In 1971 the presenters of Blue Peter buried a time capsule in the garden, returning decades later to retrieve the hoard of old badges and annuals. In a similar spirit, French archaeologists are currently excavating the remains of a meal that was buried in 1983 by the artist Daniel Spoerri. But where a metal box is relatively simple to find and dig up, the archaeological team are painstakingly excavating Spoerri's picnic and gaining valuable information about how ceramics and, ugh, pig's trotters decay.
I say "ugh", but I have eaten and enjoyed a pig's penis in a French restaurant, and can see why such treats were on the menu 27 years ago when Spoerri invited 100 guests, legends like him in the French art world, to sit down at long tables for an open-air banquet, before blowing a whistle to cease the feast, and consigning the remnants to the terroir.
It isn't a joke but a serious exercise by a serious artist. Spoerri's buried picnic is of a piece with his highly significant artistic life. The preservation of random moments, above all the recording and archiving of meals, has been at the heart of his work since the 1960s. He once published a book that mapped avant-garde Paris through objects left on a hotel table; he has also made a series of "pictures" by fixing the left-overs of meals to table tops. Artists in 17th-century Holland painted cheeses, lobsters and glasses of wine in sumptuous still lifes; Picasso did the same for rancid mutton heads in starving 1940s Paris. What Spoerri has done is to find a more literal, graphic and yet haunting way to remember the reality of life through its remnants.
You could say the 80-year-old provocateur is an archaeologist of modern life. But the big question is were the wines good, and have they lasted?