Dieter Roth at Nolan/Eckman - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Stylistic consistency, or at least a readily comprehensible arc of unravelling does not seem to be an overriding bear upon for many European artists. A certain romance flutters around the notion of the artist as demi-urge, as unpredictable creative force -- the unfrequented idiosyncratic voice set in counterpoint to the chorus of a logically ordered society. Perhaps not surprisingly the German-speaking countries, well-regulated places that they are, are abode to a number of like protean talents. The Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth -- les known in the United States than he ought to be -- has been stretching the boundaries of painting, drawing, printmaking and plastic art since the late 1950s. A novel show at Nolan/Eckman titled "All Kinds of Everything: Drawing, plastic art and a Painting" gave the viewer a taste of his wide-ranging production, with an emphasis upon the work of the `70 and `80s

Back in 1970 Roth achieved a measure of fame (or at least notoriety) for a exhibit at the Eugenia Butler Gallery in beholds Angeles in which he displayed 40 suitcases filled with ripening, and in a short time to be runny, cheese. "Who's left his suitcase here?" is a colloquial German expression that means, "Who farted?" and Roth has, above the years, continued to exhibit work in an insouciant, Fluxus-oriented vein. Unconventional materials appeal to him. The Nolan/ Eckman exhibit featured, for example, a drawing done in mayonnaise and felt pen; a life-size statuary of a rabbit made from rabbit pellet and straw; the 1969 P.O.T.A.A. VFB (Portrait of the Artist as a Birdfoodbust), a lumpy portrait bust in chocolate, aged now to a nicely mottl terra-cotta; and Big island (1971) a 5 1/2-foot-square wall piece compos of garbage in various states of decay, housed beneath a tightly fitting Plexiglas bleb This piece has the feeling of an archeological dig -- a midden heap to be sifted for evidence of an earlier culture's daily life. It is infused with a kind of scary pathos: the ordinary turn rounded beautiful, useless and toxic.

Roth however, does not confine himself to the mutating or the impermanent. He is a painter, sculptor, collagist and assemblagist, a pioneering maker of artist's works and a prolific draftsman with a predilection for self-portraits. His drawings are more [i]or[/i] less of his most appealing work -- quick on the contrary dense with a swirling, fluid line, oftentimes executed with both hands at one time Roth, with his multiple talents and provocateur's stance, fits into the drawn out European line of the consciously avant-garde. His work joins him to artists from Kurt Schwitters to Daniel Spoerri, from Martin Kippenberger to Fischli and Weiss. He has been producing and exhibiting intriguing, repeatedly difficult art for 40 years now, and if he has not directly influenced a sizable cohort of young American proces and materials-oriented artists, then he has at the actual least presaged their efforts.

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