>Dieter Roth was connected with the Vienna Aktionists (who also collaborated
>on at least one famous symposium with Fluxus), and his work is often
>autodestructive ... there is in this destructiveness of the object, event,
>etc. and joy connected to potlach like gift giving ...
This auto-destructiveness seems to be related to the transitory or temporal
nature of the object. I do not know Deiter Roth's work that well, but have
been deeply impressed by what I have seen.
Craig, you referred to the shift in his work from "the efforts at producing
a universal aesthetic language ... to the process oriented, transient, and
autobiographical works."
I find this quite interesting as well. It seems that the modernists of the
first part of the last century (I'll have to get used to saying that!) were
very much concerned with purity and clarification and with a conception of
the absolute. ...I'm reading Jan Tschichold at the moment who's illustrative
of this. It seems that the post-WWII artists challenged this with their
emphasis on time, events, change, immanence etc. However, I think beneath
this change in approach the two avant-gardes had a lot in common. Maybe
Roth's shift in orientation might reveal the common, underlying interests as
well?
It seems in recent years that the post-WWII aesthetic (I avoid the word
postmodern) has reached its limit too; and, if I'm not mistaken, there's a
renewed interest in the modernist avant-garde. Certainly I find their
idealism refreshing in contrast to the facile cynicism that seems everywhere
present today--though thats another story.
