Life is about creating yourself and creating things. Every artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of artists cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona. For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent. Writers, painters, and composers will have little relationship to an exterior self unless they actively choose to engage it. Such private-minded artists may find the very subject of persona to be taboo, distasteful, and cringeworthy. They might bristle and scoff at the possibility that they, too, have constructed and worn masks for many years. In such cases, persona becomes a hideous relative, ignored, avoided, or acknowledged only when absolutely necessary, in a huff of obligation. Negligence may lead someone to believe that persona has been extinguished, but it has not. If an artist releases art into the world, they have already created immortal persona. When we expose ourselves and ask for the world’s attention, we give birth to strange new forms of self, shadowy doppelgängers who will live on even after our death.
Any exhibition of art is also an exhibition of its creator. Denial is futile. Dealing in public facades was, in the best cases, an irritating distraction. In the worst cases, it was an inauthentic scheme, at direct odds with the mission of artists: to seek and present truth. Persona is constructed, while personality tends to be a more passive phenomenon, shaped by genetics and the vicissitudes of life. Persona is an invented, enhanced, and performed version of personality, which, makes it a natural material for artists, for whom invention, enhancement, and performance are the primary means of working.
Artistic persona encourages the contradictions of our changing selves. Instead of a fixed image, consider persona as a field of infinite expression, as unresolved and irreducible as human perception. Artistic persona does not require self-obsession, only an acceptance of the true nature of artistic exchange, in which evidence of the self is always present, even if hidden or ignored. The line between self-expression and selfishness is razor thin, but persona, when worked thoughtfully, is a tool for profound connection. Like a sonata or a painting, the presentation of self can be a window into consciousness and a generous display of vulnerability. Communication is the fundamental pleasure of art. Persona is artificial, which is to say, it’s created by humans. So is paint. So is a piano. So is a seventy-thousand-year-old arrowhead. This does not corrupt persona or make it inauthentic, whatever that word means. The word art has the same root as artificial. One of art’s few defining characteristics is that it is made, in part, by people-not by a deity or wilderness or chaos.
Early Life and Education
Karl-Dietrich Roth, later known as Dieter Roth, was born in Hannover, Germany, the first of three sons. His mother Vera was German, and his father Karl-Ulrich was a Swiss businessman. After the beginning of World War II, Roth spent 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. The family moved to Bern in 1947, where Roth began an apprenticeship in commercial art. His clientele included the local milk association and the cheese union.
Artistic Beginnings and Influences
Roth left home in 1953 and began to collaborate with Marcel Wyss and Eugen Gomringer on the magazine Spirale, of which nine issues were published (1953-64). Most of his work at this time was in the prevailing Concrete art idiom, exemplified by Max Bill. He took part in a number of local exhibitions, as well as writing poetry, making his first organic sculptures, and experimenting with Op art. A key breakthrough in his attitude to art was witnessing the performance of Tinguely's Homage to Modern Art in Basel, 1961.
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Fluxus Movement and Literary Experimentation
Roth associated with the Fluxus movement, maintaining his distinct artistic identity. His artist's books challenged traditional formats, allowing readers to interact with and rearrange pages. 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" reference to literature.
Awards and Recognition
In 1960, Roth 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.
Biodegradable Artworks and Teaching
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." This became the first of his celebrated biodegradable works.
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. In 1966 his studio in Providence was cleared out for rent arrears; all but one artwork was destroyed in the process.
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Prolific Output and Diverse Creations
While in the US, Roth divorced Sigriđur but remained on good terms with the family, by now including three children: Karl, Björn, and Vera. 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, jewelry designs, furniture, posters, prints, and installations.
Noteworthy Exhibitions and Installations
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. For his first exhibition in the 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. 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.
Experimental Approaches and Publications
Roth's work became increasingly varied throughout the 1970s. He exhibited manufacturing instructions-the Order Form Exhibitions-for the first show, any buyer could take the directions to a printer of their choice and create their own print or multiple; the second time around, the instructions had to be taken to a baker to create the collector's own baked goods. The same attitude applied to collectors; his most important collector, the German dentist Hanns Sohm, made his own Literature Sausages to Roth's instructions, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Work in 20 Volumes. He published the magazine Zeitschrift für Alles (Review for Everything) 1975-1987, promised to publish anything that anyone sent to Roth, the only editorial constraint being the limit of 4 (later 5) pages. By the time Roth announced its demise, the journal had grown to 1396 pages long. The mid-seventies also saw a comprehensive attempt to republish all of Roth's bookworks.
Large-Scale Installations and Legacy
Roth's installations became larger over the years and more open-ended. Gartenskulptor (Garden Sculpture), for instance, had started out as a copy of the multiple P.O.TH.A.A.VFB, a self-portrait bust made of chocolate and birdseed standing on a bird-table, exposed to the elements. Referred to by Roth as a 'dis- and re-assembly object,' each new incarnation gradually acquired working drawings, paintings, sculpted rabbits, and collages placed on trellises in collector's gardens. It even acquired a real rabbit and the rabbit's hutch for a number of years. The last time it was installed in a garden was in 1989. When it was exhibited indoors in Switzerland, 1992, Gartenskulptor took up an entire room. By 1995 it was 20m long and included all sorts of objects including a fire ladder and television screens. By 2000, in Mönchengladbach, it was 40 meters long, having acquired elements from each of the installations' incarnations, including pebbly earth excavated by the architects Herzog and de Meuron for the facade of the Schaulager, for instance.
Recognition and the Dieter Roth Academy
Roth's work became increasingly celebrated by the 1980s; a number of retrospectives began to be staged throughout Europe, as well as large-scale exhibitions of new work. The Dieter Roth Academy was founded in May 2000 by fifteen close friends and colleagues of Dieter Roth. It now includes many times that number. In his later years, Dieter Roth spoke of his typically innovative idea of an academy, an institution unbound to any one place or building or curriculum. As a passionate traveler, he realized that the best experience a young artist can have is traveling and encountering new people and situations. Consequently, the Dieter Roth Academy lives there where its members live and work on several continents. The initial aim was to respond to Roth's legacy by continuing activities he was involved in or planned during his last years, not least a "Roth Show/Road Show" featuring art and activities by him and his friends at various venues, as well as initiating new projects that tally with Dieter's plans and thoughts, and providing a forum for his ideas. It meets several times a year in different countries for conferences and discussions, often accompanied by an exhibition of works by the members, friends, and students. This has resulted in a number of publications and an intensification of communications between the members that produces additional projects in line with the DRA ethos. Almost every meeting ends up with stories about Dieter Roth, amusing anecdotes that are also touchstones for future actions. Quite possibly the stories are one of the most important legacies we have. The forum is here to tell stories, to examine the ideas we have received from Dieter's words and practice, and marvel at the changes the Academy undergoes as it acts on its legacy, very much like a Dieter Roth artwork. In short, the Academy is here to promote and develop the artistic and above all human insights he gave us all.
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Concluding Remarks
Dieter Roth's life and work exemplify the artist's role in shaping persona and challenging conventional boundaries. His journey, marked by experimentation, collaboration, and a unique perspective, continues to inspire and influence the art world.
Russ George Biography
Early life
He used to be a member of Greenpeace and was part of the crew of the Rainbow Warrior, though by 2012 he and Greenpeace were adversarial.
Career
Shortly after, in 1989, Darcy Russ George and Ronald A. Brightsen founded Clustron Science Corp. In 1998, Russ George founded Saturna Technologies and eWorld Travel Corp. in 2002, then renamed a second time to Diatom Corp. from George in 2005, it sold it another company named Diatom Corp., with Planktos renamed to Planktos Corp. to reflect this acquisition. The name change became effective March 7, 2007.
Planktos
In May 2007, Planktos Corp. announced their plans to dissolve 100 tons of iron over a 10 000 square kilometer area on the high seas near the Galápagos Islands, the first of six planned large-scale operations Planktos was planning to conduct in the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean from 2007 to 2009. The intent was to profit by fertilizing the ocean with iron dust, creating blooms of phytoplankton that in theory would absorb carbon dioxide. The business plan was then to sell carbon offset credits to other companies. These plans caught the attention of the several NGOs, the first of which was the eco-justice ETC Group, which raised alarm about the large-scale geoengineering project. This in turn caused other organizations to take notice of Planktos Corp. In the middle of June 2007, Sea Shepherd UK published a statement that one of their vessels would be able to monitor movements of any Planktos vessels and intercept them if necessary. Unbeknownst to the organizations attempting to put a halt to these operations, a change of plans had taken place, and instead of heading for Galápagos, the vessel set course on the Bermudas for a refueling stop, intending to cruise across the Atlantic and conduct the operation near the Canary Islands instead in order to avoid confrontation with the Sea Shepherds. Much to the surprise of Sea Shepherds, on November 14, 2007, the vessel appeared in the harbor of St. Georges, where it refueled as planned. At this point, the vessel had no iron dust aboard, with Planktos attempting to obtain the required iron for the experiment dust from ground-up metal scrap instead, contradicting earlier claims of using virgin iron dust in the experiment as well as leading to concerns whether the iron used would be contaminated by oils or impurities. Two days later, the vessel departed for the Canary Islands.
Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation and Ocean Fertilization Experiment
According to Wired, in July 2012, "a renegade American businessman," George, "decided to trigger an algae bloom to absorb some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere-an attempt at geoengineering, a tech-based approach to combating climate change." Wired called it "the largest known geoengineering experiment at the time."
In 2012, the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation decided on conducting an 'ocean pasture restoration experiment' by spreading more than 100 tonnes of an iron-rich dirt-like substance over a large area in the Pacific Ocean. In July 2012, George departed from Victoria with a crew of 11 on a chartered fishing vessel named the Ocean Pearl, loaded with 100 tons of iron-rich nutrient. The vessel exited the Strait of Juan de Fuca and headed northwards into the Gulf of Alaska until they reached the currents known as the Haida Eddies, approximately 200 miles westward of the coast of Haida Gwaii. The crew spent the next weeks zigzagging the ship over the ocean while mixing the 4 000 50-lb bags of nutrients with seawater and pumping them overboard using a hose before returning to Victoria to take 20 more tons of nutrient aboard to repeat the process in August.