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

Thirty-two years later, comparable works in the MOMA retrospective, such as Guitar (1968; not a guitar at all, but once-oozing victuals sandwiched between glass and surrounded by a wood frame with a handle), with their leached, caked, decomposed and fetid materials, still seemed radical. Yet Roth (and many of his viewers) saw beauty in his decomposed foodstuff-objects. According to the artist, during his early years in Iceland he had made some "dirty pictures" that he thought he should destroy. So he poured sour milk over them: "Then I noticed that they became very beautiful. Subsequently I always pour sour milk over pictures that weren't beautiful or didn't work out. Sour milk is like landscape, ever changing. Works of art should be like that--they should change like man himself, grow old and die." (11)

Roth's food pieces might be instructively viewed as falling within the tradition of the still life, a genre that wouldn't go away--from Francis Picabia's Portrait of Cezanne of 1920, with its actual dead stuffed monkey incorporated as both portrait and memento mori, to Jasper Johns's use of plates and cutlery in the 1960s. Arman's Poubelles of 1960, transparent boxes filled with trash, or Spoerri's table tops with collaged plates, utensils and leftovers, all segregate objects whose usefulness has been snuffed out and their status elevated by the intervention of the artist. In Roth's still lifes, garbage is given continued life and pride of place.

Yet such works as Guitar and Bananas under Glass are hardly "still" in the English and German sense of the word (Stilleben), or even, using the French or Italian term for the genre, "dead" (nature morte, natura morta). Roth brought "dead nature" perversely back to life by inflecting a tradition represented by, for example, Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit (ca. 1596), in which the artfully arranged fruit is beginning to spoil and the grape leaves to wilt. A classic vanitas, the painting reminds us that time and its consequences cannot be slowed. No less inexorably than Caravaggio's represented fruit, Roth's foodstuffs suffer what we choose to call the "ravages of time," though Roth's decay, like Caravaggio's, is ravishing as well as ravaging.

One of the goals of Renaissance esthetics, to which Caravaggio was heir, was to persuade us that the painting is a window through which we are seeing actuality. Roth, however, literalizes the reality that the Renaissance only theorized. He constructed the frame of Guitar to look like a window, its joins leaking the threatening weather seen through the glass. In Roth's still life, we are placed in a postlapsarian world in which death and disintegration are integral to our physical existence--however vainly we may seek to stay them. The challenge of the Roth corpus is to try to make sense of myriad sensory "facts," especially when they appear to be changing with each viewing.

Roth's still lifes may be seen as allegories of the senses. Smell was certainly a factor--a more pleasant experience in Roth's chocolate pieces than in those with decaying garbage. Smell was more vivid, of course, when the works were new, time having blunted their olfactory effects (at MOMA, many of the chocolate pieces were re-created, their scent thereby restored). Roth claimed that he chose chocolate as a medium--first incorporating it into some mid-1960s drypoints, along with cookies--specifically because he liked the smell (though he also exploited its resemblance to shit and Freudian notions of artists playing with theft own feces, an enduring theme for him). The olfactory component of P.O.TH.A.A.VFB. (Portrait of the artist as Vogelflutterbuste [birdseed bust], 1968) is as strong or stronger than the visual one, since the minimally modeled form with its indistinct contours is hardly as clear from a distance as is the heady fragrance. (12) Roth presented glass-shelved towers of chocolate self-portraits and dogs and lions, tier above tier, industrially fabricated like works by Pop and Minimalist artists.