Kichka's Breakfast I

Daniel Spoerri, 1960

So this is the guy who glued his girlfriend’s breakfast down and hung it on the wall. Daniel Spoerri. And look at what it’s sitting on. A kitchen chair, with a board across the seat. So, start on the right. A tin of salt. A can of Nescafé. Then a glass, an opened can of condensed milk, the coffeepot. Two white bowls. Keep going. That red eggcup. Look close. The shell’s still in it. And at the far left, a little tin lid full of cigarette butts. Coffee. Egg. Cigarette. Maybe that’s how the morning went. It’s 1960. Spoerri’s living in a hotel room in Paris. His girlfriend, Kichka, has finished breakfast. He’s waiting for visitors, and all this is still sitting there. His words: “I pasted together the morning’s breakfast, which was still there by chance.” Then he hangs it on the wall. Chair and all. This is the first of what he calls snare pictures. Traps. He takes things where he finds them, fixes them in place, and turns the whole thing upright. The board that was lying flat is now facing you. So, if a painting of breakfast is a picture of a morning, this is the morning. MoMA buys this one the next year. And then he keeps going. In 1963, he turns a Paris gallery into a restaurant. He cooks. Art critics wait the tables. And when the meal’s over, the dishes and leftovers get fixed in place. The table goes up on the wall. So go back to that little lid. “Still there by chance.” That’s how he found the breakfast. Those cigarette butts are still there now, because he glued them down.

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