| dc.description.abstract | On October 17, 1961, at 3.47 in the afternoon, artist Daniel Spoerri traced all the objects gathered on the blue tabletop of his Parisian hotel room onto a large sheet of paper. Paper clips, wine stoppers, matchboxes, burnt matches, spice jars, cutlery, leftover bread, spilled salt – nothing was left out, nothing was deemed too unimportant. Each outline – 80 in total – was then numbered and annotated in a corresponding note. In a sober, mock-encyclopedic style Spoerri described one object after the other, noting details such as visual appearance, text printed on product packaging, the cost of the item etc. A good deal of the notes were also furnished with additional anecdotal material, such as the circumstance of the objects’ acquisition, the use they had been put to, stories relating to Spoerri’s friends and acquaintances, short descriptions of how they ended up on the table in the first place, or other tidbits of information. Whenever he felt it necessary, Spoerri added footnotes to the notes for further elaborations, engaging the help of his good friend Robert Filliou to correct his memory or his French. The resulting collection of notes was published, together with the outline of the objects, as a small booklet in February 1962. And by 1968 two more editions of the book had been published, each with new material and footnotes added to the work by Spoerri as well as from his friends Emmett Williams and Dieter Roth. This thesis is a study of this collaborative work: An Anecdoted Topography of Chance. It argues that the work should be understood not just as a collection of notes bound together as a book, but as an archive generated from a principle of openness and potentially endless accumulation. It will discuss how the work is underpinned and shaped by media technologies such as photography and sound recording, pointing to the broadening of the book format that accelerated through the proliferation of artists’ books in the 1960s. It will also look at some possible implications of the work’s archival character, specifically how its proximity to everyday life and the life of its main author can be viewed as symptomatic for a kind of “soft” power that aims at a non-coercive control of life. | eng |