Dieter Roth. POTH.AAVFB

Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Dieter Roth. P.O.TH.A.A.VFB. (Portrait of the artist as Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust]). 1968. © Dieter Roth Estate. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Nature, the Nonhuman, and the Critique of Representation in Dieter Roth’s Biodegradable Work* Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 HEIÐA BJÖRK ÁRNADÓTTIR Dieter Roth’s P.O.TH.A.A.VFB. (Portrait of the Artist as Vogelfutterbüste [Birdseed Bust], 1968) embodies several characteristics of the Swiss-German artist’s prolific oeuvre: the significance of literature to his practice, the central themes of material and bodily decay, and the self-deprecating humor, irony, and sense of melancholy that permeate many of his works. Made from a combination of chocolate and birdseed and mounted on a simple wooden platform in the garden of his fabricator, Rudolf Rieser, in Cologne in 1970, Roth’s self-portrait was intended to be consumed and digested by birds slowly chipping away at his like- ness and, through their facilitation, to enter and disperse into the larger, sur- rounding ecosystem.1 Roth later expanded the idea, augmenting the sculpture with the addition of several objects and smaller artworks while adding further support to the platform. Throughout the years, until Roth’s death in 1998, his Garden Sculpture (Gartenskulptur, 1968–98)—as the work became known—included, among other things, various small paintings, sketches, collages, and objects, as well as Roth’s Bunny-Dung Bunnies (Karnickelköttelkarnickel) multiples. Exposed to natural forces, each article gradually degenerated. Paint and other elements washed away by rain and wind were captured by the artist in a jar placed underneath the platform, their decomposed remains serving as sources for further artistic production as Roth added to the ever-growing sculpture. The incorporation of organic material marks Roth’s work since the early 1960s, for instance his Literature Sausages (Literaturwürste, 1961–74), his “pressings” and “squashings,” and his many works made from chocolate, cheese, and spices. Three important implications of this practice are encapsulated in Roth’s P.O.TH.A.A.VFB. and Garden Sculpture. Firstly, through the use of unstable materials like chocolate and birdseed, Roth undermines sculpture’s traditional function of commemorating for posterity what it represents. Secondly, in their explicit * I would like to thank T’ai Smith and Ignacio Adriasola for their encouragement and their comments on an early version of this essay. To Adam Lehner I extend my gratitude for his generous editorial comments. Last but not least, I would like to thank the Living Art Museum in Iceland for their support during the process of researching and preparing this essay. 1. See Dirk Dobke and Bernadette Walter, ROTH TIME: A Dieter Roth Retrospective, ed. Theodora Vischer and Bernadette Walter, trans. Catherine Schelbert (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003), p. 116. OCTOBER 175 Winter 2021, pp. 70–87. © 2021 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00416 72 OCTOBER Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Roth. Karnickelköttelkarnickel (Bunny-dropping-bunny). 1968. © Dieter Roth Estate. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. address to the proximal senses of taste, smell, and touch, Roth’s biodegradable works problematize the traditional separation and hierarchy of the senses, chal- lenging the dominant place of vision within modern aesthetics. Finally, by relying explicitly on the activity and production of nonhuman forces and beings (such as birds, rain, wind, and various microorganisms), P.O.TH.A.A.VFB. and Garden Sculpture harness the capacity of such natural phenomena to expose the artwork’s material embeddedness in a complex web of ongoing processes and relations that extend long past the spectator’s engagement with the work and beyond the realm of human social and cultural institutions. Roth’s biodegradable pieces are predated by his important work with artist books in the late 1950s and his early engagement with the premises of Concrete Dieter Roth’s Biodegradable Work 73 art in works of graphic design, poetry, and visual art. In the early 1960s, however, the artist turned away from the strict, systematic aesthetic of Concrete art and began to experiment with ready-made materials and objects and chance-based and destructive processes. The impetus behind the dramatic transformation of Roth’s practice in the early ’60s has been the source of some speculation in recent years. Art historian Dirk Dobke has suggested that it may have been prompted by his Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 experience of the “American way of life” and the planned obsolescence integral to modern capitalist society.2 More recently, Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir has argued that Roth’s practice was significantly marked by his experiences in Iceland, where the artist lived between 1957 and 1964, noting Roth’s fascination with the “material rawness” of postwar Icelandic vernacular culture.3 More broadly, the transformation of Roth’s practice has been linked to the artist’s introduction into global networks of experimental artists emerging across Europe, America, and Japan in the postwar period. As is evident from Roth’s comments and writing, his turn away from Concrete art in the early ’60s was rooted in his growing discontent with the idealist and ethical premises of modern art and aesthetics—a sentiment that would have been shared by many of Roth’s generation. Yet, while the development of Roth’s practice broadly parallels that of artists associated with Zero, the Nouveaux Réalistes, and Fluxus, it was also distinguished by his sustained and critical inter- ruption of the traditional limits of the spheres of nature and culture, as exempli- fied by Garden Sculpture. In this essay, I consider Roth’s work in relation to Fluxus, with which Roth was loosely associated in the early 1960s. Examining Roth’s work in the context of the transnational group provides critical insights into how it developed out of Concrete art and poetry in the ’50s to achieve a more process-based form during the ’60s. Critically, it also highlights aspects of Fluxus’s theoretical positioning that have heretofore gone unexamined, most crucially the role of the natural and the nonhuman. I argue that Roth’s use of unstable organic material and his growing concern with the proximal senses were aimed not only at the destabilization of the art object and the hierarchy of the senses but also, more broadly, at the conceptual distinctions between both humans and animals and between culture and nature. Roth’s project was grounded in his recognition of the centrality of these conceptual pairs to the Western aesthetic tradition. Furthermore, the transformation of Roth’s practice was rooted in his tacit identification of the complicity of definitions of “good taste” in the authoritarian circumscription of behavior and the hierarchi- cal ordering of peoples and cultures central to the project of modernity. While the specific terms of Roth’s practice after 1960 were undoubtedly encouraged by his 2. See Dirk Dobke, interviews with Emmett Williams, Berlin, December 4, 2003, and Alison Knowles, New York, December 12, 2003, in Dieter Roth in America (London: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 2004), pp. 31–34, 43–47. 3. Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir, “New Maps for Networks: Reykjavík Fluxus—A Case of Expanding Connections,” in Narratives Unfolding: National Art Histories in an Unfinished World, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), p. 195. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Roth. Literaturwurst (Literature Sausage). 1969. © Dieter Roth Estate. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Dieter Roth’s Biodegradable Work 75 engagement with and participation in the production of global networks of experimental artists, I maintain that they were also significantly shaped by his residence in Iceland, outside of the centers of art, as well as by his early life experiences in Nazi Germany. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00416/1905670/octo_a_00416.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Modern Aesthetics and the Transformation of Roth’s Practice Roth published his first artist book shortly after his arrival in Iceland in 1957. A remake of a book that he had made as a gift for the newborn son of German theater director and poet Claus Bremer in 1954, Children’s Book (Kinderbuch, 1957) is composed of layers of cardboard bound with a coil spring. Each page contains printed images of circles and diamond forms of various sizes in blue, red, yellow, and green, creating a complex interplay of form and color. Composed entirely of nonreferential, nonmimetic pictorial elements, Children’s Book effectively embodies Concrete art’s principle of pure plasticity.4 In comparison, Roth’s abandonment of the principles of Concrete art, his adoption of processes of chance and destruc- tion, and his incorporation of biodegradable materials are dramatically encapsulated in the iconic Literature Sausages, made just four years later. Conceived for the Romanian-born Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri in 1961, Roth’s first “literature sausage” was created by cutting strips of pages from various books and then mixing them with food ingredients following traditional recipes, the paper acting as a substitute for meat. If in his earlier artist books, such as Children’s Book, Roth had striven for a certain “purity” of form, in keeping with the doctrines of Concrete art, the Literature Sausages give a distinct impression of impurity.

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