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Chapte NINE Daniel Spoerri’s Carnival of Animals cecilia novero Who as a young child has not dreamt of the Frog-King or has not been afraid of the werewolf or yet still of Dracula who could metamorphose into a bat? Even Little Red Riding Hood tells the story of a metamorphosis of animal into human and vice versa. And then there are all those sayings, “as strong as a lion,” “as cunning as a fox,” “as filthy as a pig,” etc., up to the common belief that the dog and his owner resemble each other. . . . And if we also think of all the masks present in various cultures and different carnivals, or if we think of all those mythologies in which gods and demons take the form of animals either to protect us or threaten us, marry us or rape us, then we have touched only summarily on a very controversial issue: I mean the fact that the genetic code is universal, namely, it is shared by bacteria, animals, and humans . . . [and that] all living creatures originally stemmed from the same cells, mankind included. We have not known this fact for long, since 1953 to be exact, the year the structure of the DNA was decoded. —SPOERRI, ANEKDOTOMANIA, 153 With this comment on the play between animal tales, proverbs, and science in his autobiographical Anekdotomania, Romanian-born, Europe-based artist Daniel Spoerri (b. 1930) suggests the genesis of his probing juxtaposition of animal and human physiognomy in his installation Carnival of Animals (1995).1 152 GORGE OUS BE A S T S After being partially exhibited in various locations, Carnival is now permanently on view in a former monastery that the artist acquired and turned into a museum , in 2010, in the picturesque Austrian village of Hadersdorf am Kamp. Like many of Spoerri’s other works, Carnival is made up of a series of assemblages in which found objects are mixed with two-dimensional images to create a new three-dimensional composition.2 Thus Carnival follows the artist’s principal techniques. These are piéger, “to trap,” and détromper, “to undeceive.” The former has characterized Spoerri’s work from the start. It is particularly important because in the act of trapping the found situations of objects, the rule of chance substitutes for the artist’s expert hand. Let me clarify. In his early Trap-Paintings (1960s) Spoerri glued onto the “tables” on which he ate the remainders of meals, including dirty dishes, glasses, bread, and ashtrays, exactly as chance had placed them there. He then hung these trapped and trapping tables vertically on his walls as artworks. For Spoerri, the snare tables thus suddenly entered a new field of vision: from remainders of life they became works of art. Hence viewers are encouraged to see the effects of their own act of consumption hanging vertically in front of their eyes, not beneath their gaze. Through this reversal of the horizontal to the vertical axis in the field of vision, art becomes visible as the outcome of consumption in life. To undeceive, or détromper—a gesture that returns in several assemblages— is the act Spoerri employed to unmask the painterly illusion found especially in naturalistic art. More broadly, the works Spoerri names détrompe l’oeil defamiliarize the gaze that humans cast on the world, both in life and through artistic representation.3 One key example combines the above-mentioned techniques and functions as a reference point for Carnival of Animals. Relying on the rule of chance, on the one hand, as in the trap paintings, and on détromper, on the other, Spoerri’s Criminal Investigations (1972–91) toy with the proposition that virtually any object can become a murder weapon. For this series he enlarged photos from police archives on canvases, which he then overlaid with the rummaged objects from his wanderings through flea markets. Similarly, in the Carnival series of wall assemblages, Spoerri recycled Charles Le Brun’s canonical seventeenth-century drawings of animal and human physiognomic resemblances. As he explains in Anekdotomania, he first found these drawings by chance in a volume of the Swiss German poet, physiognomist , and theologian Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments for Furthering the Knowledge and Love of Man (1775–78), a work Spoerri had acquired in an antique store. As he then adds, the drawings had illustrated a now lost 1671 lecture on physiognomy by Le Brun, first painter to the French king, held in Paris at the...

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