Lab Roth

Dieter Roth was born in Hamburg in 1930, and, in 1943 his family fled to his mother's native Switzerland.  He ended up living in a house in Zurich, the birthplace of Dada, along with other refugees, including Jewish and Communist artists.  He began making art in that house and didn't stop until his death in 1998.  In that half century, Roth produced an extraordinary range of work, which is now being honored at two exhibitions in New York--one at MoMA and the other at the impressive Hauser and Wirth gallery in Soho.  Roth was first and foremost an experimentalist.  What is most impressive about his output is the variety of media, techniques, and concepts that he explored.  One charming and timely example (courtesy of MoMA) is the bunny made from rabbit droppings, above. Part artist, part mad scientist, his work is a celebration of the artistic process even more than the product, though some of the products are remarkable to behold.

The MoMA show spans Roth's career, and includes some of his early experiments in graphic arts.  These include prints, books, postcards.  One impressive series includes images of tourist destinations that have been modified or partially occluded with blocks of color.  He also began using newspapers as a medium at this time.  The above left example show Roth experimenting with Pop iconography including comic images and printers dots, around the same time as Lichtenstein and Polke.  The image on the right (from the MoMA site) shows a tiny book made from newspaper.  Roth made books obsessively, and was obsessed with printed word.  The images below (left image from MoMA) show examples of his Literaturwurst--sausages made from classic books.

These sausage forms also relate to two other kinds of media experiments that can be found in Roth's work.  He liked to use food products to create art, as in frames spices below (courtesy of MoMA), and he also made a number of biodegradble works, in which foodstuffs were allowed to decay, as in the jarred doll, covered in mould on the right.  These experiments began in 1964.  The draw attention to the impermanence of art.  Everything is in a state of decay.  The world's masterpieces are changing each year, and will eventually return to dust.  This notion of impermanence resonates with themes in Zen Buddhism.  The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi is intended to celebrate the transience and imperfection of all things.   Roth's rotting works also have a post-modern appeal; they reminds us that artists are not in total control of what they produce.  Biodegrable art is collaborative art--the minuscule mindless organisms living all around us take part in selecting their colors and forms.

Food and decay are also important themes in the Hauser and Wirth exhibition.  That show includes some of Roth's celebrated experiments with chocolate and candy as art media.  Done in collaboration with Dieter's son Björn Roth, also an artist, the exhibition was involved a performative element of gradual creation, as well as decay.  A group of assistants cast numerous heads using various confections, and built two tall towers with them, over a period of weeks.  One is a colorful collection of canine-looking (apparently lions, however) and self-portraits of Roth (like the yellow one below).   The other is made of chocolate Roth heads, which develop a white film over time.

The gallery show also included prints, paintings, video, and a grand installation.  One of the collaborative paintings, which a wonderful and extremely knowledgeable security guard identified as his favorite, is reproduced on the left.  It shows a figure in a chair looking out at a seascape with swirls of color--perhaps an artist's mind intermingling with the world.  The installation recreates an artist's studio.  A number of these have appeared elsewhere (e.g., P.S.1 and the Hamburger Bahnhof).  Though visually assaulting, they reinforce the mad scientist theme, by presenting world of alchemical chaos, in which food products (such as beer bottles) and traditional art media are interspersed.  Two small details are presented below along with a video still showing the elder Roth at work in his laboratory.

By sheer salience and scale, the centerpiece at Hauser and Wirth is a giant floor (two floors, actually) that were laboriously shipped at incredible expense from the artist's former studio in Iceland.  Roth moved to Iceland after the war, married an Icelandic woman, became a citizen, and raised three children there, including Björn.  This outpost allowed him to conduct his endless experiments at one remove from the epicenters or European and American art.  Though hardly an outsider, it is likely that geographical distance helped Roth avoid getting completely absorbed into one of the successive movements that emerged after the war.  He was affiliated with Fluxus, and one can find many hints of pop, new realism, conceptualism, and arte povera in his work.  He often walked in lock step with current trends.  But he never became wedded to a single approach, and that restless spirit makes his work seem more contemporary and more urgent than the pantheonic figures which whom these movements are associated.  Roth's studio floor (made with red tiles that were apparently pervasive in Europe) can be seen as a giant readymade.  It looks like an abstract painting, but its many marks are created by accident, not intention.  Like Roth's biodegradable art, it can also be compared to a gargantuan peri dish in which the artist himself has left tell-tale traces.  Fortunately this is not the only trace he left behind.  These two exhibitions remind us that Roth was among the most productive and inventive artists of the later 20th century, and his contributions should be elevated from the footnotes into the main texts of art history.

Alighiero Boetti

MoMA is hosting the first major retrospective of Alighiero e Boetti, a major figure in the Arte Povera movement who died prematurely of a brain tumor in 1993.  Boetti is best known for his "mappa"--large embroideries that he commissioned Afghan artisans to make, showing maps of the world in which each country is demarcated by its national flag.  A detail from three of these (above) how the Afghan artists make different aesthetic choices, and close attention will also reveal changing national boundaries.  Of equal interest are the embroideries that Boetti commissioned at the end of his life which attempt to depict "everything" (below).  These spectacular swarms of shape and color evoke Pollack, a sly joke that converts the aesthetic of abstract expressionism's most extreme representative into something neither abstract (each splash of color represents an object) nor expressive in Pollack's sense (they are produced though dizzyingly anal needlework rather than throwing paint on canvas).

It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Boetti to these embroideries.  His output encompasses everything from wooden constructions, to metalwork and mail art.  There are also a number of fascinating themes running through his work.  One is duality.  His adopted the middle initial "e" (Italian for "and"), and some works depict the artist writing messages to himself, in handwriting written with both hands, suggesting an inner twinning of his psyche.  The exhibit opens with a giant reproduction of a doctored photo depicting Boetti standing next to himself.

Another theme is order and disorder.  Many works explore the balance between these poles, even incorporating the corresponding words in Italian.  One graphic example is Boetti's "Natural History of Multiplication," 12 large drawings showing an increasingly complex assembly of little abstract shapes (two panels are reproduced above).  We seem to move from order to chaos, but even the most chaotic seem to have been algebraically assembled, and more ostensibly ordered panels have an organizational logic that is impossible to decipher.

This brings us to a final theme: cryptography.  In some of Boetti's large biro drawings, one border is decorated with an alphabet and the rest of work consists of a large monochrome field dotted with little commas (see the detail above).  Each comma lines up with a letter of the alphabet, allowing viewers to decode a hidden word or message.  Boetti commissioned people to make these drawings for him, using biro pens (an expression of his Arte Povera ethos, which emphasizes use of inexpensive materials).  He also made sure that both men and women would execute the work (embodying his interest in duality).  And, of course, the collective nature of their production also recapitulates the mappa project (indeed, the pen strokes strongly resemble embroidered threads).  Thus, we see Boetti's core interests reflected here.  We are reminded that Boetti is not just a visual artist.  Though visually arresting, his work is a sustained exploration of a network of ideas.  One of his Biro pieces is called called "Six Senses"; if you decode the commas, you find words for the five classic senses followed by pensare, the Italian word for "think."