No time for art in this life

Dieter Roth's Motorcycle racers III is on exhibition in New York. Heini Schneebli, Hamburg/MoMA

The first major United States retrospective of the work of Swiss artist, Dieter Roth, has opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

The exhibition – “Roth Time: A Dieter Roth Retrospective” – showcases five decades of one of the most iconoclastic artists of the post-war era.

Less well known than many artists of his generation, Roth spurned the art world and sometimes distrusted other artists.

He was often seen as an anti-art satirist because he used unconventional materials. In “Literaturwurst”, for instance, he put German novels as well as the complete works of Hegel through a meat grinder, mixing the shreds with herbs and fat and turning them into “literary sausage”.

His palette also included bananas, rubbish and household junk, as the exhibitions at MoMA and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center reveal.

Born of a German father and Swiss mother, Roth was sent from his birthplace, Hamburg, to Zurich as a teenager to escape the Allied bombings in 1943. There, he cultivated a love of poetry and art.

Concrete

At 16, he made his first print on a flattened tin can, a sign of what was to come. Roth began his career as an admirer of the Constructivist-inspired Concrete Art style espoused by Swiss artist Max Bill.

While making his living as a designer of books, textiles, jewellery and plywood furniture, Roth was becoming known in the European artistic underground for his graphic arts work in prints, concrete poetry and artists’ books.

In 1960 he encountered Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures, odd assemblages of machine parts, toys and other objects he had found, some of which were built to self-destruct.

Tinguely’s belief that art and life were part of the same process had a profound effect on Roth and his work.

Mindless

By 1966, Roth was using bananas and sausages in his printmaking instead of metal. From then on, his main theme was the passage of time, illustrated by visible decay, chance and mindless accumulation.

The exhibition in New York presents approximately 375 artworks, including five large-scale installations.

“Flat Waste” at PS1, is a collection of years of personal trash like cigarette stubs, sweet wrappers, hotel bills and peach pits. Each item is inserted into the plastic sleeves of 623 heavy three-ring binders housed in five sets of sturdy rolling shelves.

This piece, like much of Roth’s work, which encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, collage, assemblage, music, poetry, artists¹ books, film and video, seeks to obliterate the line between art and life.

Birdseed bust

“Garden Sculpture”, spread through three galleries at PS1, is a huge assemblage of ladders, planks, bottles of sap, pieces of furniture, videos and buckets of rubbish. The sculpture began in 1968 as a relatively small outdoor work with a bust of Roth made from birdseed and chocolate.

Evolving through processes of decay and regeneration, Garden Sculpture will never be finished, reflecting the artist’s belief that art is not a finite product. The work comes with its own workshop and dining area for the crew that installs it.

Nature was often one of Roth’s main collaborators. “P.O.THA.A.VFB” (Portrait of the Artist as “Vogelfutterbueste”, or birdseed bust) consists of a series of small self-portraits cast in chocolate.

They were sold as multiples and stacked as towers or monuments that eventually crumbled under their own weight. For this exhibition, new chocolate figures have been cast from the artist’s molds for this exhibition.

Disease

Solo Scenes is perhaps the most compelling work in the show, made in Roth’s final two years when he was suffering from lung disease. An installation of 131 monitors, Solo Scenes combines reality-TV (long before its commercialisation) and the self portrait.

The monitors document the artist in his home doing the most ordinary of tasks – washing dishes, taking down notes, playing the piano, sleeping and sitting on the toilet.

Gary Garrels, chief curator at the MoMA, organised the exhibition in conjunction with Schaulager Basel, a private Swiss museum and conservation centre as well as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.

In a statement about the exhibition, Garrels says: “Roth shifted from a foundation in classic modernism into the arena of contemporary art, or what has sometimes been called post-modernism.

“A sense of art and life as imminently tragic but boundlessly open distinguishes the career of Deiter Roth, unfolding over decades but remaining alive and relevant today.”

swissinfo, Carla Drysdale in New York

In brief

Dieter Roth was born in 1930 in Hanover, Germany, and died in Basel, Switzerland in 1998.

The two primary bases for Roth were Iceland and Basel. He was suspicious of galleries and dealers and sceptical of museums and curators as interpreters of his work.

An iconoclastic individualist, Roth has remained elusive to a broad public, despite his importance within art circles.

Roth was involved with a group of artists and writers in Bern who decided to publish an “international journal of young art”, which they called “spirale” for which Roth designed the first cover in 1953.

Artists who were essential influences on Roth included Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg.