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Dates Related to the Exhibition Dieter Roth's Poem "mein Auge ist ein Mund" and Mundunculum Fifties Sixties Seventies die Die DIE VERDAMMTE SCHEISSE Containers Dieter Roth's Books
The poem and the etching titled “mein Auge ist ein Mund” (my eye is a mouth) are parts of Mundunculum, Dieter Roth’s magnum opus, in which the artist makes a pointedly futile attempt to develop a systematic structure—a narrative and pictorial syntax—that is valid for him. Drawings and poetry formulate a metaphor of the coveted ideal work; Roth expresses the desire to fuse eye and mouth, thinking and speaking, to form a naturally bubbling spring of creative work. This would be a state of Utopia, but, for Roth especially, Utopia always meets with a high degree of uncertainty and self-doubt. Dieter Roth’s work occupies an important position in the international art of the second half of the twentieth century. He represents the development, in Europe, of new approaches to art in reaction to the abstract movements of the fifties. In his emphasis on experimentation, in his use of new techniques in visual media, and in his exploitation of their serial features, he is often closer to developments in the United States and Britain than to positions taken on the European continent. The experimental impulse characteristic of Roth’s work has proved especially fruitful in the production of prints and artist’s books. Prints are central to Roth’s work (as they are for Rauschenberg, Hamilton, and Warhol) unfolding and developing their aesthetic potential through experimental variety. And artist’s books and book-objects are especially well suited to a multi-media production in which, from the outset, the mouth—literature, poetry—and the eye—drawing, visual representations of reality—form congenial juxtapositions. Following his earliest works, influenced by Arp and Klee, Dieter Roth’s production from the fifties is marked by an engagement with Constructivist ideas. (Advanced by former Bauhaus artists like Johannes Itten and Hans Fischli, the movement dominated Swiss art at that time.) One of Roth’s most important works, marking the beginning of an intensive Constructivist phase, is the title page for the magazine Spirale, founded, in Bern, by Roth together with Eugen Gomringer and Marcel Wyss. Beginning in 1954, Roth produced geometric abstractions, in which, no longer concerned with the fixed, inert surface of the painting, he began to explore new elements of movement and process, multidimensional space and interference. It was in this context that the first experiments with books took place. Roth began a new phase in 1958 of which the best developed example is book; shaping and altering the pages with hand-cut slots of different sizes, the artist involves the viewer in the creative process. Around 1960, a radical departure can be seen from the Constructivist approach that defined Dieter Roth’s work of the fifties. The artist mentioned, among other things, a visit to an exhibition of Tinguely’s self-destructing objects that encouraged him to take this new direction. In his theoretical writings, Roth offered two fundamental concepts: the “quantitative” and the “destructive,” and he criticized the idea of the “masterpiece” and the institutionalization of art. For the first time, he formulated the principle—so essential to his oeuvre—of reusing found materials. This imperative can be seen in his use of newspaper pages in book-objects from the period—such as Quick, Daily Mirror, and Literaturwürste (Literature sausages). In the late sixties, Roth extended the principle of self-destructing works, using materials subject to decomposition and rot—like chocolate, cheese, and meat. In the same period, Roth also began to sketch out a bio- and psychomorphic pictorial language. This return to narrative structures achieved a high point in the book Mundunculum (1967, ironically characterized by the artist as a “world system”) and in the series of prints Unterhaltungsmusik (Popular music, 1966–69). In 1969, the year of Six Piccadillies, Dieter Roth’s work entered a phase of rich inventiveness and thematic combination, of blocks and series. In these works, he tested to the limit his virtuoso abilities and the technical possibilities of printing. In several series, he used postcards for inspiration and as the basis for photomechanical and printed reworking. The seventies were a period of great productivity in the artist’s graphic work. In 1978–79, Dieter Roth created the series Zwei mal fünf Trophäen (Two times five trophies), Zwei mal fünf Schläger (Two times five bats), and Zwei mal fünf Hunde (Two times five dogs). Here the technique of “two-handed speedy drawings”—dividing the sheet in two, Roth used both hands to draw simultaneous mirror images—reaches a high point. The series illustrate Roth’s claim that the dynamic and progressive line derives its most important function from its relation to the axis of symmetry. Toward the end of the seventies, the possibilities of graphic works seemed to be completely exploited and exhausted. There began to appear works that take an iconoclastic and, increasingly, self-documenting stance and have their own set of reproductive techniques: photocopies, laser copies, and Polaroid photography.
A set of fifty-two prints, die Die DIE VERDAMMTE SCHEISSE (the The THE DAMNED SHIT, 1975) was made from the intaglio plates for the book of the same name. In 1966, while Roth was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, he published the first volume of poems titled Scheisse (Shit). This was the first of an extended series of books with outrageous titles. In 1968, the Rainer-Verlag in Berlin collected the poems, previously issued in scattered publications, into a single volume, Die gesamte Scheisse (The collected shit), along with vignette-like line drawings by Dieter Roth. In the years that followed, the poems and drawings were subjected to a process of transformation, using every kind of technique—print, hand, and chance—in seven additional volumes. Each result was scrutinized, reworked, blurred—with nothing firm, nothing spared, nothing without its ironic twist. In the first volumes, slight corrections to the poems and minor alterations to the drawings initiated a process of reworking that grew steadily more intense, until, for the final volume, the artist reworked the photomechanical reproductions directly on the films. Roth’s point is not to emphasize the individual work, but to prove that the process is more important than the result. The book is not the focus, but the transition from one book to the next. As Dieter Roth remarked in the volume Typische Scheisse (Typical shit, 1973): I use the description of the objective of a thing not just to conjure up the opposite of this thing; I also exploit the process to illuminate the area between the thing and its opposite and, wherever possible, to describe it. For Containers (1971–73), one of his most intriguing graphic works; Dieter Roth produced a portfolio of thirty-three printed sheets and three watermarks. Apart from a wealth of forms, it is the concept of archiving that makes Containers remarkable. Roth offered a survey of the variety of graphic work he had produced up to that time, recreating them in the form of this edition, which was produced by the Valentien Gallery and printed by Frank Kicherer in Stuttgart. Both the title and the concept of Containers point to the work’s function as “temporary storage.” In nine intaglio prints, the artist stressed the “flatness” of his forms by pressing objects—a piece of licorice or a chocolate beetle—onto the contents of the reddish container. The soft materials went through the press, in printing, and were distorted. With this innovation, Roth introduced the techniques of collage into the graphic process. In three copperplate etchings, on dyed, hand-made paper, the artist employed the narrative pictorial language that he had been developing since Mundunculum. To hold the objects, Roth imagined a kind of wagon, which he called Trolli, from the English “trolley.” On five different folded sheets, each a meter square, he produced variations of Trolli—in silk-screen, etching, counterproof, and offset printing. The offset print is torn through the middle, inverted, and glued together again, its halves side by side, a reference to the recurring theme of mirroring in Roth’s work. Similarly, the two “books of stamps” included in the portfolio, are a reference to Roth’s principle of the quantitative. The works Roth created between 1956 and 1961 begin to concentrate on the book as a form that goes beyond its purely functional use (as a container for language), becoming an appropriate vehicle for the artist’s vision. Roth’s work introduced new, international standards for the so-called “artist’s book” and marked the beginning of a trend, which began in the seventies in Europe and the U.S.: the book, a stack of papers bound together in some form, developed into a legitimate artistic medium; it became the formal expression of a new sensibility and a radically changing concept of the artwork. In his book-objects, Roth created a hybrid form, combining book, graphic work, painting, object, sculpture—even experimental film. Thus, the book-object, central to the oeuvre of this immensely innovative artist, incorporates many ideas and concepts that were later worked out and varied in other mediums. This choice of the book, rather than the picture plane, as a medium for experimentation derived from Roth’s involvement in literature, which began in the fifties and continued throughout his career. The scale and significance of Roth’s obsession with the independent publication of his works lies somewhere between Duchamp’s production of his own miniature museum in a transportable container (Boîte en Valise), and the publishing activity undertaken by George Macunias, as part of the Fluxus political strategy. Beginning with his days as coeditor of Spirale, Dieter Roth was active in a number of publishing projects and as founder of his own publishing houses. He used these activities to express the principle of variety and the play of many possibilities. During the time that he worked with Hansjörg Mayer on the “edition hansjörg mayer,” he also founded publishing houses that had names like “Taucher Verlag” (Diver Press), “Wasserpresse” (Water Press), “Seimannsverlag” (Seimanns Press), or “Regenverlag” (Rain press), even though most of these produced only Roth’s own books and book-objects. Beginning in 1975, “Dieter Roth’s Familienverlag” (Dieter Roth’s Family Press, continued, after several years, as Dieter Roth Press), published the artist’s numerous diaries and notebook entries (which began to appear in earnest around this time) in the form of photocopy-books. These included the important diary of 1982 (a key work of the late period of Roth’s book production) which accompanied his contribution to the Venice Biennale.
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