“Dieter Roth, My Fatherly Friend”
A talk by Jan Voss of Boekie Woekie (Amsterdam)

         Thank you, Mrs.Longhauser, for having invited me to speak to you and your guests, about some of the memories i have of Dieter Roth, who, as it says on the invitation card, was for me my fatherly friend.
          ("Dieter Roth, my fatherly friend" became the headline of what i'm saying here now, when Mrs.Longhauser inquired by phone, i think early in April, whether and about what i would want to speak. I had not given it much thought then, but as i described to her my relation with Dieter Roth, i used those words. She was instantly convinced that they would make a good title. And as the invitation cards would have to be printed soon, there would be no use in thinking more about it.)
         And you, guests of Mrs.Longhauser, thank you for your patience, which i hope, i won't stretch too much.
         During the winter of 67/68 i think it was, that my professor at the Academy of Art in Düsseldorf had changed his mind about me, - he wanted to get rid of me.
         He pointed out that there would come a new professor, about to begin to teach in the print departement. Maybe that he would accept me as a student.
         The new one did. His name was Diter Rot. Without the first "e" in "Dieter", with which the Germans usually spell it, and without the "h" at the end of "Roth". I had never heard of him, though i could have, he had started to stir up the puddle here and there. He was then 37, or 38, the age Björn, his son, who is among us is now. I mention it because the father looked much like his son does today.
         He wore though a knitted cap on his rather hairless scull, and some cotton jersey sweater, baggy pants and sport shoes. Nobody then, let alone a teacher, looked like him.
         He had for his class of maybe 10 or 15 students, 2 large class rooms. The first weeks i must have kept up my old routine of seldomly showing up. But the developments in the Rot-class were too exciting. I saw an electric kitchen stove had been brought in, with on it, big pots of molten chocolade, which needed to be stirred, and soon we were pouring this chocolade mixed with saw dust, onto planks Diter had asked us to paint green: it was imnpossible, being 23, to resist the charm of working in a cow pat factory.
         Soon Diter had traded a work of his, he said, for a small offset-press, and put it up so that it was available for us in his class. To be an artist and to print in a technique, which was not as dusty as etching or lithography, but one of our time - what a thrilling offer he had made to us!
         Still today namely, to put an offest press for direct use by students into the print departements of German, or Dutch, art schools, has been thought of as to be "too dangerous" in all the cases i became involved in during the last 20 years. Dangerous - for whom? Diter didn't discuss it, he just did it.
         We never saw our professor print anything himself, he selfomly refered, except by smiling encouragingly, to what he saw we actually were doing - i remember though as an exception, that instant of great relief, when i heard his voice over my shoulder saying "Aren't you bored by this?", seeing me as i clumsily and reluctantly tried some calligraphy, i thought i was supposed to do. That was my last attempt at that.
         But, without us others knowing it for quite some time, Diter had started with a fellow student his own silk screen printery, and was very productive there.
         He saw the school, i think, as an open market for ideas, which meant for him a place where peolple could be, simultaneously developping their gifts.
         He brought his friend, Robert Filliou, who also had moved to Düsseldorf, to work in our classroom. We witnessed the coming into existence of "the principle of equivalence", a work of this wonderfully spirited poet and artist, who, by putting red socks into yellow boxes helped us effectivly to expand our ideas about art.
         I began to realize that my being an art student was like following a crash course of throwing overboard a great number of art fixations, art stereotypes, art prejucices and art obsessions, and gaining instead an insight into art as a life. Art as life, because all those profane things, as buying a car, or transporting a television set, or being appointed to teach German to Diters' then girl friend, the American artist Dorothy Iannone, - in the course of which at least i could learn and practise some English - , or to be asked by him to buy i don't remember anymore how many boxes of after eight chocolade-with-mint cookies, to glue them onto transparent plastic sheets, to pour yoghurt over them and close the sheets like envelopes after taping Diters' signature, which he had written 50 times on a piece of scrap paper, to the insides - because all of this was always accompanied by a kind of talk which i felt was true and new and significant. And it was talk which wanted to include me, and which would activate my brain and loosen my tongue. And in those cases, when it failed to do that, then i still felt it was talk which Diter needed to produce in order to approach, to turn around, to make transparent, to cope with, to attack, to digest in his cheerful, intelligent way all his topics. It was his way, to live in a fabrication of realities and the reality of fabrications.
         Some time after Diter had employed me as a chauffeur for a trip to Switzerland for himself and Robert Filliou, to my surprise a well known Basel gallerist, whom among others Diter and Robert had visited while on this trip, approached me in the hallway of the Academy and proposed business to me. There was another unexpected indication of how Diter differed from other teachers. He had taken it into his responsibility to help a young artist to come into contact with the world into which the young artist would have to grow.
         After not much more than a year, Diter would not enter the Academy any longer, he suffered increasingly from the political struggle of the time, which the 68ers also in Düsseldorf were carrying out with the docmatic arguements. This was the instant of the rift between him and Josef Beuys, whom he saw trying to exploit this movement. (The story goes, that Beuys had originally taken care of Diter becoming professor in Düsseldorf.)
         Diter held his class for maybe half a year after that, with a lunchtime drink in a bar around the corner from the school, then he gave up his teaching position altogether. This daily meeting at the bar was like a final break through, or break free from all formalities. Those who met there, were, or were not, students of Diter, and some were no students at all. It was an early version of what in recent years has sometimes been called the Dieter Road show - road this time being spelled the English way: ar - o - a - de. Which means a mental reality test: the readyness to cope with whom- or whatsoever, using skilful means in improvising ways, - or improvised means in skilful ways.
         Then Diter was more seldomly to be seen in Düsseldorf, he was on the road himself, only when he stopped over at Dorothys' i sometimes met him.
         In 1971 he must have realized that i was struck by a post studies depression. And he had a recipe to get me out of it. He asked me to go to Iceland for him, and move his things from his apartement in Reykjavík, for which the lease was running out. That brought an other world into my world, i still today go there every year, for periods as long as possible.
         His own life then, since many years, had been bound to Iceland and to his children there, quite as much as he had been bound to travel in Europe and America to make his living, or that is to say, his fame and fortune. I later learnt that for directing the play of his life, to experience the distance and the difference of the worlds he moved in, was for him of great importance. The one world would amplify the other.
         I will always cherish that he gave me access to this intensification for my own life.
         Dieter had been publishng his books both in Berlin at Rainer Verlag and in Stuttgart, where he had become co-owner of the Edition Hansjörg Mayer. Also there he opened up possibilities for me.
         I remember an occasion in Berlin at Rainers' where we made a serie of prints together - i don't know (here in Amsterdam, today, while i write this, May 15th) whether or not this serie will be on show in Philadelphia - it was a thing which got its name by Dieter: the "Mickermappe", the "pathetic portfolio" one maybe could call it in English. His style of drawing by then had developped into sheetfillers, with a lot of soft pencil graduation. Boy, how difficult i found it to get a foot in that door, though it was standing wide open!
         Around that time on an other occasion now in Iceland he had invited me to come with him in his Russian 4-wheel drive van to his house at the tip of Snaefellsnes, the peninsula where his children set him to rest a year ago. Then he had just arrived from Europe, and during the beginning of the drive he had been so eloquently cursing, blaming, scolding the people and the situations over there, that i feared the trip would become difficult. Before us being too far away from Reykjavík, i had to ask him to either let me out to hitch hike back, or to change his mood.
         I thought he was happy to change his mood. Years later though, when he started to publish his diaries, i compared our notes. There is nothing in his notes about our drive, but he remarks on my brooming. This house of his we went to must have stood empty for some months, and needed to be dusted. I, he wrote, did not do that well, i wasn't precise enough around the legs of the chairs. In my notes however, i read about the fantastic conversation we had had that night. He had given me food for thought by pointing out, that he had his difficulties with words like, or even would find it impossible to say words like "it is" or "i am", because they would not contain the prospect of possible developments. He laughed when i made him aware, a few years ago, of this discrepancy in our history writing.
         I think i can say, that he had placed by then ideas of his, and people he found fit to be there, into key positions of my mind and life. Did he follow a strategy?
         I think i must have gone through moments, when his kind of omnipresence felt difficult to live with.
         However he spoke well of me in front of others, in cases where he could not guess that i would be told. I don't remember a single occasion, where i would not have received reports of his loyalty.
         For the next 15 years - for the later seventies and most of the eighties, we met, more or less without appointment - in Iceland, Amsterdam, Berlin, Stuttgart, Chicago, Zürich, Paris or Basel. I began to understand something of his battle. He had to be doing what only he could do. He had to be in charge on all ends. He would give and give and give away, but whatever he would give away, it would never really leave him(, even if he had sold it). In order to describe himself, he used the German expression of "having 10 on each finger", meaning being simultaneously involved with many people. He juggled a most complex set of balls. He had a moral code which made him break up with pople he had worked with, often for long times. He had gotten to be seen by some as to be difficult. He did not hide that he found things difficult. On the contrary, that he suffered from difficulties, but faced them, and faced them bravely, that made him tick.
         I was very touched by the works i saw emerging, the "flat waste" for example, and the installation he made originally for the 1982 Venice biënnial art festival, the simultanious projection of, i think, some 150 super 8 movies with sound. The movies were of all sorts of situations he found himself in, shot during the months before the Venice event. A printed diary (which appeared selfpublished for the 1984 Chicago showing of this work, with Dieters' own translation into English) lets the reader see very well the man of those years: desperate, and able to express it. Able in a way, that the director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Dieter Schwarz, who got his doctoral degree by evaluating Dieter Roth's earlier litarary work, expressed in a newspaper piece after Dieter Roths' death, that one should not let oneself be fooled, his descriptions (of what i can only call a tormented life) were no "sober reports", as Dieter Roth wanted to have it, but, since "self-exposing is a literary role", Dieter Roth used his self-portrayal, "without that he would resort to the misconception of revealing real intimacy". I had to look twice to believe that he takes the liberty to say he knows better than the author does. If Dr.Schwarz were a doctor of medicine and Dieter Roth a sick opera singer he would be denyed any diagnosis, let alone compassion but he would be applauded for this new acchievment of tone in his voice. I think Dieter Roth would have felt hurt and furious reading this piece by the other Dieter. If Dieter Roth really found something going against his grain, than it was, that someone else would think he could know his things better than he himself. And that that was not a literary pose at least becomes clear when one knows that he died for that conviction. A friendly advice was already something very suspicious to him. It was the quintessence of his "road show" to permanently invent the world, and to demand for this invention both names: that of reality, and that of art.
         If Dieter was singular in the sharpness of his contradiction to how art usually is dealt with in our decades, it was because he could not tolerate that artists are regarded more and more often to fulfill the role of illustrators of the ideas of art mediators.
         Then it was around 1990. I had begun, with 5 artist friends, some years before, a shop for artist' books in a tiny space in the city centre of Amsterdam. It could only be, because of its size, a shop for "our" books, but we held there small shows of works of other bookmaking artists. We had had a show of "Roths' Verlag", the books Dieter had published of others and himself with this or similar imprints. (Like his own name he altered the name of his publishing enterprise every so often.) Now, that we had moved into a fairly spacy shop around the corner from the former one, we began to stock books by what are now a few hundred other artists. (To create the wrong picture: we could never buy those books, but had to take them on consignment.)
         And there came Dieter, - whether he couldn't be one of us. More than 20 years after he had taken me onboard in Düsseldorf.
         And if he hadn't been already, he soon became one of us! And of course the one, who could easily run almost the whole shop with his own activities. He entrusted us to be the outlet for publishing of several new books. He appointed us on several occasions to open temporary bookshops along with his exhibitions. He opened perspectives, one after the other. He could use us. And we definitely could use him. Moreover, there also was that aspect which may have made him feel drawn towards us: Boekie Woekie, the bookshop, had taken on, if without conciousely aiming to achieve it, a striking likeness to one of his long running book-projects: "The Review For Everything". Our shop, with a neither censored, nor subsidized, stock of books by artists, and his magazine of contributions by whoever wanted to contribute to it, which he had edited from 1975 to 1987, did have something very basically in common: the production of a mountain, and at its foot, the potential mountaineer. Yet another reason for Dieter to get so interested in Boekie Woekie may have been his urge to self-explore relentlessly his limits. With our self-inflicted difficulty of a store full of books nobody really wants, he may have felt the challenge once again to pick up something as from the floor and hold it high, with the for him typical show of mental strength.
         And in this effort of the last years he became for me, more than ever before, the person i felt i could and would want to relate to. But it is not good enough to say its sad that he did find his limit, since his longing, for a long time, had been to find it.
         Afterall, our telephone bill is less than half it was before he died.
         Thank you.

26 May 1999
Text unaltered, by request of the author