The 'extreme' artist's books of Dieter Roth

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Stephen Bury explores the work of an artist who wanted his work to decay to 'nothing' – something of a challenge to curators at MoMA

Dieter Roth used his own name as an experimental artist’s medium. At different times he went under the aliases of dieter roth, DITERROT, diter rot, and Dietrich Roth. He was born Karl-Dietrich Roth in 1930 in Germany to a Swiss father: this allowed him to spend most of his childhood, during the Second World War, in neutral Switzerland. He apprenticed at an advertising agency in Bern and was influenced by Max Bill’s Concrete art. He was also involved with the Bolivian-born concrete poet, Eugen Gomringer, in the magazine spirale: he designed the cover for the first issue and contributed poems (which had a poor reception). The exploration of text as an artistic medium had begun.

This exhibition, curated by Sarah Suzuki, focuses on Roth’s work with artist’s books, multiples and print editions. Roth, along with Ed Ruscha, was one of the fathers of the post-Russian Futurism artist’s book. On show until 24 June at New York’s MoMA, the show features some 160 works primarily drawn from MoMA’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books and the Museum of Modern Art Library but with additional loans from the Dieter Roth Foundation. It begins with Roth’s early books – kinderbuch and bilderbuch – which already take the book format to extremes, the latter eschewing the binding of the codex and even the use of text. With bok 1956–1959 Roth invented a text engine or poetry machine (Dichtungsmachine), a sheet of black paper with holes that could be applied over an existing text to generate chance poetry.

A similar idea lay behind Roth’s design for the poster for the 1961 international kinetic art show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam, Bewogen Beweging (Moving Movement), which had a geometric frame of die-cut holes that allowed fragments of previous posters below it to show through. Bok 3b and bok 3d (produced in small editions but re-issued as volume 7 of Roth’s collected works/self-written catalogue raisonné in 1974) have die cuts running through sheets of comics and colouring books, randomly arranged upside down or right way up: these also play on the visual expectation of weight – the die-cut blanks dramatically reducing the weight of the books: sadly, this cannot be experienced in the exhibition.

Snow(1964–9), a unique artist’s book that now belongs to MoMA, and a centrepiece of the exhibition, lies open on a low wooden table with a simple wooden chair at each end. It contains the inscription that gives the title to this exhibition, ‘wait, later this will be nothing’, and it reveals both chance and accumulation, but it also demonstrates a veritable panoply of techniques and materials emblematic of entropy or decay – the ‘rot’ of one of his aliases. A lithograph could be annotated, photographed and re-lithographed. Nonarchival techniques – diazotypes – or materials – cardboard, cellophane – are often employed. Some of these pages have not been exhibited since 1969.

Roth’s series of sausage books, Literaturwurst, straddle the border between extreme artist’s book and multiple. Ground texts from beloved or hated authors substitute for veal or pork or beef in the recipe for sausages and their title pages become sausage labels. No wonder that Roth often likened his studio to a kitchen. And from 1968 he started to work with chocolate, perhaps referencing Marcel Duchamp’s chocolate grinder in the Large Glass (1915–23) or even Joseph Beuys’ use of fat. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB (Portrait of the artist as Vogelfutterbüste [birdseed bust]) of 1968, a multiple, a self-portrait bust, made of chocolate and birdseed, with a blue dymo-print label, was designed to be mounted on a post in a garden and consumed/destroyed by birds or squirrels. The title references a book which Roth did not like, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), but it also alludes to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poetry magazine, P.O.T.H (Poor Old Tired Horse), published 1962–8: this only adds to the self-deprecating nature of this work.

Displaying artists’ books has always been problematic. As we have already seen, it is impossible to feel the lightness of the apparently heavy boks 3b and 3d but the white-cube presentation also sanitizes Roth’s decaying materials, whether chocolate, banana, birdseed, straw, rabbit droppings (as in the 1968 work, published 1972/1987, Karnickelköttelkarnickel [Bunny Dropping Bunny], perhaps an allusion to Beuys’ hare), and other highly experimental printing ‘inks’.

There is a tendency – at least in New York – for the conservator to step forward as a co-curator, and in this exhibition and catalogue there is virtual and textual presentation of the conservation approaches to Snow and to Roth’s use of chocolate. Conservators are in an ethical dilemma: they have a responsibility for the stewardship of expensive artworks made from challenging modern materials but they also face the intention of the artist that their works should decay: ‘wait, later this will be nothing’. Passive conservation is their strategy.