"Dieter Roth: Printed Pressed Bound, 1949-1979" at Goldie Paley Gallery,
Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, May 26- July 30 1999.
Felicitas Thun, guest curator (originally opened in Vienna using materials
from the Albertina Graphic Collection). Bj�rn Roth, Dieter's son, assisted
in the Philadelphia exhibition.
Writing a brief review of a comprehensive Dieter Roth exhibit (with 60
graphic prints, 60 books, and 10 assemblages), one inevitably feels like
packing his many volumes of works into a Viennese w�rst. Roth's own
Literaturw�rste (Literature Sausages) series consists of shredded pages of,
for example, the 20 volumes of Hegel's philosophy boiled and stuffed into
20 animal intestines and individually labeled.
That image, one of the most striking in the exhibit, offers an iconic
summary of Roth's aesthetic concerns, his methods of working, his
importance for the arts in the last half of the twentieth century, and even
an image of his pranksterish sense of humor. Reviewing the exhibit and
catalogue, one might also consider how the curator packaged Roth's work and
career, and how she suggested his importance for the arts.
Roth died unexpectedly in 1998, and the exhibit, that was planned before
his death, became a posthumous summary of his life and career as an
innovative printmaker and key figure in book arts. Born Karl Dietrich Roth
in Germany, 1930, he emigrated physically to Switzerland and Iceland, and
aesthetically from the Bauhaus interest in the clean lines of concrete art
to a fascination with self-destructing artworks, using everyday refuse, and
the techniques of smearing and smudging his prints.
Those shifts in his interests parallel the shift in European art from
constructivist concerns before 1960 toward conceptual art like that
associated with Fluxus, the Vienna Actionists, and Pop artists like Richard
Hamilton. Roth collaborated with these artists, making the connections
literal, and he explains that the aesthetic shift happened after he saw
Jean Tinguely's self-destructing machine. Fluxus artist Dick Higgins
published the English language edition of Roth's book 286 Little Clouds,
and a number of the artists associated with these movements produced works
in homage to Roth. But, Roth himself was never quite in any particular
group, and Dick Higgins, commenting on his unique influence said he was a
"one-man movement." Roth himself founded six different presses, mostly to
publish his own work, and his use of the trappings of infrastructure as
artworks in themselves is not easily captured in a comprehensive exhibit.
Roth's oeuvre, in this exhibit, highlights the startling shift from the
efforts at producing a universal aesthetic language in, for example, the
magazine Spirale co-edited with Eugen Gomringer, who went on to found the
International Concrete Poetry Movement, to the process oriented, transient,
and autobiographical works. The catalogue does construct this context, but
the exhibit, in its effort to collect so much of Roth's work, does not
include examples of these other works that would make the context integral
to the exhibit.
Using unusual materials, like cheese, chocolate, rabbit droppings, tar,
glue, cocoa powder, sour milk, moldy foods, licorice sticks, and other
found materials Roth introduced printmaking methods that are now among the
standard practices of artists. At the exhibit more than in reproductions
of the works, one appreciates the found objects as part of the work. You
recall the previous use and function of the object or substance and, this
process puts you in the position of the artist involved in making art.
Likewise, with his unusual procedures, like the two handed speedy drawings
in which his two hands drew simultaneous mirror images.
The possibility of printing on unusual materials and breaking open the
possibilities of the book and the page are difficult to imagine outside of
Felicitas Thun's exhibit of Roth's work. Sadly the Paley gallery was the
only venue for the exhibit in the States. The importance of the exhibit
will resonate in years to come just as the earlier exhibit at the Paley
gallery on the work of Ray Johnson led to a reappraisal of his work as an
important influence on contemporary artists. Roth, like Ray, was more than
a visual artist.
As an essay by Ferdinand Schmatz in the catalogue explains, Roth was also a
poet, and the influence of the visual art often obscures and distorts the
poetics of the work. In one of his visual poems, Roth argued that he
attempts to fuse eye and mouth as a method of aesthetic invention rather
than follow the Concrete poets' call to fuse eye and ear. Here it might
have helped to organize the exhibit to see the earlier work next to, and in
relation to, the later work not merely as a contrast, but to speculate on
how the earlier concerns led to the later works. The catalogue essays by
Thun do hint at these connections.
The poetics of his work form the basis for his importance as a key figure
in the formation of book arts. His books attempted to mix the visual
aspects of drawing and graphic design with the poetics of sequence. He
specifically chose the book form over graphic prints to stress the
interactions with a reader who, by turning pages back and forth, uses
sequence to construct a contingent artwork with each reading. The book
became an important hybrid form of his art as he played with, or disrupted,
the codex structure and involved the reader in ways unavailable to
printmakers. In that sense, his work functions not just as a precursor to
process art, but also to contemporary interactive multimedia.
What Roth discovered, for example using printing techniques involving
building-up the prints with food and other objects, has become standard
practices for many printers making it difficult to think of his oeuvre as
anything but the start of an inevitable progress. In the catalogue's
interview, Roth confesses that his innovations "resulted from a feeling of
failure," from failing to achieve what he wanted in art and poetry. What
he wanted to achieve was the impossibility of expressing the struggle and
pain involved in his life and art.
Failure was his method of innovation. Although the exhibit most likely
leads one to consider the works included as masterpieces, and many of them
are visually spectacular, the quantity of the works is, for Roth,
explicitly meant to evoke a qualitative shift in how we appreciate his
artwork. He wants us to recognize the cataloguing and collecting of forms,
substances, and processes as part of the artworks. With his fascination
with cataloguing, archiving, and combining his own works in containers
especially since 1970, perhaps Roth left artists and art historians with a
clue to extending his work: from Literaturw�rste to Review�rste?
Craig Saper
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
