Picnic Garbage Placemat

Item is a vinyl placemat by Geoffrey Hendricks depicting a partially eaten plate of food placed on the ground from an overhead viewpoint.
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Geoffrey Hendricks (1931–2018) was an American artist affiliated with Fluxus. Picnic Garbage Placemat (1973) captures an aerial view of the remnants of a picnic meal. Originally produced as an edition for Italian publisher Flash Art, the placemat echoes earlier Fluxus artists, such as Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri’s snare pictures, in which he affixed the leftovers of meals – cutlery, dirty dishes, partially eaten food – onto a tableau to capture the disorder, chance and indeterminacy that resulted from the act of dining. Hendricks’s Picnic Garbage Placemat is emblematic of Fluxus’ interest in the ephemeral, the everyday, interactivity and processes as well as its expansion of the terms of art.
-Weiyi Chang, 2024