Spoerri's habitat: the subject of two recent European retrospectives, Daniel Spoerri has been making art from mealtime leftovers, flea-market finds and commercial transactions since the late 1950s

During his first visit to America in 1964, Daniel Spoerri, one of the most innovative European avant-garde artists to emerge in the 1960s, debuted at New York's Allan Stone Gallery with an exhibition titled "31 Variations on a Meal." In the gallery were assemblages utilizing the after-dinner leavings of art-world denizens Ray Johnson, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rosenblum, Marjorie Strider and Andy Warhol, among others. The following year, Spoerri returned and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel for several months. Richard Bellamy's Green Gallery sponsored a two-week show there of the disarray of the artist's living quarters, dense with the tabletop still lifes that Stone hadn't sold. These works consisted of actual mealtime leftovers or desktop objects glued to a surface and displayed as wall-mounted high reliefs. During the next three decades, Europe was Spoerri's principal arena, and his work was seen infrequently in this country. (1) This means that we have some catching up to do with an artist whose inventive practices continue to inform art-making in countries around the world.

Spoerri began his visual-arts career in 1959 at age 30 (after spells as a ballet dancer, theater director and Concrete poet) by founding Editions MAT, a pioneering series of low-cost, editioned works of art by friends such as Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, Jean Tinguely and Victor Vasarely. He was the first to apply the term "multiple" to such projects, which are today commonplace. Along with Tinguely, the Romanian-born, Swiss-reared Spoerri was a founding member of the assemblage-oriented Nouveaux Realistes group in 1960. He also participated in several Fluxus events and publications in the early '60s.

Like the kindred Surrealists and Dadaists before him, Spoerri favored activities that enhanced the role of chance in his art works. This is particularly evident in the happenstance arrangements of his tabletop still lifes or "snare pictures," as Spoerri calls them. Although they are his best-known works (examples can be found in most European modern-art museums), the "snare pictures" are only one aspect of "Eat Art," the term Spoerri coined to encompass his diverse activities with food. For example, in 1961 he commandeered canned goods, signed and rubber stamped them with the phrase "Attention: Work of Art," and sold them in a Copenhagen art gallery for their original grocery-store price.

Other Eat Art initiatives include cooking as performance; fashioning perishable, eatable art; writing a multicultural history of meatballs; orchestrating banquets and operating restaurants. The short-lived Restaurant de la Galerie J (1963) in Paris was his first such venture, employing art-world waiters such as critic Pierre Restany and poet/critic John Ashbery. His best-known establishment, the popular Restaurant Spoerri in Dusseldoff, opened in 1968 and featured guest chefs such as artists Joseph Beuys and Antoni Miralda. Two years later, he added an Eat Art Gallery on the floor above. In 1977, he, Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, among others, set up a fetish museum and boutique in a Parisian kiosk where they displayed and sold items belonging to contemporary art personalities such as Christo, Cesar, Panamarenko and Meret Oppenheim. As a playfully entrepreneurial publisher, restaurateur and gallerist, Spoerri creatively exploited commercial transactions as a site for art.

Before 1997, when he settled near the Tuscan town of Seggiano, Spoerri lived a peripatetic existence, that took him to Bern, Paris, the Greek island of Simi, Dusseldorf, Brest, Munich and Vienna, as mood and opportunity dictated.

Although America has given Spoerri a tepid reception over the years, Europe has embraced its native son. Last summer, the five-year-old Museum Jean Tinguely in Basel presented an overview of his career. Unlike his good friend Tinguely, with whom he shared a passion for flea-market finds, Spoerri has not produced many grandly scaled works. As if to compensate for their absence in the exhibition proper, the artist installed a colossal "genetic chain" of found objects in the museum's entry-level central hall. This narrow, 180-foot-long assembly of cast-offs included shoe trees, crockery, wheels, hand tools, hardware, animal horns and masks from various cultures, nestled one after the other.

"Daniel Spoerri: Metteur en scene d'objets," as the retrospective was titled, spanned a 41-year period, encompassing art works as well as posters, invitations and vintage press notices documenting his ephemeral, performative acts. (By using the French term for theater or film director, "metteur en scene," the exhibition's title underlined the performative aspect of Spoerri's oeuvre.) Non-German- and non-French-speaking visitors probably missed most of the ingenious, sometimes raunchy humor embedded in his mischievous puns, including the collaborative projects with the artist-poet Robert Filliou. A 1970 Eat Art poster in English, vividly embodied the idea of art as food, as well as recalling Spoerri's Concrete poetry experiments of the 1950s. A lowercase "e" with voracious choppers bears down on the tip of a wedged-shaped "A" speared with a "T." The edible conglomerate of the "A" and "T" forms an arrow pointing the way from the word "ART" to the proto-Pac-man mouth of the "e."