Dieter Roth
Encyclopedia
Dieter Roth was an Icelandic
artist of Swiss German origin best known for his artist's books and for his sculptures and pictures made with rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot.
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, Roth was to spend each summer in Switzerland at the behest of the Swiss charity Pro Juventute, a group trying to protect Swiss-German children from the worst ravages of the war. By 1943 the exile had become permanent, and Roth was sent to live with a family in Zürich. This house, the home of the family of Fritz Wyss, was shared with Jewish and communist artists and actors. It was here that Roth would be encouraged to start painting and to write poetry. He wasn't to be re-united with his family, by now utterly destitute, until 1946.
The family moved to Bern in 1947, where Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art. His clientele include the local milk association and the cheese union. After seeing an exhibition of Paul Klee's
work, "a shock that [was to] grow into an obsession", he gradually moved from the style of commercial art he was being instructed in, towards international modernism.
Roth left home in 1953, and began to collaborate with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale, of which nine issues would be published (1953–64). Most of his work at this time was in the prevailing Concrete art
idiom, exemplified by Max Bill
. He took part in a number of local exhibitions, as well as writing poetry, making his first organic sculptures and experimenting with Op art
. In 1954 he met the artist Daniel Spoerri
whose friendship was to be recalled as "one of the most wonderful things I ever experienced." Spoerri would later set up Editions MAT, a publishing house for editioned books and sculptures, which would print some of Roth's early works.
In 1957 Roth married an Icelandic student Sigríður Björnsdóttir, and moved with her back to Reykjavik. Cut off from centres of European modernism, Roth started publishing a series of highly influential artist's books, and to publish these books he founded, with Icelandic poet Einar Bragi
, the publishing company forlag ed. In works such as Bok ("Book") 1958, cut holes in the pages and dispensed with the codex
, allowing the reader to rearrange the pages in any order they wished, whilst Daily Mirror Book, 1961, used the found material of a newspaper cut into 2 cm squares and then rebound as a 150 page book.
This processing of found text reached a logical conclusion in his book Literaturwurst
(Literature Sausage) 1961. The first copy was made out of a Daily Mirror mixed with spices and foodstuffs from genuine sausage recipes, and stuffed in a sausage skin which he sent to his friend Spoerri. Later copies took books or magazines to create an "ironic" reference to literature. This marked the beginnings of his use of foodstuffs in art, which brought him increasing notoriety throughout the 1960s.
, Max Ernst
and Herbert Read
on the jury. As well as a substantial monetary prize, the award included the chance to print a monograph; Roth declined, asking instead for funding to pay for a new work. The end result was his most ambitious book to date, the Copley Book, 1965, a semi-autobiographical deconstruction of the process of book making. In the same year he exhibited at Arthur Köpcke’s gallery in Copenhagen and at the Festival d’Art d’Avant-garde, Paris in 1960, and began an itinerant lifestyle, exhibiting and working throughout Europe, Iceland and America, a pattern he would continue for the rest of his life.
A key breakthrough in his attitude to art was witnessing the performance of Tinguely's
Homage to Modern Art in Basel
, 1961. The work profoundly impressed Roth, leading to a decisive break with constructivism into post-modern avant-garde practices associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes such as Tinguely and Arman
, and the group of artists that were about to become known as Fluxus
, including Joseph Beuys
and Nam June Paik
.
, the avant-garde
art movement centred around George Maciunas
in New York
, he deliberately kept his distance from Maciunas; when asked to add his memories of Maciunas to a biography being compiled by Emmett Williams
, he contributed a less-than-complimentary summary; He later told an interviewer;
The main instance of his working within Fluxus was his contributions to Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a collaborative work of cumulative anecdotes by Spoerri, Robert Filliou
and Emmett Williams, and published by Something Else Press
, (although even this book is debatedly not Fluxus ). Spoerri himself has stated that "it doesn't relate to Fluxus", coming as it did before the movement. Either way, Roth contributed anecdotes to the 1968 edition of what has since become known as “arguably the most important and entertaining 'Artist's book' of the post-war period.” Roth had also offered his artist's book Literaturwurst to Fluxus as a possible publisher in 1963, around the same time as the early Fluxkits (see Water Yam
) but this was turned down by Maciunas.
, on the understanding that he would create a constructivist book. Roth wanted to make something three-dimensional instead, and was promptly fired. Roth managed to salvage his position and used the next three months to create 6,000 pieces on paper, photographed, printed, re-photographed, drawn over etc., which ended up tacked to the wall; 500 or so were photographed, to be published as a book recording the whole process. He then held a party inviting the students to remove anything they liked; the college rescinded its offer to publish the book, which ended up as Snow, finally printed in 1970. He moved on to Rhode Island School of Design
at the beginning of 1965, where his tenure involved teaching at the School of Graphic Design, employing his principle of "non-teaching as teaching". This involved sitting by himself working, refusing to tell his students anything. He also used these students to typeset and print his first book of poetry Scheisse. Neue Gedichte von Dieter Rot (Shit. New Poems by Dieter Rot) 1966. Since the students were unable to speak German, Roth incorporated all their typographical errors into the book.
In 1966 his studio in Providence was cleared out for rent arrears; all but one artwork was destroyed in the process. While in the US, Roth divorced Sigriđur but remained on good terms with the family, by now including three children-Karl, Björn and Vera. Roth would collaborate with his children-especially Björn-for the rest of his life.
As his notoriety increased, his work rate became prolific with major bodies of work including books of poetry, artist's books, sculptures, paintings, multiples, sound recordings, collaborations with other artists such as Emmett Williams
, Hermann Nitsch
and Richard Hamilton
, jewellery designs, furniture, posters, prints and installations. Of these, it was Installations
that gradually became Roth's preferred medium alongside books.
, Pop art
and Arte Povera
, Roth began to produce a series of multiples in the mid-sixties; these editioned sculptural pieces were distinguished by an (extremely) unorthodox approach to materials.
The first multiple was an edition of 100 cakes in the shape of a motorcyclist handed out at the opening to an exhibition of Roth's work at Gallery Hansjorg Mayer. Inevitably, few of these have survived, having been eaten by the visitors. Later multiples used chocolate (Untitled 1969, featuring a doll immersed down to her ankles in chocolate); chocolate and birdseed (P.o.TH.A.A.VFB, 1968, a bust of the artist designed to be left out in the garden ); banana (A Pocket Room by Diter Rot, 1968, featuring a slice of banana placed on a print of a kitchen table in a box ) and rabbit shit (Rabbit-Shit-Rabbit, 1972, in which the Lindt chocolate bunny mould was re-used, making an immediately recognisable bunny rabbit from rabbit shit.)
Other pieces used toy motorbikes, brown sugar, jigsaw puzzles and spices.
(1970), he exhibited a series of 37 suitcases filled with cheese on the floor, below pictures made with cheese on the wall. Called Staple Cheese (A Race), a pun on Steeple Chase, the suitcases were to be opened one a day, whilst the wall pictures included a horizontal line tracking the vertical movement of the cheeses as they slid toward it. However, within a few days the over-powering smell, maggots and flies combined to make it impossible to enter the room. As a gesture to honor what he called “the exhibition’s true audience,” Roth collected some of the dead flies lying on the floor of the gallery space and put them in a glass jar. The suitcases were later stored in a container designed by Roth for a number of years until Butler's husband threw the whole exhibition away in the desert.
Roth's work became increasingly varied throughout the 1970s. He exhibited manufacturing instructions - the Order Form Exhibitions - for the first show, any buyer could take the directions to a printer of their choice, and create their own print or multiple; second time around, the instructions had to taken to a baker to create the collector's own baked goods. The same attitude applied to collectors; his most important collector, the German dentist Hanns Sohm, made his own Literature Sausages to Roth's instructions, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrih Hegel’s Work in 20 Volumes. He published the magazine Zeitschrift für Alles (Review for Everything) 1975-1987, promised to publish anything that anyone sent to Roth, the only editorial constraint being the limit of 4 (later 5) pages. By the time Roth announced its demise, the journal had grown to 1396 pages long. The mid seventies also saw a comprehensive attempt to republish all of Roth's bookworks. Instigated by Hansjörg Mayer, a publisher Roth had met in 1963, the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works) would run to 26 volumes, many of which are still easily available across Europe and America.
Roth had started to compulsively paint over postcards in the early sixties, explaining that it was easier to paint over printed objects than blank canvases; one of his most famous works, 96 Picadillies, 1977, grew out of this compulsion, having as its starting point Roth's encounter with the collection of postcards of Picadilly Circus owned by Richard Hamilton and his wife Rita Donagh. Initially, six of these cards were printed as a large scale portfolio in 1970; eventually, in 1977, 96 of these altered Picadillies were collected in a book, including the unaltered backs, with cut marks to allow the buyer to re-use them as postcards.
Each picture from the series emphasised a different aspect of the scene; one postcard was blanked out everywhere except for the buses circling around Eros
; another might add black paint judiciously across the scene to suggest a bustling nightscape.
Gartenskulptor (Garden Sculpture), for instance, had started out as a copy of the multiple P.O.TH.A.A.VFB, a self-portrait
bust made of chocolate and birdseed standing on a bird-table, exposed to the elements. Referred to by Roth as a 'dis- and re-assembly object', each new incarnation gradually acquired working drawings, paintings, sculpted rabbits and collages placed on trellises in collector's gardens. It even acquired a real rabbit and the rabbit's hutch for a number of years. The last time it was installed in a garden was in 1989. When it was exhibited indoors in Switzerland, 1992, Gartenskulptor took up an entire room. By 1995 it was 20m long and included all sorts of objects including a fire ladder and television screens. By 2000, in Mönchengladbach
, it was 40 metres long, having acquired elements from each of the installations' incarnations, including pebbly earth excavated by the architects Herzog and de Meuron for the facade of the Schaulager, for instance. The rabbit was no longer present.
, and received a number of awards and prizes, including the Genevan Prix Caran d’Ache Beaux Arts, a prestigious Swiss prize, in 1991.
Dieter Roth died on 5 June 1998, in his studio in Basel
, of a heart attack.
Further info about DRA
Icelanders
Icelanders are a Scandinavian ethnic group and a nation, native to Iceland.On 17 June 1944, when an Icelandic republic was founded the Icelanders became independent from the Danish monarchy. The language spoken is Icelandic, a North Germanic language, and Lutheranism is the predominant religion...
artist of Swiss German origin best known for his artist's books and for his sculptures and pictures made with rotting food stuffs. He was also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot.
Biography
Early life
He was born Karl-Dietrich Roth in Hannover, the first of three sons. His mother Vera was German; his father Karl-Ulrich was a Swiss businessman. After the beginning of World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Roth was to spend each summer in Switzerland at the behest of the Swiss charity Pro Juventute, a group trying to protect Swiss-German children from the worst ravages of the war. By 1943 the exile had become permanent, and Roth was sent to live with a family in Zürich. This house, the home of the family of Fritz Wyss, was shared with Jewish and communist artists and actors. It was here that Roth would be encouraged to start painting and to write poetry. He wasn't to be re-united with his family, by now utterly destitute, until 1946.
The family moved to Bern in 1947, where Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art. His clientele include the local milk association and the cheese union. After seeing an exhibition of Paul Klee's
Paul Klee
Paul Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism...
work, "a shock that [was to] grow into an obsession", he gradually moved from the style of commercial art he was being instructed in, towards international modernism.
Spirale and the early books
Concrete art
Concrete art and design or concretism is an abstractionist movement that evolved in the 1930s out of the work of De Stijl, the futurists and Kandinsky around the Swiss painter Max Bill. The term "concrete art" was first introduced by Theo van Doesburg in his "Manifesto of Concrete Art"...
idiom, exemplified by Max Bill
Max Bill
Max Bill was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer and graphic designer.Bill was born in Winterthur...
. He took part in a number of local exhibitions, as well as writing poetry, making his first organic sculptures and experimenting with Op art
Op art
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions."Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made...
. In 1954 he met the artist Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri
Daniel Spoerri is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania, who has been called "the central figure of European post-war art" and "one of the most renown[ed] [artists] of the 20th century." Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures...
whose friendship was to be recalled as "one of the most wonderful things I ever experienced." Spoerri would later set up Editions MAT, a publishing house for editioned books and sculptures, which would print some of Roth's early works.
In 1957 Roth married an Icelandic student Sigríður Björnsdóttir, and moved with her back to Reykjavik. Cut off from centres of European modernism, Roth started publishing a series of highly influential artist's books, and to publish these books he founded, with Icelandic poet Einar Bragi
Einar Bragi
Einar Bragi was an Icelandic poet and publisher. He was a modernist who founded and edited the journal Birtingur, the leading forum for modernism in Iceland at the time.Bragi published nine books of poetry between 1950 and 1980. He is known as one of the Atom Poets...
, the publishing company forlag ed. In works such as Bok ("Book") 1958, cut holes in the pages and dispensed with the codex
Codex
A codex is a book in the format used for modern books, with multiple quires or gatherings typically bound together and given a cover.Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement...
, allowing the reader to rearrange the pages in any order they wished, whilst Daily Mirror Book, 1961, used the found material of a newspaper cut into 2 cm squares and then rebound as a 150 page book.
This processing of found text reached a logical conclusion in his book Literaturwurst
Literaturwurst
Literaturwurst is an Artist's book, made by the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth between 1961 and 1974. Each book was made using traditional sausage recipes, but replacing the sausage meat with a book or magazine. The cover of the edition was then pasted onto the skin of the sausage and signed and...
(Literature Sausage) 1961. The first copy was made out of a Daily Mirror mixed with spices and foodstuffs from genuine sausage recipes, and stuffed in a sausage skin which he sent to his friend Spoerri. Later copies took books or magazines to create an "ironic" reference to literature. This marked the beginnings of his use of foodstuffs in art, which brought him increasing notoriety throughout the 1960s.
The William and Norma Copley Award
In 1960 he won the William and Norma Copley Award, which included Marcel DuchampMarcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...
, Max Ernst
Max Ernst
Max Ernst was a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and poet. A prolific artist, Ernst was one of the primary pioneers of the Dada movement and Surrealism.-Early life:...
and Herbert Read
Herbert Read
Sir Herbert Edward Read, DSO, MC was an English anarchist, poet, and critic of literature and art. He was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism, and was strongly influenced by proto-existentialist thinker Max Stirner....
on the jury. As well as a substantial monetary prize, the award included the chance to print a monograph; Roth declined, asking instead for funding to pay for a new work. The end result was his most ambitious book to date, the Copley Book, 1965, a semi-autobiographical deconstruction of the process of book making. In the same year he exhibited at Arthur Köpcke’s gallery in Copenhagen and at the Festival d’Art d’Avant-garde, Paris in 1960, and began an itinerant lifestyle, exhibiting and working throughout Europe, Iceland and America, a pattern he would continue for the rest of his life.
A key breakthrough in his attitude to art was witnessing the performance of Tinguely's
Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor. He is best known for his sculptural machines or kinetic art, in the Dada tradition; known officially as metamechanics...
Homage to Modern Art in Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, 1961. The work profoundly impressed Roth, leading to a decisive break with constructivism into post-modern avant-garde practices associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes such as Tinguely and Arman
Arman
Arman was a French-born American artist. Born Armand Pierre Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman is a painter who moved from using the objects as paintbrushes to using them as the painting itself...
, and the group of artists that were about to become known as Fluxus
Fluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, including Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys
Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...
and Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....
.
Fluxus
Whilst Roth was close friends with many members of early FluxusFluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, the avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
art movement centred around George Maciunas
George Maciunas
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He was a founding member of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers...
in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, he deliberately kept his distance from Maciunas; when asked to add his memories of Maciunas to a biography being compiled by Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams was an American poet and visual artist.Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966...
, he contributed a less-than-complimentary summary; He later told an interviewer;
The main instance of his working within Fluxus was his contributions to Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, a collaborative work of cumulative anecdotes by Spoerri, Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou
Robert Filliou was a French Fluxus artist, who produced works as a filmmaker, "action poet," sculptor, and happenings maestro....
and Emmett Williams, and published by Something Else Press
Something Else Press
Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by Higgins, Ray Johnson, Gertrude Stein, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Bern Porter, John Cage, Emmett Williams and others. The Something Else Press was an early publisher of...
, (although even this book is debatedly not Fluxus ). Spoerri himself has stated that "it doesn't relate to Fluxus", coming as it did before the movement. Either way, Roth contributed anecdotes to the 1968 edition of what has since become known as “arguably the most important and entertaining 'Artist's book' of the post-war period.” Roth had also offered his artist's book Literaturwurst to Fluxus as a possible publisher in 1963, around the same time as the early Fluxkits (see Water Yam
Water Yam (artist's multiple)
Water Yam is an artist's book by the American artist George Brecht. Originally published in Germany, June 1963 in a box designed by George Maciunas and typeset by Tomas Schmit, it has been re-published in various countries several times since...
) but this was turned down by Maciunas.
Biodegradable art
In 1964, Roth was commissioned, alongside several other artists, to paint a portrait of the collector and dealer Carl Laszlo to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Roth took a solarized photo of the Swiss collector, and painted over it with processed cheese "in order to get his goat. I thought he would turn blue and green, like cheese." This became the first of his celebrated biodegradable works. In a series of works called Insel ("Island", 1968), for instance, Roth would take a blue panel, cover it in foodstuffs arranged as islands on the background, cover the surface in yoghurt, then cover that in a layer of plaster, leaving the piece to undergo a series of transformations; mouldy stages, bacterial decay, insect attack, and then stability as only nondegradable elements were left.Rhode Island, Providence
In 1964 he was offered a post at the Philadelphia Museum of ArtPhiladelphia Museum of Art
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is among the largest art museums in the United States. It is located at the west end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the Centennial Exposition of the same year...
, on the understanding that he would create a constructivist book. Roth wanted to make something three-dimensional instead, and was promptly fired. Roth managed to salvage his position and used the next three months to create 6,000 pieces on paper, photographed, printed, re-photographed, drawn over etc., which ended up tacked to the wall; 500 or so were photographed, to be published as a book recording the whole process. He then held a party inviting the students to remove anything they liked; the college rescinded its offer to publish the book, which ended up as Snow, finally printed in 1970. He moved on to Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Rhode Island School of Design is a fine arts and design college located in Providence, Rhode Island. It was founded in 1877. Located at the base of College Hill, the RISD campus is contiguous with the Brown University campus. The two institutions share social, academic, and community resources and...
at the beginning of 1965, where his tenure involved teaching at the School of Graphic Design, employing his principle of "non-teaching as teaching". This involved sitting by himself working, refusing to tell his students anything. He also used these students to typeset and print his first book of poetry Scheisse. Neue Gedichte von Dieter Rot (Shit. New Poems by Dieter Rot) 1966. Since the students were unable to speak German, Roth incorporated all their typographical errors into the book.
In 1966 his studio in Providence was cleared out for rent arrears; all but one artwork was destroyed in the process. While in the US, Roth divorced Sigriđur but remained on good terms with the family, by now including three children-Karl, Björn and Vera. Roth would collaborate with his children-especially Björn-for the rest of his life.
As his notoriety increased, his work rate became prolific with major bodies of work including books of poetry, artist's books, sculptures, paintings, multiples, sound recordings, collaborations with other artists such as Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams
Emmett Williams was an American poet and visual artist.Williams was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and grew up in Virginia, and lived in Europe from 1949 to 1966...
, Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch
Hermann Nitsch is an Austrian artist who works in experimental and multimedia modes.Born in Vienna, Nitsch received training in painting during the time he studied at the Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchanstalt. He is called an "actionist" or a performance artist...
and Richard Hamilton
Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard William Hamilton, CH was a British painter and collage artist. His 1956 collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the...
, jewellery designs, furniture, posters, prints and installations. Of these, it was Installations
Installation art
Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between...
that gradually became Roth's preferred medium alongside books.
Multiples
Like a lot of his contemporaries in FluxusFluxus
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s. They have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning,...
, Pop art
Pop art
Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the mid 1950s in Britain and in the late 1950s in the United States. Pop art challenged tradition by asserting that an artist's use of the mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture is contiguous with the perspective of fine art...
and Arte Povera
Arte Povera
Arte Povera is a modern art movement. The term was introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, when artists were taking a radical stance. Artists began attacking the values of established institutions of government, industry, and culture, and even questioning whether...
, Roth began to produce a series of multiples in the mid-sixties; these editioned sculptural pieces were distinguished by an (extremely) unorthodox approach to materials.
The first multiple was an edition of 100 cakes in the shape of a motorcyclist handed out at the opening to an exhibition of Roth's work at Gallery Hansjorg Mayer. Inevitably, few of these have survived, having been eaten by the visitors. Later multiples used chocolate (Untitled 1969, featuring a doll immersed down to her ankles in chocolate); chocolate and birdseed (P.o.TH.A.A.VFB, 1968, a bust of the artist designed to be left out in the garden ); banana (A Pocket Room by Diter Rot, 1968, featuring a slice of banana placed on a print of a kitchen table in a box ) and rabbit shit (Rabbit-Shit-Rabbit, 1972, in which the Lindt chocolate bunny mould was re-used, making an immediately recognisable bunny rabbit from rabbit shit.)
Other pieces used toy motorbikes, brown sugar, jigsaw puzzles and spices.
Staple Cheese (A Race)
For his first exhibition in USA, at the Eugenia Butler Gallery of Los AngelesLos Ángeles
Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...
(1970), he exhibited a series of 37 suitcases filled with cheese on the floor, below pictures made with cheese on the wall. Called Staple Cheese (A Race), a pun on Steeple Chase, the suitcases were to be opened one a day, whilst the wall pictures included a horizontal line tracking the vertical movement of the cheeses as they slid toward it. However, within a few days the over-powering smell, maggots and flies combined to make it impossible to enter the room. As a gesture to honor what he called “the exhibition’s true audience,” Roth collected some of the dead flies lying on the floor of the gallery space and put them in a glass jar. The suitcases were later stored in a container designed by Roth for a number of years until Butler's husband threw the whole exhibition away in the desert.
Roth's work became increasingly varied throughout the 1970s. He exhibited manufacturing instructions - the Order Form Exhibitions - for the first show, any buyer could take the directions to a printer of their choice, and create their own print or multiple; second time around, the instructions had to taken to a baker to create the collector's own baked goods. The same attitude applied to collectors; his most important collector, the German dentist Hanns Sohm, made his own Literature Sausages to Roth's instructions, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrih Hegel’s Work in 20 Volumes. He published the magazine Zeitschrift für Alles (Review for Everything) 1975-1987, promised to publish anything that anyone sent to Roth, the only editorial constraint being the limit of 4 (later 5) pages. By the time Roth announced its demise, the journal had grown to 1396 pages long. The mid seventies also saw a comprehensive attempt to republish all of Roth's bookworks. Instigated by Hansjörg Mayer, a publisher Roth had met in 1963, the Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works) would run to 26 volumes, many of which are still easily available across Europe and America.
96 Picadillies
Each picture from the series emphasised a different aspect of the scene; one postcard was blanked out everywhere except for the buses circling around Eros
Eros
Eros , in Greek mythology, was the Greek god of love. His Roman counterpart was Cupid . Some myths make him a primordial god, while in other myths, he is the son of Aphrodite....
; another might add black paint judiciously across the scene to suggest a bustling nightscape.
1980s and 1990s
Garden Sculpture
Roth's installations became larger over the years, and more open-ended. After 1980 they were often created in collaboration with his son Björn and other artists, who would also contribute to the pieces.Gartenskulptor (Garden Sculpture), for instance, had started out as a copy of the multiple P.O.TH.A.A.VFB, a self-portrait
Self-portrait
A self-portrait is a representation of an artist, drawn, painted, photographed, or sculpted by the artist. Although self-portraits have been made by artists since the earliest times, it is not until the Early Renaissance in the mid 15th century that artists can be frequently identified depicting...
bust made of chocolate and birdseed standing on a bird-table, exposed to the elements. Referred to by Roth as a 'dis- and re-assembly object', each new incarnation gradually acquired working drawings, paintings, sculpted rabbits and collages placed on trellises in collector's gardens. It even acquired a real rabbit and the rabbit's hutch for a number of years. The last time it was installed in a garden was in 1989. When it was exhibited indoors in Switzerland, 1992, Gartenskulptor took up an entire room. By 1995 it was 20m long and included all sorts of objects including a fire ladder and television screens. By 2000, in Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach , formerly known as Münchengladbach, is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located west of the Rhine half way between Düsseldorf and the Dutch border....
, it was 40 metres long, having acquired elements from each of the installations' incarnations, including pebbly earth excavated by the architects Herzog and de Meuron for the facade of the Schaulager, for instance. The rabbit was no longer present.
Late renown
Roth's work became increasingly celebrated by the 1980s; a number of retrospectives began to be staged throughout Europe, as well as large scale exhibitions of new work. He represented Switzerland at the 1982 Venice BiennaleVenice Biennale
The Venice Biennale is a major contemporary art exhibition that takes place once every two years in Venice, Italy. The Venice Film Festival is part of it. So too is the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which is held in even years...
, and received a number of awards and prizes, including the Genevan Prix Caran d’Ache Beaux Arts, a prestigious Swiss prize, in 1991.
Dieter Roth died on 5 June 1998, in his studio in Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, of a heart attack.
Dieter Roth Academy
In memory of Dieter Roth, every year his close friends (most of them artists, among which: Sigurdur and Kristjan Gudmundsson, Dorothy Iannone, Runa Thorkelsdottir, Jan Voss, Henriette van Egten, Bjorn Roth, Andrea Tippel, Bernd Koberling, Petur Kristjansson, Rainer and Agnes Pretzell, Malcolm Green, Eggert Einarsson e.a.) meet for a conference. Previous meetings have been in:- Lubeck, Germany (2004)
- Mosfellsbaer, Iceland (2005)
- Xiamen, China (2006)
- Amsterdam, Netherlands (2007)
- Hellnar, Iceland (2008)
- Stuttgart, Germany (2009)
- Hjalteyri, Iceland (2010)
Further info about DRA
External links
- Dieter Roth Foundation and museum website
- Roth Time: a Dieter Roth retrospective — Museum of Modern Art (New York)
- Dieter Roth in artnet Monographs
- Boekie Woekie, artist bookstore Amsterdam. Books by Dieter Roth.
- Dieter Roth biography and exhibition review by cosmopolis.ch
- Dieter Roth Academy
- A Collection of his work in the Tate
- Dieter Roth on the website of his gallery Eva Presenhuber
- Documentary film on Dieter Roth