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Daniel Roth at Maccarone, Inc - New York

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Elizabeth Schambelan

German artist Daniel Roth uses an array of mediums to elaborate mysterious, intricate narratives. In his recent show at Maccarone, Inc., Roth deployed drawing, photography, architectural interventions and constructed objects to tell the story of a guest at a thermal bath-cum-Soviet monument in Sofia, Bulgaria. The guest imagines the existence of an undersea plant that infests the navigational equipment of ships and causes them to go off course. Meanwhile, at the Ford Foundation thousands of miles away, scientists are in fact developing just such an organism.

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The nucleus of the show was a weathered wooden cabinet installed near the gallery's entrance. The cabinet was referred to as a post office in the checklist of works, and its middle section swung away from the wall to reveal the ingoing and outgoing tubes of a pneumatic messenger system. On a lower shelf, two clear plastic cylinders were mounted in a rack. One of them contained a letter, written on the stationery of the "Thermal Bath of the Naked Truth," in which the unnamed guest alludes to his strange vision.

The pneumatic tubes led into an anteroom that viewers accessed through a small, raised portal. Here, a C-print showing the graffiti-scarred monument slid to one side to disclose a small map of a river or causeway. Two large pencil drawings wrapped around the walls on either side of the C-print. They depicted modernist industrial interiors that appeared to be in a state of psychotic dissolution: planes floated in space; lines describing stairways trailed off into nothing; and visual clarity was obscured by a creepy proliferation of sprouting vegetal forms. Despite the hallucinatory nature of their imagery, the drawings were executed in the precise, evacuated style associated with architectural rendering, so that it was as if the Euclidean rationale of architecture itself was being infiltrated by the uncanny.

On the upper floor of the gallery, a slide carousel projected a cycle of marine and maritime images, interspersed with photographs of the Ford scientists classifying botanical specimens in their cluttered labs. The slides had the saturated, off-color look of filmstrips from the '70s, and the technologies they pictured--cumbersome metal consoles bristling with dials and gauges--appeared to date from the period just before the advent of the digital age. These images resonated with the decidedly analogue sensibility that governed the whole show. With its hidden components that viewers could explore and manipulate, the installation was interactive in the old-fashioned sense of the term, and offered the vaguely eerie pleasures of a cabinet of curiosities or a set of nested novelty-store boxes. Among other critical notions, the show seemed to engage ideas of obsolescence and of what has been called the redemptive potential of outmoded practices and forms. That it engaged these notions obliquely, through the lens of narrative, was another one of its pleasures, pointing ,to narrative's own redemptive potential, and to Roth's ability to unlock it.

Daniel Roth at Maccarone, Inc - New York

Art in America, Jan, 2003 by Elizabeth Schambelan

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