Dieter Roth

(Hanover, 1930 – Basel, 1998)

Painter, draftsman, sculptor, shareholder, poet, editor, insatiable researcher, he turned his life into a continuous creative process. Roth entered art through industrial design, a field that he expanded to cover almost all areas of artistic creation. What defines this artist, situated in the neo-Dadaist movement, is the tendency to dissolve the distinction between art and life, an attitude that he shared with groups such as Fluxus and the new realists. His universe, only apparently chaotic, combined all materials, with a special interest in organic materials and their degeneration. Roth's interest in organic transformation became part of his strategy to subvert the mechanisms of art commercialization. An example of this is the experience of the Mold Museum, which operated in Hamburg between 1992 and 2004, closed since the main materials of the works were chocolate, sugar and spices, while the mold later intervened autonomously. In the late 1950s, Roth worked in New York, where he organized happenings and produced kinetic works and stamps that incorporated texts and photograms. In the seventies, he collaborated with artists such as Arnulf Rainer (1972-1979) and Richard Hamilton (1975-1977), with whom he spent time in Cadaqués. With a mutable name –Dieter Roth, dieter roth, DITERROT, diter rot or Dietrich Roth, depending on the work and the context–, Roth was always a rebel who sought new media and claimed mutation and constant change.

The works exhibited at MediaLab are: Literaturwurst (die blechtrommel), 1967. In 1961 it began its production of the so-called literary sausages. He preserves the labels of the titles of books and magazines intact, and applies them to sausages made according to specific recipes: he cuts into pieces the texts of famous authors such as Günter Grass (The Tin Drum, 1967), Alfred Andersch (The Red One, 1967) , copies of newspapers and magazines such as the Daily Mirror (no. 1, 1961) or Der Spiegel (1969), he mixes them with the ingredients of the recipe and stuffs everything into the skin. Roth offers what he so hated literary morality in pieces to be consumed through the digestive system. The disgust that the text rationally produces is enhanced by the real stench of the letters.

In Poeterei 3-4, (1968), the entire book has become food: the pages, which can be removed individually from the boxes, consist of printed aluminum foil bags filled with lamb chops, sauerkraut, and sausages. While the letters of the text itself are almost illegible, Roth makes us experience again and again the feeling of failure in its function as a vehicle for the perception of reality, in a similar way to literary sausages: they envelop and hide the organic content , susceptible to being exposed to the putrefaction process. Language becomes part of the everyday world, which is only usually referred to on other occasions. (Excerpt from Ina Conzen: 'Bücher und Buchprojekte' in: Dieter Roth: Die Haut der Welt).