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

There are other aspects of the food paintings that bear consideration in the light of Roth's own time. In Medium Sunset, one of several Sunsets from 1968, Roth slipped a slice of sausage between two sheets of paper and let the grease from the meat stain the paper support (it was then encased in plastic and allowed to rot). Like the later Bananas under Glass, Medium Sunset is largely free of the hand of the artist; once assembled, these food paintings make themselves over time. The artist is, in part, merely an agent provocateur who unleashes the forces inherent in the medium. The materials themselves determine the formal aspects of the works and then continue to act on them as destabilizing elements, leading, to a certain extent, to the images' disintegration. Here, the orblike shape left by the sausage and its aura of grease has materialized on a kind of horizon line formed by the two different-colored, attached sheets, so that the top may be read as sky and the bottom as land or sea. The Sunsets may be seen as an extension of the accidental "dirty" sour-milk pictures--that is, unless the "sunset" is read not as a sunset but as a female breast, which it just as readily resembles, complete with a nipple. Taste, smell and touch, sight, food and sex, vanity and lust: all are present in the work--as are landscape, still life, female nude.

Nearly all of Roth's glass- or plastic-encased foodstuffs from the 1960s have the feeling of enlarged biological specimen slides. The mad scientist aspect of these pieces is one of their fascinations, as is their sense of a compulsive research, a facet of Flat Waste of 1975-76/1992 (on view in its entirety at P.S. 1), in which Roth placed his own trash in plastic sleeves and assembled them in 623 binders arranged neatly in five wooden bookcases, a deliberately planted archeology. Somewhere in the detritus of Roth's existence there is a history, one collected from the edges of the artist's (and our) existence, stuff rejected and then reclaimed that denies the binary of extraordinary art and ordinary junk.

Roth's near total enmeshing of art and life is best represented by the compelling Solo Scenes, a multipart video simultaneously playing on a vast wall of 128 monitors, in which he recorded his everyday activities in his home and studio over the course of his final year (1997-98). If ever there were a work to interrogate the myth of the artist, Solo Scenes, shown at P.S. 1, is the one to do it. This piece at once plays on our voyeuristic fascination with the artist, ill but still working, and shatters his life irretrievably. The work is impossible to read coherently or comprehensively; forever in motion, it makes us aware of the fact that we never see the whole, regardless of how many screens there are or how long we look at them. In the end, as in so much of Roth's work, we are confronted with transience extended over expanses of time, an ongoing denouement.

Cataloguing Roth

In 1970, Dieter Roth met Philipp Buse, the Hamburg lawyer who became his stalwart supporter. Buse helped Roth establish the Dieter Roth Museum in Hamburg in the early '90s, which at the time of Roth's death contained 520 original works, 1,400 prints, and 250 books--a collection amassed by Roth and Buse over a period of 25 years. Beginning in 1991, Roth and his son Bjorn also set up, in a neighboring coach house, the Schimmelmuseum ("Mold Museum"), which contains, among other organic works, the multi-ton Selbsturm (Self-Tower, 1993-94) and Zuckerturm (Sugar Tower, 1994). Both sites are administered by the Dieter Roth Foundation.