An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Something Else Press

Perhaps Spoerri‘s fascination with displacing the horizontal with the vertical began when he created the first “tableau-piège” in 1960, “The Resting Place of the Delbeck Family”, by gluing a number of dinner-table objects on a board [1] and then hanging it on a wall. Or it could have begun with “Dylaby” in 1962 [2], in which he turned the orientation of a whole room clockwise. Objects as well as actors were put in a horizontal position whereas the visitors stayed vertically according to gravity. Being the only ones that had this orientation they felt wrong however.