Dieter Roth (April 21, 1930 – June 5, 1998) was a Swiss artist known for his artist's books, editioned prints, sculptures, and works made of found materials, including 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 II, 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, which was by now utterly destitute, until 1946, when they joined him in Switzerland.
The family moved to Bern in 1947, where Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art. His clientele includes 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.
Spirale and the early books
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.Artnet Online retrieved 2008-10-10. 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, he 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"Roth, Wien 2002, p48, quoted in . reference to literature. This marked the beginnings of his use of foodstuffs in art, which brought him increasing notoriety throughout the 1960s.
1960s
The William and Norma Copley Award In 1960 he won the William and Norma Copley Award, which included Marcel Duchamp, 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.Artnet Online retrieved 2008-10-08.
Fluxus Whilst Roth was close friends with many members of early Fluxus,Spoerri, Emmett Williams, Tinguely and others. the avant-garde art movement centred around George Maciunas in New York City, 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;"I can't write much-met him 2 times-. Kind of teacher: compensates lack of talent with scolding...gets envious fellows (the girls were softer) together (flux) and makes lack of liveliness into a (restricting) morale. Ornamenter, though." Roth, 1993, quoted in . he later told an interviewer;
Still, there are a number of instances of his working within Fluxus; most prominently, 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.cf. An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, Atlas Press, London 1995, p. 15 He also contributed to V TRe, the Fluxus magazine originally edited by George Brecht, and had work published in An Anthology, published by La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low and Maciunas in 1963. 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.
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."Roth, quoted in . 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.Artcritical.com Review retrieved 2008-10-07.
Rhode Island, Providence In 1964 he was offered a post at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 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.Collaborations with Björn include a 1995 exhibition Björn and Dieter Roth; Archive of the Everyday at the Vienna Secession 1995; with Karl & Björn include Blowers, 1987-93, and with Vera & Björn include Cellar Duet, 1989Björn has continued to carry on his father's legacy at his request; . In 2010 Hauser & Wirth showed one such collaboration, a selection of collage-assemblages, made from the cardboard mats Roth would place on the worktables in his studios to collect the "traces of domestic activities," such as coffee stains and Björn's childish doodles.
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.
Multiples Like a lot of his contemporaries in Fluxus, 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 faeces (Rabbit-Shit-Rabbit, 1972, in which the Lindt chocolate bunny mould was re-used)
Other pieces used toy motorbikes, brown sugar, jigsaw puzzles, and spices.
1970s
Staple Cheese (A Race) For his first exhibition in US, at the Eugenia Butler Gallery of Los Angeles (1970), he exhibited a series of 37 suitcases filled with cheese on the floor, below pictures made with cheese on the wall.Dieter Roth essay, Oxford Art Online 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 overpowering smell, maggots and flies combined to make it impossible to enter the room. 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.