Muzej-Museo Lapidarium, Novigrad-Cittanova

Muzej – Museo Lapidarium, Galerija – Gallery Rigo, Novigrad – Cittanova
Velika ulica 5, 52466 Novigrad – Cittanova, Croatia
GSM: +385 52 726 – 582, info@muzej-lapidarium.hr
More about the artist: http://www.spoerri.at/

Daniel Spoerri

PARS PRO TOTO

With an Essy by Bora Ćosić

Opening: July 7, 2018, 9 p.m. at Gallery Rigo
Duration: July 7 – August 7, 2018

Daniel Spoerri will be present at the opening.

The Cheerful Demise of Daniel Spoerri’s World

I mentioned Daniel’s name for the first time in a magazine whose editor I was half a century ago, but I never thought that so many years later I would meet him again in real life, as I did ten years ago when we suddenly established our small brotherhood. My giant of a cousin is now climbing up Rovinj hill as if Mann’s Mynheer Peeperkorn was coming for a visit and it is no wonder that Clavdia Chauchat is his companion, dressed in white, the maid who becomes tearful at every kind word, and is also Russian. This is how we turned our meeting into a novel that is continuing in this exhibition, a doll’s house of our joint dot-ages.
A completely different Daniel is here now, a closed-space version of his unbounded energy, deter-mined to show the herbarium of his infantile soul. Instead of the violence of so many of his shows – of all the things that he has done, and the clunking of those crazy machines that he made with Tinguely – we now see the tiny boxes of a young girl’s secrets and the pages of the diary of a little girl. However, this could only be an Alice in wonderland, a silly child who sees the world as a precious mess and jumble, as it deserves to be seen. It was the surrealist poet Dušan Matić who said that in order to make a better ar-rangement for people and children, which is not a double row, a bench or a school desk that is not torture, it is necessary to make chaos from the existing double rows, benches, school desks and so on, and properly to scatter around these pictures, double rows, benches and school desks.
I wish that this small exhibition is nothing formal or too serious, I wish for both of us to hold on to our spirit – corrosive, destructive, but cheerful.
Bora Ćosić, Berlin, May 2018

Translated by Nataša Jeffery