On 23 April 1983, the artist Daniel Spoerri organised a feast in the gardens of the Montcel estate in Jouy-en-Josas called the “Lunch under the grass on the occasion of the burial of the snare picture”. On that day, about 80 illustrious members of the cultural elite gathered to participate in an Eat-Art performance, concocted by the artist who signed the declaration constituting the New Realism, and then became an active member of the Fluxus group.

The sequence of events of this funeral parody, and its dramaturgical skeleton, is as follows: while the guests enjoy a menu based on offal, a digger crane digs a trench the same length as the table, perpendicular to it. After the main course, eaters are invited to detach the tray from their table and place it at the bottom of the trench, taking care not to move plates, cutlery, bottles, etc. The tables are then covered with soil, the pit completely backfilled. The meal then continued its course, cheese and dessert, the whole properly watered, a fine and penetrating rain forcing to retreat into the living room of the “chateau”.

The assembly leaves itself by agreeing to return soon, to open an original archaeological site that the artist dreamed of, not without gloating, like the “first excavations of modern art”, as if it were a question of rediscovering in their own artistic waste a disappeared civilization.

This archaeological site was indeed opened in 2010….. Based on archaeological excavations organized on site, considered as the trigger for an ethnographic investigation, it is a question of collecting testimonies that allow us to reconstruct the stakes of a situation that took place in another time.

During an investigation that has not yet been completed, an attempt will be made to link the one-day event (the “Déjeuner sous l’herbe” of 23 April 1983), involving a priori only a microcosm (the “happy few”), to a much broader socio-cultural process. These testimonies are crossed with the discoveries of the archaeologists associated with the project from the beginning.

A project conceived by the “Société du déterrement du tableau -piège” (SDTP) http://www.dejeunersouslherbe.org/

In collaboration with INRAP, IRIS and ACAPACE.

With the amused participation of Daniel Spoerri.