Dieter Roth (April 21, 1930 - June 5, 1998), also known as Dieter Rot and Diter Rot, was a Swiss artist renowned for his multifaceted and experimental approach to art. His diverse body of work encompassed artist's books, editioned prints, sculptures, and creations using found materials, including perishable foodstuffs. Roth's career was marked by a spirit of innovation, collaboration, and a challenge to traditional artistic boundaries. He is now recognized as one of the most significant European post-war artists.
Early Life and Influences
Born Karl-Dietrich Roth in Hannover, Germany, in 1930, Roth's early life was shaped by the turmoil of World War II. His mother, Vera, was German, and his father, Karl-Ulrich, was a Swiss businessman. To escape the Allied bombings, he was sent to Switzerland in 1943, where he lived with a family in Zürich. This family, headed by Fritz Wyss, also sheltered Jewish and communist artists and actors, exposing Roth to a vibrant artistic community.
In 1947, the family relocated to Bern, where Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art. His clientele included the local milk association and the cheese union. During this period, he mastered lithography, typography, and graphic design.
Artistic Beginnings and Key Collaborations
In 1953, Roth left home and began collaborating with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale, which published nine issues between 1953 and 1964. His early work reflected the Concrete art style prevalent at the time. He participated in local exhibitions, wrote poetry, created his first organic sculptures, and experimented with Op art.
Roth's artistic journey was further marked by his association with the Fluxus movement, all the while maintaining his distinct artistic identity.
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The Artist's Book Pioneer
Roth is credited with inventing the ‘artists book’, a publication that is itself an artwork (rather than documentation of other works) and interrogates the form and function of a book. Alongside Ed Ruscha, he pioneered this form of creative expression, establishing its potential and encouraging curatorial and critical recognition of it as a distinctive form of artistic practice.
His artist's books challenged traditional formats, allowing readers to interact with and rearrange pages. His work often involved incorporating found materials like newspapers and magazines.
Examples include Children’s Book and Picture Book, both created in 1957, and 2 Books (1958), which engage the viewer as an active participant in activating transmutations of form and color in the various overlays. Right from the beginning the artist exploited the specific mechanical qualities of the book, in this case its ability to present sequenced tableaux of shapes and colors. As he became more interested in finding hidden aesthetic qualities in the commonplace, in 1961 Roth brought the narrative form of the comic book (Book 3b and Book 3d) into his overlay deconstructions.
One of Roth's most ambitious books was the Copley Book, 1965, a semi-autobiographical deconstruction of the process of book making. The book was the result of the William and Norma Copley award that Roth was awarded in 1960. In the early 1960s, Roth was working at the Rhode Island School of Design but would regularly send correspondences, pictures, and ideas to London for the construction of the book. He worked throughout the development process with British artist Richard Hamilton, who shared a mutual affection for the art of publishing. Hamilton worked as the liaison between America and England, coming to be a kind of collaborator in the project, as he fulfilled tasks like receiving and executing the files that Roth was sending from the US. Pages with notes to the printers themselves are included, revealing the publishing process to the reader. This was an idea Roth continued to feature in later book projects. The Copley Book works as an inventory of everything that lead to the production of the book itself. It is this book-making framework that is being exposed to the reader, as most are likely to be unfamiliar with the process of writing, printing, and distributing a book. Roth has been cited as the originator of the medium of the artist’s book, and the merging of fine art practice and book making on display in the Copley Book supersedes earlier examples in the work of William Blake or the Dada poets in scale and engagement with the potential of the publishing medium.
Embrace of Decay and Decomposition
One of the most important and unique factors in Roth’s work was his embrace of decay and decomposition, particularly through the use of foodstuffs in sculptures and installations. These objects shift and change over time, and therefore pose a unique challenge to the curator and archivist, as well as to an audience confronted by the smell, flies and insects that are attracted by his objects.
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Throughout his career, Roth pushed artistic boundaries by creating biodegradable artworks that evolved over time due to natural decay. His pieces, like "Insel," combined foodstuffs with various materials, showcasing his unique perspective on transformation and impermanence.
Travel and Nomadism
For Roth, travelling and nomadism was an essential part of his practice. He roamed around the world, soaking up different experiences and arguing that the artist constantly required new experiences. This travel was accompanied by a frenzy of making, resulting in a huge body of work that is only today being properly accounted for, catalogued, and displayed as a cohesive creative endeavor. Reflecting his early experiences of dislocation and migration in World War II, Roth was a devoted traveler and nomad throughout his adult life, bringing in images, experiences, and collaborations generated through his roaming across the globe. The written documentation and diaries of this travelling also fed into Roth’s art and interest in paper as a material, emphasizing the indivisible relationship between his personal life and artistic practice.
Disdain for the Art World's Economic Models
Roth frequently demonstrated his disdain for the economic models of the art world, particularly art dealers and museum professionals. In the later part of his life he preferred to show his work in a copy shop in a Basel suburb, bypassing the established institutions and prefiguring several similar anti-institutional gestures by artists engaged in Institutional Critique.
Important Artworks
Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage) (1961-1974)
These sausage works consist of minced or pulped literature, encased in a sausage skin with fat and gelatin and flavoured with herbs and spices. The minced pages inside each sausage are taken from publications that Roth disliked or envied, such as To Seek a New World by Robert F. Kennedy and issues of the British tabloid newspaper The Daily Mirror. Each iteration of these sausages range in dimensions, but they are generally of a size that could be held in the hand, echoing the original form of the books and newspapers it is made from. A pungent smell emanates from the sausages as the fat attempts to preserve the destroyed words within, developing over time according to its age and the conditions of display. The colour also changes over time, reminding the viewer of its biological nature and instability as an object. The use of fat in the sausage is one of the first instances of Roth’s use of perishable materials in an object for gallery display.
The visual metaphor of Literaturwurst connects the routine of eating to the consumption of knowledge and words through books. Roth’s allegory pokes fun at the seriousness of bookmaking and reverence for the published word, as well as gesturing to the phrase “not mincing your words” - to speak directly and clearly about an important topic (unlike those texts he destroys). Equally, the sausage is a reflection of his German upbringing, as a staple food in the national cuisine.
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The series of Literaturwursts grew in the 1970s to include fillings made from magazines as well as books and newspapers, as well as by using a plastic casing to allow the size of the sausage to be increased beyond normal parameters. As a skilled writer and publisher himself, Roth undoes this craft in this series, destroying the written word as if he is committing some kind of blasphemy. This work invites free interaction - suggesting that the reader or consumer of texts should be equal in agency to the creator, a concept that corresponds to the now influential notion of ‘The Death of the Author’ put forward by French critic Roland Barthes. In this way the Literaturwurst pieces are representative of how Roth’s work attempts to occupy dual registers as playful and rebellious but also critically robust and challenging by referencing (then) cutting-edge concepts in literary theory in an amusing manner.
Copley Book (1965)
The Copley Book is a self-reflexive project that both reveals the processes of book making and expresses the life and experience of Roth at the time of its completion. A compendium of sketches, notes, doodles, poems, photos, paintings, letters and cuttings, the book is not bound but is instead presented inside a box wrapped in a paper cover. The assortment of mediums and printing techniques within reveals Roth’s preoccupation with books and publishing. But the disarray of the documents and the lack of page numbers invite its readers to interact with the pages creatively. The audience are given the possibility to construct or deconstruct a story by reconfiguring both the order of chronology of the book and their own method of display.
Although Roth had been investigating books as art since the 1950s, the Copley Book has been regularly cited as his most successfully realised and consciously self-referential ‘book on books’.
P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the Artist as Vogelfutterbuste [birdseed bust])(1970)
This work is a self-portrait of a middle-aged Roth. The bust is haphazardly modelled, presented as if it were a work-in-progress clay head a few steps away from being fired in the kiln. The detail of facial rendering is vague as the medium Roth chose to sculpt in is chocolate and birdseed. The chocolate oxidises as it decays and melts over the period of display, with the mutation of the head alluding to the passing of time, mortality, and the instability and porousness of our bodies. The unconventional usage of chocolate is juxtaposed by the very traditional portrait genre of a sculpted bust. The bust is also placed on its own flimsy plinth of fibreboard, complete with a titled plaque.
Roth intended for the plinth to be placed outside and high up, in order for the head to be consumed almost entirely by birds and other creatures. As a preserved object in the contemporary museum, it is now covered in the holes that evidence its genuine bird-feeding purpose. This piece represents a shift in Roth’s career to a more confident and idiosyncratic use of the materials he chose to work in and established a pattern of engagement with transitory or fragile sculpture that he would continue to explore in his later work. The incomplete or ‘work-in-progress’ appearance of the work is also reflection of life in process, embodying Roth’s criticism of the notion of finish or artistic perfection. The title of this piece refers to James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and is part of Roth’s long-standing practice of appropriating grand symbols of literature and incorporating them into his art. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB is one of many chocolate bust self-portraits that Roth completed, and reflects a larger interest in the bust as an object of artistic expression. In 1969, for example, he filled a zinc bathtub with busts of Beethoven made from chocolate and hard fat (The Bathtub for Ludwig Van). In other instances he displayed busts of his own face in a large stack until they buckled under their own weight. This (sometimes literal) deconstruction of the bust sits alongside Roth’s subversion of symbols of ‘high culture’, whether in the fields of visual art or literature.
Staple Cheese (A Race) (1970)
This work consisted of a series of suitcases, left in the middle of the floor of the Eugenia Butler Gallery in Los Angeles, filled with large blocks of cheese. Art historian Camille Paulhan reports that this amounted to nearly two tons of cheese, revealed as the suitcases were opened, displayed and closed one by one over the course of the exhibition. Also displayed in the gallery was a ‘cheese race’- consisting of a selection of cheeses thrown at the walls and left dribbling down the white plaster at various speeds and distances over time. The odor of the piece would have been a significant part of the viewing experience, with the cheese spoiling in the hot Californian weather, and changing the experience of attending the exhibition over the course of its display.
Roth’s choice of cheap and artificial American cheese contrasts with the visual symbol of the suitcase, a metaphor for his cosmopolitan and peripatetic lifestyle and critique of superficial consumer culture. The suitcases suggest a question of belonging and ownership as both a symbol of travel and freedom and a product for consumption and aspiration. The nature of the exhibition also reveals a fundamental questioning of the economic operations of the art world, particularly the notion of institutionalisation and the transaction between artist and collector. How would a collector purchase or display this piece beyond its original showing? What afterlives can it have beyond documentation? This question of preservation came to be rather significant for collector and gallery owner Eugenia Butler. A few weeks into the exhibition the spoiling cheese had become a breeding ground for maggots and flies, so much so that the health authorities had to intervene and threatened to penalize Butler. Roth revelled in this outcome and claimed that the insects were his ‘true audience’. Butler’s husband eventually had to dispose of the cheese cases in the desert due to their stench and toxicity, despite Roth having built special conservation containers for the cases.
Staple Cheese was Roth’s first solo show in America, having originally made a name for himself in Europe, and the public outcry and scandal of the health authority did much to cement his rebellious image.
Interfaces Series (1977)
In this collaborative series of over fifty groupings of portrait images, Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth share the frame as though in conversation or opposition. The entire series consists of sixty or so sketchbook pages that have been mounted into wooden frames. Each portrait was paired with a counterpart and have since been grouped into different formulations as the work has migrated across the world, as well as in relation to the developing careers and significance of each artists’ practice. The portraits play with posing and interaction to create an implied back and forth between the two artists, reflecting their longstanding friendship and collaboration. Each artist often paints their portraits over a photographic print of their own faces, as if the two artists are poking fun at themselves (and, by extension, each other). The individual portraits are notebook sized and have been mounted into wooden frames to create an approximation of a quadriptych (as in the image here), a diptych or a triptych.
At the time of their creation, Roth was regularly visiting Richard Hamilton at his studio in Cadaqués, Spain, and the two artists, who had already worked on several projects together, began to create these images as a kind of visual document of their creative relationship. As an homage to their relationship, this light-hearted series also reminds its viewer of the joyful potentials of art-making and the pleasure of collaboration. Collaboration would go on to become an even more significant element of his practice, which Interfaces prefigures and establishes as a fundamental interest for Roth.
Gartenskulptor (Garden Sculpture) (1968-1996)
This collaborative installation between Roth and his son Bjorn consists of wooden platforms and rickety structures that dominate the room, spreading its ill-defined platforms and wooden limbs throughout the space. On several shelf-like sections are jars filled with liquid and labelled with captioned photos of the dates and cities that Dieter Roth and his son Björn Roth worked on the piece. Chairs are strung up together and hang suspended on the wooden framing, which is taped to a multitude of television monitors. All the separate pieces are interspersed with plants.