Opus of excess: the Dieter Roth retrospective at MOMA and P.S. 1 showed how this irascible polymath rode roughshod over convention while radically reformulating historical genres

Art in America, Sept, 2004 by John Paoletti

The recent New York installation of the sweeping Dieter Roth retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at P.S. 1 provided Americans with an opportunity to become more familiar with Roth's dramatically varied output and to reflect upon how utterly the parameters of art were repositioned during the 50-odd years of his career. (1) The exhibition began with works from the 1950s inspired by Constructivist and Concrete art and ended with vast collaged environments of junk. The path from the meticulously composed artist's books and op-kinetic "Revolving Grid Pictures" (1960-61) in the first rooms at MOMA to the slam-bang everything-but-the-kitchen-sink assemblages and full-room productions of the '80s and '90s, the largest of which were on view at P.S. 1, was hardly direct. Roth's constant jettisoning of one mode of operation for another, his frequent reinvention of himself as all artist, his restless exploration of mediums, make his overall body of work a many-headed hydra that defies rational assessment--arguably, just what he wanted.

The chronological arrangement, although conventional enough, imparted to the instructively disconcerting chaos a real sense of how thoroughly Roth, who died in 1998, undermined standard notions of artistic production. Works ranged from his student drawings to at least one assemblage that is ongoing even today (Gartenskulptur, a giant rambling construction that spilled through two of the largest morns at P.S. 1, was added onto over more than 25 years of installation and re-installation, and is still being altered and augmented by Roth's collaborator and son, Bjorn, and others). Roth produced a veritable torrent of work--paintings, sculptures, prints and books, drawings, collages and assemblages, videos and films--in scales ranging from modest to megalomaniacal, with some pieces painstakingly crafted and others seemingly thrown together with no apparent logic.

One almost suspected, in zigzagging through Roth's production, that the artist couldn't always make up his mind about what he wanted to do, or even what he wanted to be called. Having begun his career as Dieter Roth, in 1956 he changed his name to the orthographically simplified Dieter Roth, in line with his poetry and typographical experiments. (2) In 1968, he returned to "Dieter" and in 1973 to "Roth," but it was already clear that his name served a polylinguistic function. "Rot" had become, for him, a form of creation (what he was to call, in his typically mordant manner, "decomposition"). His name doubled homophonically as Diderot--the philosophe, rationalist, and sly and immensely prolific propagandist of the huge Encyclopedie (Roth never said which role was paramount to him). Roth as Rot ("red" in German) might have been assuming the persona of "Diter the Red," a double reference both to Scandinavian Viking heroes like Eric the Red and to Communism. "Rot" could also summon up disorderliness, the unconscious or an evil person, three of its meanings in Icelandic, which he spoke; the first two would certainly resonate with his assemblages and the way he created them, the third with his attitude toward the art establishment. (3)

Given such chameleonlike self-presentation, along with the range of his huge output, the exhibition could have been overwhelming, a visual blitz in which the quality of the work and of Roth's thinking got lost. That didn't happen. The curators organized his frustratingly discontinuous work into coherent spaces, allowing his clutter to be sifted through with some degree of deliberation. Although many of the issues raised by the show simmered throughout his career (and in the work of many of his contemporaries), the exhibition brought his endgame tactics into view with special clarity.

The peripatetic complexities of the exhibition mirror in some ways the life Roth led. Born in Hannover, Germany, in 1930 to a German mother and a Swiss father, he was sent to Switzerland during the Second World War and received his early training in design in Bern. He had a difficult time accepting that he was German, but he never fully embraced Switzerland, either, as he remarked in a 1944 letter to his parents: "I have lived in the Reich too long to be genuinely Swiss." This ambivalence about how he thought of himself was further complicated after his move in 1957 to Reykjavik (there he married his first wife, who was Icelandic), a place that he would from then on consider something of a home base, regardless of where he was living.

Roth's feeling of being an outsider deeply colored his work. (4) His early training was in the practical arts, not a route that would naturally have led to a career in fine art. He designed graphics in Switzerland throughout the 1950s, textiles in Copenhagen (1956), furniture and jewelry in Reykjavik (after 1957; a selection of his clunky rings made of hardware and found materials was on display in the exhibition). Yet Roth managed to connect with some of the most adventuresome artists of his time, one of the first being Daniel Spoerri, whom he met in 1954 in Bern. In August 1960 he encountered Emmett Williams and Jean Tinguely in Basel and formed a close friendship with Williams that lasted until Roth's death. In November of that year he traveled to Paris, where he met Robert Filliou. Tinguely's kinetic machines clearly influenced Roth's thinking about the transience of art, as did Williams's, Filliou's and Spoerri's participation in Fluxus, with its emphasis on performance, ephemerality and the ordinary. (5)