby causes a sensation of dizziness when entered. A reference to the Garden of Bomarzo is evident, the famous park that was created during the Mannerist period. The park contains a »Wonky House«, one of its most spectacular elements.

While travelling through Apuglia in 1999, Daniel Spoerri’s interest was captured by the »Trulli«, old stone huts, the purpose of which has, even today, not been fully researched. He had a similar ‘domed structure’ constructed for the Giardino to be used as a baking oven. He placed five smokestacks on the »hut«, which he modelled on a tailor’s dummy family. Casts were made with workmanlike expertise and if now fine smoke flows from the heads, it is evidence not of mental work, but rather of culinary work. The dtv lexicon (Vol.19, Munich 1975) says »Trullo – subtype of a primitive, single-roomed stone roundhouse with a dome-shaped, stone roof (..)The door is the only source of daylight. Chimneys are usually later additions.« Spoerri’s work with the idiosyncratic chimneys as a »later addition« is a nice proof of this definition.

Right on the edge of the »Giardino« five bronze cast, lifesize mannequin in distorted positions in a ditch lined with a brick wall. Beside it lies a pile of earth, which seems to indicate that the gravesite will soon be covered over. The scene is familiar to us: whether concentration camps, scenes from Vietnam, Yugoslavia or Iraq. Whenever humans destroy other humans, they bury their victims, like dogs bury their gnawed bones. I call these bodies clones because they are copies, one hardly distinguishable from the other. Twisted like fallen marionettes, they almost appear beautiful, despite the dreadful association with a mass grave. Over and over again, the »Giardino« shows us dark sides, for without these there could be no beauty.

D.S.

Stair pyramid, a tetrahedron in sheet iron with a base measuring 5 metres long and reaching 4.5 metres in height, rises up in nine steps to its pinnacle, a small podium on which stands a very slim, 1-metre high bronze sculpture. This comprises a three-legged stand into which a knotted stick is screwed, and atop this there balances, as it were, a 20-cm small kitsch reproduction of the Venus de Milo. Only partially visible from below, she reaches up to the clouds on her knotted stick, this phallus-like stick-object (a term invented by Raymond Queneau). The three-sided pyramid form, which isn’t at all noticeable from a distance, is a continuation of the three legs of the stand – the base shape of pyramids is normally square, because they symbolise the earth.

D.S. 2001

Nam June Paik’s health made communication between the two artist friends rather difficult. So Daniel Spoerri asked Emily Harvey to deliver a letter in which he asked Paik for a contribution to the Giardino. »Tell him to make something as big as the Eiffel Tower!”, Paik is supposed to have joyfully said, and Spoerri immediately installed the smallest Eiffel Tower that he could find, presenting a touch of the humour that Spoerri finds so appealing in Paik. When Emily Harvey saw the Eiffel Tower, she exclaimed: »But he didn’t say Eiffel Tower. He said Empire State Building!” And that pleased Spoerri no end.

The loosely related figures stand in fan-foot grass as if they had appeared in the gloom of the night. One stretches its hands out towards us as if it wanted to offer something. These are somnambulent figures whose intentions we cannot rightly discern and so they appear somewhat threatening, but also transitory. Dream creatures, of the sort that we may have encountered before in the depths of sleep..

A figure by Daniel Spoerri awaits visitors outside the restaurant. She’s called »The Bersagliera«, that is, she’s a sharpshooter, but her stance is reminiscent of the female figure in the »Courting Couple« (No.31). The swing of her hips give her more of a coquettish character than a baleful one. On closer inspection, you’ll also discover that she has received more shots than she has meted out: her body shows evidence of numerous circular injuries. The figure’s facial expression, a collage of remnants from a foundry, is in fact on the cheerful side. If you ask the artist, he thinks she’s probably quite happy at that moment to be penetrated by a sizeable phallus.

The stands densely hung with iron chains in the middle of the clutter in an Italian scrap merchant yard inevitably drew the eye of the inveterate collector Daniel Spoerri, not least because here was a collection that had come together over the course of many, many years. The heavy object was transported, just as it was, to the Giardino and put back together in its original state outside Spoerri’s studio, where there was already a collection point for horseshoes, which can be found frequently on that piece of land. Combined with these, the »Christmas tree«, as Daniel Spoerri called it then, in honour of the date it was erected, was reminiscent of a chieftain or a medicine man decorated with fetishes, but on the other hand there are echoes of Arman’s mighty tower of ploughs and hay tedders, which rises up from the ground some distance away, but in the line of sight. Possibly in order to make a clear demarcation between the two, Spoerri had the »Chain Heap« painted grey.

The newest sculpture that Daniel Spoerri has had erected in the Giardino is part of a series with which he has been highly involved for over two years, the »Prillwitz Idols«. The impulse came from an eighteenth-century story about counterfeiters. Ungainly figures reminiscent of art brut were treated like Slavic shrines and believed to be real for over a hundred years. Daniel Spoerri was enchanted by the way that these imaginative little figurines were put together from different elements and created his own variations, but in rather different dimensions. The sculpture in the Giardino is three metres tall! The title comes from the merging of two figures. Spoerri swaps the heads of an African figure and a naive European woodcarving.

In the spring of 2006 Daniel Spoerri participated in the exhibition »A3« on the Place Saint Sulpice in Paris with the theme »Absence«, in memory of the artist Raymond Hains, who had died shortly before and with whom he had long been friends. For his homage, Spoerri executed an idea that he had been toying with for some time: discarded walking sticks serving as supports for plants, thereby providing a memorial to the possibly deceased owners of the sticks as well as providing an aid to propelling the plants’ vigour to the light. Raymond Hains, who termed himself »l’abstrait« – the abstract one – had himself appeared at the previous »A3« exhibition with two walking sticks. The same installation can now be found in the Giardino in a former, now derelict herb garden.

The three heavy cast iron forms are found pieces that Daniel Spoerri immediately identified as detonated shells. Neither did it escape him that they had bloomed in a bizarre way and so he looked for a plant with which to complement them. His old friend Eva Aeppli was able to help, indirectly, because during a telephone conversation she was talking about her favourite plants: »It’s no contest for me,« she said. »The araucaria!«. Spoerri did some research, found an image and was immediately taken with the rebelliousness of this plant: a symbol for wilfulness.

The idea for this installation goes back to a trip to England. There, Spoerri sketched a pergola comprising a row of interwoven sickles. The idyll of a pergola is thus clearly subverted. Gradually, roses and jasmine will overgrow the walk that has been established in the Giardino. It is set up so that visitors walk towards a small chapel on the neighbouring land.

After Daniel Spoerri had had the last meals of twelve famous men chiselled in marble for an exhibition in Milan, he decided to place a monument to famous women in the Giardino. Marie Antoinette, Hannah Arendt, Hildegard von Bingen, Tanja Blixen, Madame Curie, Marlene Dietrich, Isidora Duncan, Mata Hari, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and the goddess Leda.

Daniel Spoerri has had a wooden boardwalk along the small passage through the hedge to the large meadow replaced with a small brick bridge. Four gorilla skulls cast in bronze support those who walk across it.

At the time Daniel Spoerri was working as assistant director in the theatre, he frequently used this pseudonym.

The Frog Acrobats are really a frog dance of death, because the original model was a dessicated frog that lay, semi-circular, on a branch. I had it cast – first in silver, then twice to shape a bracelet. Then we enlarged it, and these Frog Acrobats came into being, crawling all over each other, full of beans – the topmost one is even trying to jump with huge ski sticks! Another Spoerri resurrection!

D.S.

On a summer’s day in 1983 Daniel Spoerri had tables buried in Park Jouy en Josas. Beforehand, guests had had a picnic in the open air on one of these 40-metre long tables. While the diners were relaxing and having a good time, just a short distance away, mechanical diggers were excavating a 40-metre long and 2-metre wide ditch. Daniel Spoerri closed the banquet and asked the guests to carry the tables into the ditch. The picnic is buried. In August 2010, INRAP* revealed parts of the »Snare-Table«, which had been buried for 27 years; one square metre of it was cast in bronze.

* INRAP: Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives

In 2009 Daniel Spoerri founded a second trust in Austria. Ever since there has been a museum and a restaurant in the small village of Hadersdorf am Kamp, 60 kilometres north of Vienna. The building has a garden with old fruit tree stock. A cherry tree lifts two mighty branches into the air. Daniel Spoerri imagined them as two outstretched arms and added an appropriate head. The »Cherry Tree Buddha« changes its appearance with the shift of the seasons – corporal when the tree blossoms, generous and sociable when the tree bears fruit and the birds sit in the branches, austere in the winter and aflame in the autumn, with a heightened sense for colour. Nature does its bit and contributes an art work that always looks different.

He also intended the sculpture to be realised in the »Giardino« – as a visible sign of the connection between the two Spoerri foundations. The artist selected a tree with ivy growing over its trunk. That alters the overall impression of the Buddha. They are referred to as an »original in series«. The same bronze cast takes on a different appearance thanks to different natural conditions. The sculpture has a further augmentation – a kind of lace collar – through the addition of two circular saw blades, which provide balance. These were added by Michael Holzberger, who carried out the installation.

From the beginning, Daniel Spoerri has emphasised the importance of working with nature in the »Giardino«. In late 2015 a new botanical focus was introduced. Professor Stefano Mancuso is the director of this research branch and, together with his institute, will use the sculpture park for projects in botanical field research.

The Golem is a mystical creature of Jewish mythology. A creature formed from clay, it has a human-like appearance. It is dumb and extraordinarily strong.

Daniel Spoerri was invited to create such a homunculus by the Acquedotto Santa Fiora. The artist was provided with old pumps, valves, sieves and fragments of water supply systems, and he constructed a robot-like figure that, as it naturally should, lives close to a pool of water, acting as a watchman or a waymarker. Daniel Spoerri was supported by Angelo Maineri from Comerio in the execution of the project.

On a summer’s day in 1983 Daniel Spoerri had tables buried in Park Jouy en Josas. Beforehand, guests had had a picnic in the open air on one of these 40-metre long tables. While the diners were relaxing and having a good time, just a short distance away, mechanical diggers were excavating a 40-metre long and 2-metre wide ditch. Daniel Spoerri closed the banquet and asked the guests to carry the tables into the ditch. The picnic is buried. In August 2010, INRAP* revealed parts of the »Snare-Table«, which had been buried for 27 years; one square metre of it was cast in bronze.

* INRAP: Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives