Spoerri was born Daniel Issac Feinstein, in Galati, Romania, in 1930, to a Swiss Catholic mother and a Romanian Jewish father. His father converted to Protestantism and began proselytizing in Galati. A strict and imposing man, he once punched young Spoerri in the head for singing hymns on the toilet. Already, Daniel’s life was strange. But in 1941, the Nazis made his life even stranger when they disappeared his father. It didn’t matter that his father was a Christian. The Nazis killed him anyway – it was about blood. Spoerri has made a lot of art about blood in his lifetime, and cooked it in many meals. Spoerri is the author of at least five culinary treatises; and, not coincidentally, he lives overlooking the finest farmer’s market in Vienna. Spoerri rebukes distinctions between art, food and blood. Spoerri developed his artistic practice around food and sociality while living in Bern in the 1950s, working as a professional dancer with the Bern Opera Ballet Company. By 1959, Spoerri was concentrating his attention on the table as a creative locus, a site of magic, sensuality and anthropology. It was a natural extension of his physical and intellectual activities. In 1960, alongside Yves Klein, Spoerri joined the Nouveau Réalistes; and from there revolutionized European culture’s relationship to food as art.

As I press the bell, I sense something behind me. I turn to see Spoerri, tucked in close, vibrant and handsome in a linen jacket and canvas pants held up by the same wide, suspenders that he has worn for the last 70 years. I recognize them from so many photographs. Spoerri carries a small bag full of fruit and other items. He knows it’s me. “I was just getting something for us,” he smiles. And our day unfolds. We tape several hours of conversation in his living room studio, and then continue over large bowls of beef wonton soup at a nearby cafe. I focus the interview on Spoerri’s productive but limited time in America. Spoerri came to the U.S. for the first time in 1964, the year Robert Rauschenberg won the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale – a significant moment in New York’s epic conquest of the international art scene.

Spoerri stayed in New York for a little under a year, creating a groundbreaking exhibition at the Allan Stone Gallery entitled 31 Variations on a Meal. During this performance-based exhibition Spoerri cooked and shared meals with a different guest for 31 consecutive evenings. At a certain, spontaneous moment, each meal was considered “finished” and Spoerri affixed every remnant – food, ashes, dishware, whatever – on to the table and hung each successive repast around the walls of the gallery. His guests included Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other art-world luminaries. Spoerri returned to Europe for a spell then came back to New York in 1965. During this visit he created another important installation in his room at the Chelsea Hotel, consisting of the products and materials of his daily life, particularly meals and social interactions.

A decade passed before he returned again in September 1975, this time for a two-month stint as a visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). Sitting together in the noodle house, Spoerri describes his time in San Francisco as a period of scenic beauty and artistic frustration. Spoerri’s voice rises dramatically as he tells me about destroying his exhibition at the Eliane Ganz Gallery in San Francisco on the evening of September 28, 1975.

Spoerri loved to complicate things, but there had been no prior account of violence, no hostile erasure. It struck me as completely odd that he would destroy the artifacts of any of his gastronomic practices. Once I got back to the States, I scheduled an appointment with the archivist of the San Francisco Art Institute, hoping to learn the circumstances of Spoerri’s unique and intriguing act. I uncovered a sordid mess of academic and social pressures that came to a head not only in Spoerri’s violent act, but in a series of political upheavals at the Art Institute at the time.

Spoerri’s visit to San Francisco was initiated by the Eliane Ganz Gallery and SFAI, specifically by the recently appointed President, Arnold Herstand, and the Dean of the College, Roy Ascott. Spoerri arrived in San Francisco around mid-September, accompanied by his French girlfriend, Claude Torre. What Spoerri didn’t know, was that he was walking into a hornet’s nest. The student body and most of the faculty were beginning to realize that Herstand was enacting sweeping changes in the Art Institute’s academic and administrative structures: no more tuition waiver for selected students, no more part-time faculty, plans for a tuition hike, and a general shift in the overall mission and character of the Institute away from studio practice and critique and toward a vocational professionalism. The students and faculty felt the administration was taking them for granted. The administration’s decision to give Spoerri and Torre license to work in the Printmaking Department’s studios hadn’t been cleared by Dick Graf, head of the department. This created all the more tension when, according to some accounts, Claude Torre behaved badly in the studios and Spoerri got upset. The students didn’t want to work with Torre; Spoerri refused to have seminars with students.

Things were going badly, and a gaping divide developed between the students and the majority of the faculty – against the administration. By 1976, just a few months after Spoerri left, the students of the Art Institute withheld their tuition in an escrow account and successfully pressured the Board of Director’s to force Herstand to resign. The students won a rare victory against the forces of elitism and privilege. Thankfully, this history exists in print, in the student newspaper the Eye, published for a few years in the 1970s. The events of this time were recorded with great transparency – official documents, committee notes and editorial opinions were printed and distributed to the entire community in theEye. Without this tool, it would have been impossible for the students to mobilize against the administration and the Board. Herstand was sunk by the power of language and initiative, and perhaps a bit by Spoerri as well. It couldn’t have looked good for Herstand to have a renowned European artist smash cake in the face of a patron and destroy his own artwork.

Take a look at the photographs surrounding this essay. You are there. September 28, 1975. These images are the only ones that survive in the SFAI archives, and even they seem suspect. What is going on here? Where are the signs and nuances of sociality regularly seen in Spoerri’s practice? Nothing spontaneous is happening at these tables. There’s Spoerri, in a fashionable white suit, his gestures formal and remote; his normally mischievous grin replaced by a stiff smile. The whole feel of the meal is orchestrated. The food is ornate to the point of vulgarity. The guests are unvaried, too fancy. There at Spoerri’s table one sees Francis Ford Coppola and his wife, and there’s Arnold Herstand, wearing the trompe l’oeil tuxedo t-shirt. The guest list reveals the cream of San Francisco society: Mr. and Mrs. Paul Pelosi, Mr. and Mrs. Richard Swig, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Getty, Peter Plagens and Mrs. D.A. Hoyt, the unlucky recipient of Spoerri’s cake assault, just to name a few. There were almost 40 guests at the party and they were all rich and influential. Notice how only one table is square and without a tablecloth? This was the table that Spoerri was expected to preserve for posterity. And there is the cake itself, a frosted replica of Spoerri’s work, sad symbol of Spoerri’s original revolution, being plated by a servant, waiting to be consumed. When, moments after these images were taken, Spoerri ruptured the illusion of civility constructed as a banquet and destroyed his work, including everyone’s dinner, he renounced authorship of the event, flinging authorship away from himself onto the “real” creators of the event, destroying his master’s table. Spoerri became his work’s anti-author – a role he has often identified with the act of defecation. Why didn’t the photographer keep shooting when Spoerri went bananas? Fortunately, gossip columnist Herb Caen, who was a guest at the banquet, printed an account several days later.