This book is about the collaborative work by four artists associated with the FLUXUS and Nouveau Réalisme movements.

"Sens-Plastiquehas now been a companion of mine for nearly 20 years, and so far as I am concerned, Malcolm de Chazal is much the most original and interesting French writer to emerge since the war." -W.H. Auden After seeing an azalea looking at him in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens (and realizing that he himself was becoming a flower), Malcolm de Chazal began composing what would eventually become his unclassifiable masterpiece, Sens-Plastique, which would take its final form in 1948. Containing over 2,000 aphorisms, axioms and allegories, the book was immediately hailed as a work of genius by André Breton, Francis Ponge, Jean Dubuffet and Georges Braque. Embraced by the Surrealists as one of their own, Chazal chose to avoid all literary factions and steadfastly anchored himself in his solitary life as a bachelor mystic on the island nation of Mauritius, where he would proceed to write books and paint for the rest of his life. Sens-Plastiqueemploys a strange humor and an alchemical sensibility to offer up an utterly original world vision that unifies neo-science, philosophy and poetry into a new form of writing. Mapping every human body part, facial expression and emotion onto the natural kingdom through subconscious thinking, Chazal presents a world in which humankind is not just made in the image of God, but Nature is made in the image of humankind: a sensual, synesthetic world in which everything in the universe, be it animal, vegetable, mineral or human, employs a spiritual copula. Malcolm de Chazal(1902-81) was a Mauritian writer and painter. Forsaking a career in the sugar industry, he spent the majority of his life in a solitary, mystical pursuit of the continuity between man and nature.

Satirisk-humoristisk roman.

The term “artistic animator” is inspired by the definition “Kunstanimator” given to Spoerri by his longstanding friend Karl Gerstner during an interview with Katerina Vatsella in 1995. Wherever he went, Spoerri was capable of inspiring others to make art, and at the same time he absorbed, interiorized and transformed ideas from others. His fluctuating memberships during late Modernism (Zero, Nouveau Réalisme, Fluxus, Mail Art) explain why some areas of this work have not yet received their due attention and their connection to the whole picture has often eluded scholarly inquiry. Beyond his tableaux-pièges, which gave him immediate notoriety through an early purchase by the MoMA, Spoerri discovered a new way to approach the multiples in sculpture (Edition MAT), he transformed his trap pictures into an experimental narrative form (Topographie Anécdotée du Hasard), he initiated the Eat Art movement, he tested an innovative curatorial approach (the Musée Sentimental and the Giardino). Despite constant interruptions due to his semi-nomadic lifestyle, this oeuvre presents an extraordinary coherence, where none of these ventures can be properly understood without considering all the others. This is the first monograph entirely devoted to Daniel Spoerri in the United States to date. With an introduction by Barbara Räderscheidt.

This intimate publication documents an iconic art space of the 20th century, the Warsaw apartment and studio of Polish artists Henryk Stazewski (1894-1988) and Edward Krasinski (1925-2004)--a lively artistic and social space shared by multiple artists. Referencing Daniel Spoerri's landmark artist's book An Anecdoted Topography of Chance (1962), it interweaves a detailed photographic survey of the studio--still preserved today as it was after Krasinski's death in 2004--by Polish photographer Pawel Bownik with numerous short stories written by relatives, artists, critics, curators and friends of both artists in commemoration of the importance of this location in the definition and social life of the Polish avant-garde, and in the dialogue between Western and Eastern European contemporary art scenes. Contributors include Daniel Buren, Andrzej Przywara, Anka Ptaszkowska, Joann Mytleowska, Adam Szymczyk and many others.