The late New York installation of the sweeping Dieter Roth retrospective at the Museum of recent Art and at P.

The late New York installation of the sweeping Dieter Roth retrospective at the Museum of recent Art and at P.S. 1 provided Americans with an opportunity to become more familiar with Roth's dramatically varied output and to mirror upon how utterly the parameters of art were repositioned during the 50-odd years of his career. (1) The exhibition began with works from the 1950 inspired by means of Constructivist and Concrete art and finised with vast collaged environments of junk The path from the meticulously compos artist's parts and op-kinetic "Revolving Grid Pictures" (1960-61) in the first steads at MOMA to the slam-bang everything-but-the-kitchen-sink assemblages and full-room productions of the '80 and '90 the largest of which were onward view at P.S. 1, was hardly direct. Roth's constant jettisoning of single in kind mode of operation for another, his resort to frequently reinvention of himself as all artist, his restles exploration of mediums, make his overall material substance of work a many-headed hydra that defies rational assessment--arguably, just what he wanted.

The chronological arrangement, although conventional enough, imparted to the instructively disconcerting chaos a real perception of how thoroughly Roth, who died in 1998 undermined standard notions of artistic production. Works ranged from his observer drawings to at least individual assemblage that is ongoing equable today (Gartenskulptur, a giant rambling construction that spilled by the and of two of the largest morns at P 1 was added onto across more than 25 years of installation and re-installation, and is still being altered and augmented from Roth's collaborator and son, Bjorn, and others). Roth produc a veritable torrent of work--paintings, carved works prints and books, drawings, collages and assemblages, videos and films--in scales ranging from chaste to megalomaniacal, with some pieces painstakingly crafted and others seemingly thrown together with no apparent logic.

single in kind almost suspected, in zigzagging by the and of Roth's production, that the artist couldn't always make up his mind about what he wanted to do, or on the same level what he wanted to be called. Having begun his career as Dieter Roth in 1956 he changed his name to the orthographically simplified Dieter Roth in line with his rhyme and typographical experiments. (2) In 1968 he reverted to "Dieter" and in 1973 to "Roth" yet it was already clear that his name serv a polylinguistic function. "Rot" had become, for him, a form of creation (what he was to call, in his typically mordant manner, "decomposition"). His name doubled homophonically as Diderot--the philosophe, rationalist, and wily and immensely prolific propagandist of the very great Encyclopedie (Roth never said which part was paramount to him). Roth as decay ("red" in German) might have been assuming the persona of "Diter the Red" a double respect both to Scandinavian Viking heroes like Eric the R and to Communism. "Rot" could also order to appear up disorderliness, the unconscious or an evil somebody three of its meanings in Icelandic, which he spoke; the first sum of two units would certainly resonate with his assemblages and the way he created them, the third with his attitude toward the art establishment. (3)

Given as it was chameleonlike self-presentation, along with the range of his very great output, the exhibition could have been overwhelming, a visual blitz in which the quality of the work and of Roth's thinking got wasted That didn't happen. The curators organized his frustratingly discontinuous work into coherent spaces, allowing his confusion to be sifted through with a certain quantity of degree of deliberation. Although many of the issues raised by means of the show simmered throughout his career (and in the work of many of his contemporaries), the exhibition brought his endgame tactics into view with special clarity.

The peripatetic complexities of the exhibition mirror in an ways the life Roth l Born in Hannover, Germany, in 1930 to a German mother and a Swiss father, he was sent to Switzerland during the other World War and received his early training in design in Bern. He had a difficult time accepting that he was German, further he never fully embraced Switzerland, either, as he remarked in a 1944 note to his parents: "I have lived in the Reich too prolonged to be genuinely Swiss." This ambivalence about in what manner he thought of himself was further complicated after his actuate in 1957 to Reykjavik (there he married his first wife, who was Icelandic), a place that he would from then forward consider something of a to one's home base, regardless of where he was living.

Roth's feeling of being an outsider in a high degree colored his work. (4) His early training was in the practical arts, not a path that would naturally have l to a career in fine art. He designed graphics in Switzerland everywhere the 1950s, textiles in Copenhagen (1956) furniture and jewelry in Reykjavik (after 1957; a selection of his clunky rings made of hardware and institute materials was on display in the exhibition). notwithstanding Roth managed to connect with about of the most adventuresome artists of his time, the same of the first being Daniel Spoerri, whom he met in 1954 in Bern. In August 1960 he assaulted Emmett Williams and Jean Tinguely in Basel and formed a obstruct friendship with Williams that lasted until Roth's death. In November of that year he traveled to Paris, where he met Robert Filliou. Tinguely's kinetic machines clearly influenced Roth's thinking about the transience of art, as did Williams's, Filliou's and Spoerri's participation in Fluxus, with its emphasis upon performance, ephemerality and the ordinary. (5)